LIST OF PANELS

According to Thomas R. Dye, policy analysis seeks to understand what governments do, why they do it, and what difference it makes. Yet much scholarship in the area of public policy puts its analytical focus on the first two goals at the expense of the third. In the past years and decades, many studies have contributed to a better understanding of the factors that explain cross-national variance in policy outputs, but the thorough comparative evaluation of their effects in the real world has often been neglected. This is unfortunate, because this third function of policy analysis arguably bears substantial societal relevance.   This panel invites studies that try to assess the effectiveness of regulatory policies in solving societal problems. Do regulatory policies have any effect on the problems they are supposed to solve? Which regulatory arrangements are associated with the best (and the worst) policy outcomes? How can research pragmatic problems associated with an evaluation of regulatory policies be overcome? By addressing questions like these, the contributors of this panel advance our understanding of the real world impacts of different regulatory frameworks in a multitude of different policy areas. These areas include, but are not limited to, environmental policy, consumer protection policy, health policy and morality policy. We would like to point out that we invite all sorts of theoretical and methodological approaches in order to stimulate fruitful discussions.

According to Thomas R. Dye, policy analysis seeks to understand what governments do, why they do it, and what difference it makes. Yet much scholarship in the area of public policy puts its analytical focus on the first two goals at the expense of the third. In the past years and decades, many studies have contributed to a better understanding of the factors that explain cross-national variance in policy outputs, but the thorough comparative evaluation of their effects in the real world has often been neglected. This is unfortunate, because this third function of policy analysis arguably bears substantial societal relevance.   This panel invites studies that try to assess the effectiveness of regulatory policies in solving societal problems. Do regulatory policies have any effect on the problems they are supposed to solve? Which regulatory arrangements are associated with the best (and the worst) policy outcomes? How can research pragmatic problems associated with an evaluation of regulatory policies be overcome? By addressing questions like these, the contributors of this panel advance our understanding of the real world impacts of different regulatory frameworks in a multitude of different policy areas. These areas include, but are not limited to, environmental policy, consumer protection policy, health policy and morality policy. We would like to point out that we invite all sorts of theoretical and methodological approaches in order to stimulate fruitful discussions.