Comparative Policy Studies

Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

I. Engeli, C. Rothmayr Allison, I. Engeli, C. Rothmayr Allison, Kenneth A. Loparo, Christine Rothmayr Allison, I. Engeli, C. Rothmayr Allison, Christine Rothmayr Allison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780230298750
• eBook ISBN: 9781137314154
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the first volume of its kind, a collection of top policy scholars combine empirical and methodological analysis in the field of comparative policy studies to provide compelling insights into the formulation, implementation and evaluation of policies across regional and national boundaries.

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Conceptual and Methodological Challenges in Comparative Public Policy

Isabelle Engeli and Christine Rothmayr Allison

The need for a more integrated methodological perspective in comparative public policy

Handbooks and manuals on public policy regularly open with a discussion on whether there is such a thing as a field of policy studies. Some point to the fact that the diversity of methodological and theoretical approaches, and the more ‘craft-oriented’ than purely science-oriented character of policy studies, make the building of grand theory a vain endeavour. Others, in order to affirm that we can meaningfully speak of a field of policy studies, have assembled and sometimes integrated concepts and theoretical frameworks in order to distinguish policy studies from other research programmes in the social sciences as a subdiscipline in its own right. This volume does not engage in this type of discussion, but takes for granted that there is a research tradition going back to the work of Lasswell (1951, 1970) that we can call policy studies. Lasswell conceived of the policy sciences as being problem focused, that is, interested in the substantive societal issues and problems facing governments which they need to address through analyzing the processes of policy formulation and choices, and by evaluating implementation and policy outcomes. He advocated a multidisciplinary, multimethod and theory-driven approach. In this approach, in order to contribute to problem solving, we need theories of the policy process in order to understand the mechanisms and factors that shape policy choices and policy outcomes. The ultimate goal of policy science for Lasswell was to contribute to the democratization of society.

This volume incorporates a specific interpretation of the Lasswellian approach to the policy sciences, and proposes a more precise focus on the central issue of methodological challenges in comparative policy studies. The field of public policy analysis comprises broadly two different, related and equally valuable scholarly enterprises: to provide knowledge and policy expertise in and for policy making (policy sciences, policy analysis), and to develop general theories and frameworks of the policy process explaining and predicting policy-making processes (policy studies). The latter focuses on how problems are defined, agendas set, policies formulated, decided, implemented and evaluated (Parsons, 1995: p. XVI). Both research traditions embrace comparative research in order to ensure their findings contribute to better theories on policy making.

This book is part of the second scholarly endeavour, that of policy studies. Comparative policy studies address processes of policy making, of problem emergence and definition, of policy formulation, of policy implementation and also evaluation. Why governments choose different courses of action – or decide not to act at all – is the classical question of comparative policy studies, and constitutes a central aspect of the discussions in this volume (Heidenheimer et al., 1990: p. 3). Drawing on the seminal work of Heidenheimer et al. (1990), this volume places comparison at the heart of public policy research. Comparative analysis encourages moving beyond the particularities of each case and identifying patterns and regularity across cases, settings and time periods. Comparative designs force the researcher not to stop the analysis at particularistic explanations drawn from a single context, but to test whether the answers to research questions hold true for a larger number of cases and contexts.

For example, the policies designed to regulate the emerging field of human biotechnology provide a vivid illustration of the utility of comparison. Countries have adopted highly contrasting responses to the challenges posed by human biotechnology development and embryonic research. For instance, France launched the policy decision-making process on human biotechnology early in the 1980s. The proponents of early regulation emphasized the problems stemming from the legal void regarding human biotechnology at that time. On the contrary, one of France’s neighbours, Belgium, formulated a completely different policy response to the same legal void and waited for more than 20 years to regulate the field. Understanding why, how and to what extent policy responses to human biotechnology development diverge requires a comparative research design (Varone et al., 2005; Montpetit et al., 2007; Engeli et al., 2012).

In the same vein, a comparative approach helps disentangle the morass of competing, and often conflicting, accounts of policy responses to a common event, often conceived of in the literature as an exogenous ‘shock to the system’. Contemporary examples of such events are the emergence of global terror networks or the global economic crisis of 2008. In both cases, governments scrambled to make policy in a compressed time frame, with limited antecedents or precedents, and in the face of great pressure from organized groups and the public for effective action. Much has been written from a descriptive perspective, often using narrative techniques, that has given insight into the forces at play within particular policy-making contexts (that is, the United States); however, the limitations of sui generis become clearly evident when cases are added and the analysis becomes comparative (Hajer, 2009; Culpepper, 2011). Comparative analysis widens the understanding of potential policy options – thus pushing the researcher to explain not only why certain policies were adopted, but also why others were not – and also permits the building of classifications and taxonomies of regulations, policies and instruments.

Why this book?

Since the seminal work of Heidenheimer et al. (1990), the field of comparative public policy has developed tremendously and the research community is ever expanding. With this expansion, new questions, new theories and new methodological challenges have emerged. In particular there has been a growing interest in conducting comparative policy studies for various reasons. The digital age together with higher standards in terms of government transparency and access to information, have increased the availability and accessibility of policy relevant information, data and statistics. Globalization and regional processes of economic integration, together with processes of decentralization or even federalization, have transformed national and international political institutions and pushed policy scholars to integrate concepts of internationalization, Europeanization and multilevel governance in their research and research designs in order to account, for example, for increasing interdependence. We can also observe a more critical approach to theories developed within the US institutional context that have been prominent in policy analysis and that scholars want to test and further develop in order to test their generalizability. Last, but not least, in various countries we can observe a ‘comparative turn’ in the study of national politics that has also contributed to strengthen comparative policy research. Independent of the reasons for the increased interest in comparative policy studies, policy scholars have turned to comparative designs in order to be able to better identify patterns and regularities across cases, in order to go beyond the particularities of any single case, irrespective of the research tradition they identify with.

Despite a considerably greater emphasis on comparative policy research, policy scholars currently have no single text at their disposal that takes into account the various research traditions in policy studies and provides an overview over various methodological approaches from a public policy perspective. This volume is not intended to replace publications that discuss a specific type of research design, specific traditions of analysis or methods of analysis in detail. Similarly, it is not intended to provide the reader with fine grained knowledge on the methods of data collection and analysis. Rather it provides an overview of the basic design choices which researchers conducting comparative policy studies have to answer and encourages the more experienced researcher to reconsider their own research in the light of other methodological possibilities for designing comparative research. Hence, while emphasizing the importance of comparison in policy studies, from a methodological perspective this volume advocates a pluralist view. Each chapter is dedicated to a specify method that often relies on a particular type of data. Accordingly, each chapter also discusses the relevant data for the method presented. This way of organizing the volume allows for taking into account the diversity of data used in comparative policy analysis.

Addressing methodological challenges in comparative policy studies

Comparative policy studies face various methodological challenges. Researchers first have to conceptualize the object of comparison, public policy, and choose the cases that will be compared. The first part of the book discusses these two basic methodological challenges facing any research project. The second part familiarizes the researcher with the most widely used comparative designs, representing different traditions within policy studies, reaching from case studies and process tracing, to medium-N and large-N studies and addressing interpretivist analysis. The third part of the book takes up recent methodological developments in comparative policy, namely comparing beyond traditional European and North American cases, addressing multilevel governance, integrating gender into policy studies and using mixed-methods designs. The chapters in all three parts extensively cite examples of comparative policy studies in order to provide guidance for concretely designing research projects. Finally, it is worth pointing out that the stage of actually conceptualizing public policy and choosing a research design is preceded by a more fundamental reflexion about what public policy studies are and ought to be. As the chapters assembled in this volume illustrate, an interpretivist approach to comparative public policy (for example, Chapter 7) would have a substantially different take on the conceptualization of public policy than would a gender-based approach (for example, Chapter 10) or a more classical postpositivist analysis (for example, Chapter 6).

Part I: Types of comparisons and their methodological challenges

The book starts out with defining the object of comparison, public policies, and proposes several conceptual angles to do so. As Howlett and Cashore point out in Chapter 2, the various ways in which policies have been defined poses a challenge for accumulating knowledge, building and testing theories across various comparative policy studies. As the authors demonstrate, one of the challenges of comparing public policies lies within the object of comparison itself, as ‘. . . public policies are complex entities made up of a number of constituent parts, since they exist as combinations of goals and means put together and implemented by a variety of authoritative policy actors operating within an environment of multiple interacting actors and organizations operating over both time and space’ (Howlett and Cashore, this volume, p. 20).

Hence, researchers have to make conscious conceptual choices when designing a comparative policy study, as studying all phases of the policy cycle from agenda setting to policy evaluation – and this across time and space – constitutes a great challenge for collecting and analyzing relevant data. In fact, more often then not, theoretical discussions focus on specific stages of the policy cycle, that is, trying to explain why policies vary across countries in terms of goals and instruments, comparing policy agendas in order to understand shifts in attention, looking at processes of emulation or policy diffusion across countries or then looking at how policy discourse or policy frames structure policy output and implementation. While the stages approach can be helpful in order to conceptualize with more clarity what is being studied, it entails some drawbacks, notably by artificially separating stages that in reality overlap and are linked with each other (as the authors point out) through various feedback loops. Nevertheless, thinking along stages also points to how the actor constellation varies throughout the policy cycle, drawing our attention to the fact that the interaction of policy actors, which is often at the heart of understanding public policies, is embedded in a larger institutional context and institutions create different constraints and opportunities in comparative perspective.

According to Howlett and Cashore, the currently dominant approach addresses the complexity of public policies by focusing on policy dynamics, that is, how polices evolve over time. This approach has several im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1 Conceptual and Methodological Challenges in Comparative Public Policy
• Part I: Types of Comparisons and Their Methodological Challenges
• Part II: Comparative Designs
• Part III: New Challenges in Comparative Designs