Federalism allows state politicians opportunities to undermine or support for federal policies. As a result, voters often have varied impressions of the same federal programmes. To test how this dynamic affects voting behaviour, I gather data on the severity of the opioid epidemic from 2006–2016. I exploit discontinuities between states that expanded Medicaid and those that did not to gain causal leverage over whether expansion affected the severity of the epidemic and whether these policy effects affected policy feedback. I show that the decision to expand Medicaid reduced the severity of the opioid epidemic. I also show that expanding Medicaid and subsequent reductions in the severity of the opioid epidemic increased support for the Democratic Party. The results imply that the Republican Party performed better in places where voters did not have access to Medicaid expansion and where the epidemic worsened, demonstrating an unintended consequence of federalism on policy feedback.

A patchwork of policies exists across the United States. While citizens’ policy preferences in domains such as the criminal legal system, gun regulations/rights, immigration, and welfare are informed by their political predispositions, they are also shaped by the extent to which policy targets are viewed as deserving. This article centres the idea that collective evaluations matter in policymaking, and it ascertains whether subnational levels of deservingness evaluations of several target groups differ across space to illuminate the link between these judgements and state policy design. We leverage original survey data and multilevel regression and poststratification to create state-level estimates of deservingness evaluations. The analyses elucidate the heterogeneity in state-level deservingness evaluations of several politically relevant groups, and they pinpoint a link between these social reputations and policy design. The article also delivers a useful methodological tool and measures for scholars of state policy design to employ in future research.

Political economy theories tell us that policy preferences are driven by economic self-interest and that party cues can be a rational decision-making strategy. But does citizens’ ability to assess their self-interest influence the sources of information they rely on and their policy choices? I hypothesise that financial and economic literacy influences the type of information individuals are responsive to, and ultimately, their economic policy preferences. Using a survey experiment on price controls in Italy, I manipulate whether citizens receive party cues or policy information. I show that financially and economically literate individuals are more likely to understand information concerning the costs and benefits of the policy under analysis, and to be responsive to it. This is not the case for financially and economically illiterate individuals, who are more receptive to party cues, even when such cues are misleading and lead them to support welfare-reducing policies.

Law-making in most parliamentary democracies is dominated by the executive. Yet so far, all research has focused on the parliamentary stage of law-making. Studies suggest that the changes to bills submitted by coalition governments are the result of coalition policies dealing with the agency loss caused by ministerial drift. This is puzzling because it is already easier and more effective for coalition parties to attempt to change the bills in the executive phase than in the parliamentary one. The article aims to close the knowledge gap, and it quantitatively explores the factors that facilitate changes during the understudied executive phase on case study of the Czech Republic. Analysis reveals that government bills are altered more during the executive phase than the parliamentary phase. While we find no significant impact caused by the distance to coalition compromise, the saliency of a bill for coalition partners has a negative influence on the ratio of changes.

This article explores the politics of policy change by focusing on agenda setting through the lens of the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA), which has been travelling to ever-larger geographies. We aim to produce signposts for future case studies of policy change by bringing together insights from MSA and New Institutionalism. We ask: Which institutions should we focus on when studying agenda-setting politics in different geographies? How do these institutions shape MSA’s structural elements – problem stream, policy stream, political stream, policy windows, and policy entrepreneur? In answering these questions, we hope to weave not only formal but also informal institutions into MSA’s backbone more tightly. We bring together diverse case studies that are sufficiently abstract and whose findings travel easily across other institutional contexts. We revisit the structural elements of MSA and illustrate how key formal and informal rules structure the politics in these structural elements.

Research on environmental policy support utilises different categorisations of policies, for example, differentiating between policies assumed to be perceived as rewarding or punishing. Do citizens’ perception of environmental policies also lend itself to this categorisation? Based on an exhaustive sample of active policies in Sweden, this study presents a taxonomy of environmental policy support in Sweden. A fairly representative Swedish sample (N = 2911) rated the acceptability of 44 environmental policies. Exploratory factor analysis indicated that participants’ acceptability of policies forms three categories: push policies consisting of regulatory and market-based disincentives, pull policies consisting mainly of market-based incentives, and informational policies, such as ecolabeling. Sociodemographics had small but consistent effects on attitudes towards the three categories, while political ideology had a larger effect across the categories. This study indicates that current academic categorisations may not adequately capture laypeople’s perceptions, and discusses the importance of research on driving mechanisms behind the current taxonomy.

The enforcement of EU state aid rules is often portrayed as mainly driven by technocratic standards, but there are indications that political factors also play a role. However, their exact impact and relationship with technocratic factors remain unknown. This article studies under which technocratic and political conditions the Commission approves or does not approve state aid to national airlines. Based on a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of all 14 cases of alleged state aid to national airlines between 2004 and 2019, the article shows that both the approval and non-approval of aid are predominantly dependent upon the Commission’s technocratic assessment: a low degree of market distortion turns out to be a sufficient condition for the approval of aid, whereas a high degree of market distortion is a necessary condition for the non-approval of aid. However, in some cases, political factors are decisive in determining enforcement outcomes.

Forums provide venues where different actors from the public administration sector, the interest group sector, or the research sector jointly discuss an issue of common interest. This article analyses which types of benefits are related to actors’ investing working time to forums. Actors’ dedication and work are basic predicates for forums to be able to produce outputs. The analysis of members of eight forums dealing with habitat and natural hazard governance in Switzerland suggests that actors participating in forums attribute more importance to exchange benefits, corresponding to opportunities of interaction with other actors – than to policy benefits – corresponding to opportunities for actors to influence policy or practice. However, more working time is invested by actors that lend importance to individual benefits – as opposed to collective benefits. These findings are important for understanding why actors provide work for forums in collaborative and polycentric governance systems.

In the public debate on climate change in Europe, aviation transport has become a bone of contention and thus also a target of political regulation. While the actual available policy instruments, their designs and effects have been extensively studied, their political economy has remained a rather blind spot of research. Therefore, in this article we explore factors accounting for the instrument choice in aviation policy. Revealing most different evolutions in this matter, the Netherlands and Germany represent appropriately illustrative cases for a comparative exploration. Based on the Political Process-inherent Dynamics Approach, we shed light on a highly complex and limiting institutional environment for aviation policy-making and ultimately identify diverging conceptions of problem structures as well as different configurations of party competition as main explanatory factors for instrument choice and aviation policy evolution.