In recent years, the movement of personnel from the public sector to interest groups has garnered considerable attention throughout Europe. Consequently, there has been an increased focus on the phenomenon of revolving door lobbyists within academic literature. This research contributes to this scholarly discussion by examining how the employment of such lobbyists facilitates access. We argue that interest groups gain advantages by recruiting individuals from the public sector in policy domains with limited mobilization, but this benefit decreases as more interest groups mobilize. Our analysis of survey data from seven European political systems supports these expectations, indicating that recruiting professionals with experience in the public sector enhances access, especially in policy areas with minimal lobbying activity. This highlights the potential for interest mobilization to counterbalance the advantages of hiring revolving door lobbyists.

As governments increasingly adopt algorithms and artificial intelligence (AAI), we still know comparatively little about citizens’ support for algorithmic government. In this paper, we analyze how many and what kind of reasons for government use of AAI citizens support. We use a sample of 17,000 respondents from 16 OECD countries and find that opinions on algorithmic government are divided. A narrow majority of people (55.6%) support a majority of reasons for using algorithmic government, and this is relatively consistent across countries. Results from multilevel models suggest that most of the cross-country variation is explained by individual-level characteristics, including age, education, gender, and income. Older and more educated respondents are more accepting of algorithmic government, while female and low-income respondents are less supportive. Finally, we classify the reasons for using algorithmic government into two types, “fairness” and “efficiency,” and find that support for them varies based on individuals’ political attitudes.

What shapes citizens’ perceptions of long-term welfare state sustainability? Past work hints at three explanations: information about fiscal pressure, deservingness views of recipient groups, and left-right ideology. We consider all three in an experiment exposing people to information about fiscal costs and/or low deservingness in the labor market domain. Left-right ideology functions as a moderator. Unlike past work, which has concentrated on demographic pressures, information about fiscal costs does not generate worries about sustainability (separately or combined with deservingness cues). Rather, left-right ideology moderates reactions. People on the left seem to question and counterargue against fiscal pressure, such that when facing negative information, they develop more positive sustainability views. This counter-reaction coexists with statistically insignificant effects in the negative direction among people on the right. These ideological contingencies arise without partisan cues, suggesting that welfare state pressure itself is ideologically controversial in the labor market domain.

Under what conditions do incumbents succeed in curtailing programs benefitting large constituencies of low-income voters? We undertake a within-country comparison of four highly popular cash transfer policies in Brazil in the 2010s. Our contribution is threefold. First, we refine the concept of policy drift by distinguishing executive-driven drift (resulting from incumbents’ decisions) from opposition-driven drift (resulting from the veto power of welfare opponents). The latter results from the dispersion of authority; the former is favored by its concentration. Second, we show that executive-driven drift is a successful strategy when programs give incumbents discretion over entitlement and benefits, meaning authority to make unilateral decisions. Third, we argue that executive-driven drift explains retrenchment outcomes better than partisan orientation, size of program’s clientele, and fiscal impacts. Incumbents were more successful in their retrenchment initiatives when concentration of authority in the executive branch allowed them to bypass legislative and judicial veto points.

When does the delegation of legislative powers to the executive endanger policy compliance? The European Union (EU) Lisbon Treaty introduced quasi-legislative tertiary legislation – delegated acts – which empowers the European Commission to amend secondary legislation. Formally, member states control delegated acts only ex post via a veto power in the Council, while they have both ex ante amendment powers and ex post veto over the alternative Commission legislation: implementing acts. However, as member states determine the choice of legislative instrument, we argue that they would consent to the Commission adopting delegated acts only on non-controversial issues. Such selection should result in their lower compliance with implementing than with delegated acts. Our analyses of member states’ transposition delays and infringement cases related to EU tertiary directives support this argument. The results suggest that the delegation of legislative powers to the executive does not increase non-compliance when the legislators have the means to moderate it ex ante.

Does American identity predict preferences for anti-democratic policies that aim to marginalize Muslim Americans? Absent significant priming of inclusive elements of American identity, we argue that individuals with stronger attachments to American identity will be less likely than their counterparts to reject a range of anti-Muslim policies that are antithetical to principles of religious liberty and equality. Across three surveys and multiple measures, American identity powerfully predicts preferences for curbing the civil liberties of Muslim citizens. Particularly striking is the finding that the effect of American identity spans the partisan divide; it consistently explains the endorsement of exclusionary policies among self-identified Democrats, who typically hold more progressive policy positions toward minority groups than Republicans. Overall, our study highlights the contradictory and exclusionary nature of American identity, which has important implications for minority groups constructed as outside the boundaries of Americanness.

International efforts to protect biodiversity date back to the 1970s. The effectiveness of Multilateral Environmental Agreements and regional legal instruments has been influenced by national implementation. In this process, subnational governance plays a crucial role. Although policy implementation has been extensively investigated, its subnational dimension has been somewhat neglected, particularly in peripheral areas such as the Outermost Regions of Europe. These remote territories are critical areas in the global fight against biodiversity loss since their ecosystems’ richness makes them biodiversity hotspots. The article applies the knowledge cumulated in policy research to the implementation of biodiversity policy in two of these territories – Reunion Island (France) and the Canary Islands (Spain) – and analyzes policy implementation in the context of multi-level governance. The article questions whether and to what extent decentralization benefits biodiversity policies and highlights salient trade-offs: local empowerment versus fragmentation of competences; responsiveness versus subnational discretion; and accountability versus policy capture.

As the COVID-19 pandemic became an unprecedented global threat, it was accompanied by an increase in trust in governments as well as fear among the public. Previous research suggests that both institutional trust and fear contribute to the willingness of citizens to comply with anti-pandemic measures. Moreover, fear during the contagion also increases trust in government. This article presents a test of the mediation of the effects of fear on compliance through trust. In addition, it differentiates between three different facets of COVID-19-related fear: fear of the disease, fear of economic consequences, and fear of political consequences. The results suggest that while fear of the disease increases compliance, fear of political consequences decreases compliance. Moreover, the effects of fear are mediated through trust in government. The negative impact of fear of political consequences on compliance increased between April and December 2020.

The power of economists in policymaking is widely recognized by both scholars and political actors. While the literature on expert influence has primarily focused on the intellectual features of expert arguments, we argue that economists’ strategic use of framing and normative reasoning wields more influence in policymaking than is acknowledged by current scholarship. Through a comprehensive investigation into the institutionalization of the Norwegian Oil Fund and its associated fiscal regime, drawing on 26 elite interviews with key political and technocratic actors, we unveil the considerable influence of state economists in shaping the policy for managing petroleum wealth. These economists not only played a crucial role in legitimizing and lending credibility to the new policy but also employed strategic framing as a reinforcing mechanism to sustain the policy regime, illustrating the essential role of economists as storytellers. Hence, we suggest including strategic framing as a conceptual element within the theoretical framework of expert influence.

Many Western countries first introduced family allowances around the Second World War. We argue that this clustering is not coincidental and put pronatalist policies related to war preparation and the socioeconomic and demographic ramifications of the Second World War at the center of our explanation. To test this, we first conduct brief case studies of France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to detail how war preparation influenced the introduction of such family allowances. Second, a panel regression of 18 Western countries investigates the different factors contributing to the timing of introduction of such policies and shows that war and its aftershocks have been an important causal factor in the introduction of family allowances. It was not so much the destructiveness of and the involvement in the war that played a role, but rather a general wartime crisis that affected belligerent and non-belligerent countries in similar ways.

Through the pooling and exchange of resources such as expertise and knowledge between network participants, European Administrative Networks (EANs) are expected to play a significant role in enhancing policy learning. Yet, scarce empirical evidence has been presented concerning the learning process taking place within EANs. This paper addresses this gap through the analysis of the Network of the Heads of European Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA Network). Based on a unique survey dataset, social network analysis and exponential random graph models are used to trace the interaction patterns within the network and test which factors shape them. The analysis highlights the relevance of national political factors – i.e. the preferences of national governments and ministries – in shaping the learning processes taking place in the EPA Network. While the network is an important venue for disseminating knowledge between directly and indirectly connected actors, learning processes are mainly limited to like-minded peers.

As the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation in 2020, many emphasized that carceral spaces were hotspots for the virus, leaving Black and Brown people especially vulnerable to infection. In combination with other critiques of racism in the carceral state, these observations created pressure to decarcerate, especially on the political left. How did political elites discuss the carceral state in this changed atmosphere? To answer this question, we analyze rhetoric in public statements across four liberal metropolitan areas during the spring and summer of 2020. In these statements, we find a long-standing discourse of racially paternalist penal welfarism, retrofitted to pandemic times and accompanied by a distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” criminals. Accommodating portrayals of incarcerated people as vulnerable to COVID-19 and in desperate need of care, this pattern of rhetoric positioned the carceral state as a protector in order to justify continued incarceration.

Why do citizens support or reject climate change mitigation policies? This is not an easy choice: citizens need to support the government in making these decisions, accept potentially radical behavior change, and have altruism across borders and for future generations. A substantial literature argues that political trust facilitates citizen support for these complex policy decisions by mitigating the cost and uncertainty that policies impose on individuals and buttressing support for government intervention. We test whether this is the case with a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in Germany in which we vary fundamental aspects of policy design that are related to the cost, uncertainty, and implementation of climate change policies. Contrary to strong theoretical expectations and previous work, we find no difference between those with low and high trust on their support for different policy attributes, assuaging the concern that low and declining trust inhibits climate policymaking.

Unilateral presidential action is thought to be limited by the ability of successors to easily reverse past decisions. Yet, most executive actions are never formally revoked. We argue that because of presidents’ unique position as chief executive, some actions create outcomes that make policy reversal more difficult or even infeasible. We develop a novel measure of policies with more immutable consequences and analyze the revocation of executive orders issued between 1937 and 2021. We find the degree of outcome immutability reduces the influence of political conditions on policy revocation. We further examine these dynamics in three cases in which presidents have substantial discretion – diplomacy, non-combatant detention, and police militarization. Scholarship has long highlighted the president’s first-mover status relative to other institutional actors as a key source of their power. Collectively, our argument and evidence demonstrate this applies to their relationship with successors.

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly embracing systems approaches to deal with the complexity of public service delivery and policy evaluation. However, there is little agreement on what exactly constitutes a systems approach, conceptually or methodologically. We review and critically synthesize systems literature from the fields of health, education, and infrastructure. We argue that the common theoretical core of systems approaches is the idea that multi-dimensional complementarities between a policy and other aspects of the policy context are the first-order problem of policy design and evaluation. We distinguish between macro-systems approaches, which focus on the collective coherence of a set of policies or institutions, and micro-systems approaches, which focus on how a single policy interacts with the context in which it operates. We develop a typology of micro-systems approaches and discuss their relationship to standard impact evaluation methods as well as to work in external validity, implementation science, and complexity theory.

Why are international regulatory standards not set? While most of the literature focuses on explaining positive cases of standard-setting where international rules are agreed upon, weak or negative cases remain prevalent and yet surprisingly under-explored. To explain these cases in the area of financial services, we integrate an inter-state explanation, which focuses on competition between major jurisdictions, with a transgovernmental explanation, which relates to conflict between different regulatory bodies at the international level. We also consider how these dimensions interact with financial industry lobbying. This allows us to construct a typology differentiating between distinct types of cases concerning international standard-setting: (1) absent standards, (2) non-agreed standards, (3) symbolic standards, and (4) agreed standards. The explanatory leverage of our approach is illustrated through a systematic structured focused comparison of four post-crisis cases related to “shadow banking.” The article generates novel insights into regulatory conflicts and the scope conditions for international agreement.

Previous scholarship has shown that experience with public policies can affect citizens’ willingness to participate in politics. However, few studies have examined whether the effect of experience with policy is moderated by existing policy environments. We focus on the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and examine how it affects foreign-born Latinos’ political orientation and behavior. We find a relationship between enrollment in DACA and political orientation and that the effect on participation is moderated by the intensity of enforcement in an immigrant’s county of residence.

The three-child policy constitutes a hotly debated socio-political issue in China. Upon its announcement, many Chinese citizens have ridiculed the move on social media. Adopting the cognitive mediation model and the influence of presumed influence theory, this study examines how social media exposure to three-child policy-related news and discussions could affect the Chinese public’s attitudes toward the policy. The online survey results show that social media exposure negatively predicts supportive opinion via cognitive elaboration and three types of perceived negative effects of the policy (i.e., perceived negative effects on self, on the public, and on females) in serial. It also finds that institutional trust moderates the relationship between cognitive elaboration and policy support. Only among people with high institutional trust, there is a positive effect of social media exposure on supportive opinion through cognitive elaboration.

Schedule C and noncareer Senior Executive Service positions hold significant influence over policy outcomes, yet they have received limited scrutiny compared to advise and consent (PAS) appointments. Such appointments offer understudied avenues for presidential control over the bureaucracy. Through a comprehensive analysis of more detailed data than has been employed to date, we reveal that these appointments are responsive to broader political dynamics, particularly those relevant to PAS appointments, including inter- and intrabranch conflicts, agency ideology, Senate workload, and the political calendar. However, statutory constraints and agency characteristics – such as the managerial expertise of appointed agency leadership – also shape their utilization. While unilateral appointments provide an advantage to Presidents, executives are constrained when using them to overcome legislative opposition or reshape resistant agencies. These lower-level appointments reflect the wider political landscape, granting the President significant – but not unrestrained – opportunities to exert influence on both the bureaucracy and policy outcomes.