Dear colleagues,

We’d like to draw your attention to a workshop on questions related to the co-evolution of policy and technology organised by Matthew Lockwood (SPRU/Sussex), Tobias Schmidt and Sebastian Sewerin (both at ETH Zurich).

We invite paper proposals for our workshop “The Co-Evolution of Policy and Technology: Integrating a Technology Perspective into Feedback Theory”, which will take place as part of the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in Toulouse (14–17 April 2020). We are interested in approaches from various angles, be it from a policy design, policy change or policy feedback perspective.
Our workshop builds on the notion that the integration of a technology perspective into policy feedback research would allow for the sharpening of theoretical assumptions and conceptualizations of key elements of feedback thinking. Systematic technology-feedback studies could therefore, we argue, provide a significant contribution to the ongoing revival of feedback research.

More specifically, we invite papers that address one of these or similar research questions:

*What role do technology-inherent differences play for long-term feedback loops? Does policy-induced technological change, for example, in the health sector play out differently than in, for example, the energy or transport sector? To which extent is the co-evolution of policy and technology sector-specific?

*What are the mechanisms linking policy, technological change and politics? For example, does policy-induced technological change expand or narrow policy options and why?

*What is the role of policy design for inducing interactions between policy, politics and technological change? Does policy design have a direct impact on the intensity of feedback effects?

*How can the methodological challenges of studying the co-evolution of policy and technology be overcome? For example, how can research design effectively cater for the hen-and-egg problem underlying this co-evolution?

*What is the role of political institutions in the co-evolution of policy and technology? For example, what is the effect of institutional variation on the intensity of (positive or negative) technology-policy feedback loops?

*What is the role of agency in the long-term interactions of policy, politics and technological change? How can researcher effectively study, e.g., technology-related policy beliefs or preferences in (repeated rounds of) policy designing?

*What (direct or indirect) impact do technology-spillovers have, both cross-sectoral and cross-country? Put differently, how does technological change in one jurisdiction feed back into the politics of another?

The format of the workshop (small group, 4 full days) offers a unique opportunity for in-depth discussions of both individual papers and the ‘bigger picture’. The deadline for submissions is 5 November 2019. Full details on the workshop and the ECPR Joint Sessions as well as information how to submit an abstract are available here (https://ecpr.eu/Events/PanelDetails.aspx?PanelID=8494&EventID=129).

In case of questions please do not hesitate to contact one of us.

All the best,

Sebastian, Matthew and Tobias

recent publications:

Nicolas Schmid, Sebastian Sewerin & Tobias S. Schmidt: Explaining Advocacy Coalition Change with Policy Feedback. Policy Studies Journal, online first.

Tobias S. Schmidt, Nicolas Schmid & Sebastian Sewerin: Policy goals, partisanship and paradigmatic change in energy policy – analyzing parliamentary discourse in Germany over 30 years. Climate Policy, online first.

Tobias S. Schmidt & Sebastian Sewerin: Measuring the temporal dynamics of policy mixes – An empirical analysis of renewable energy policy mixes’ balance and design features in nine countries. Research Policy, online first.

ETH Zurich
Dr. Sebastian Sewerin
Senior Researcher
Energy Politics Group; Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences
Haldeneggsteig 4 (IFW D 27.2)
8092 Zurich, Switzerland

Phone +41 44 632 47 22
sebastian.sewerin@gess.ethz.ch
www.epg.ethz.ch/people/senior-researchers/dr--sebastian-sewerin.html

www.researchgate.net/profile/Sebastian_Sewerin