LIST OF PANELS

Comparing policy implementation has been a fruitful venture for scholars of public policy. Scientific journals and research articles that apply a comparative perspective -across country, sectors and/or policies- are burgeoning (Engeli et al., 2018). This panel seeks to contribute to this wide debate by shedding light on a specific topic, which is the role of qualitative approaches to comparing street-level policy implementation. State and non-state actors and organizations on the ground are our focus of comparative analysis. This panel follows the lines of the comparative research on the implementation that goes beyond slippery normative concepts like implementation “success” and “failure” (Hupe & Sætren 2015) and the compliance towards supranational organizations such as the EU (Infantino 2019). While less prominent than comparing policies in their own right, comparing implementation offers important insights into differing trajectories and the institutional, political and other factors that shape them. This is particularly true where policy-making is centralised but implementation is not, for example the implementation of national law by substate actors in multiple localities or the implementation of international or supranational treaties by its member states. What do we learn from qualitative and comparative research designs at the level of the implementation? What are the challenges, empirical and theoretical, that such research designs might imply? How do they contribute to the fields of policy implementation and the study of policymaking?

Comparative perspectives on policy implementation have been successfully adopted in policy fields like migration, environmental protection, health care, housing or unemployment. However, given the ideosyncracies of each policy field, there is little debate over the conditions for good comparison accross them. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that 90 per cent of implementation research even as late as in the 2000s studied and compared policies within a given country (Sætren 2014). This panel seeks to change this. This panel aims at privileging case-oriented rather than variable-oriented comparative research, which is small-N comparisons based on cases that are studied through qualitative research. According to Della Porta (2008, 198), a case-oriented approach “aims at rich descriptions of a few instances of a certain phenomenon. (...) Variable-oriented studies mainly aim at establishing generalized relationships between variables, while case-oriented research seeks to understand complex units.” This methodology is premised on the assumption that the comparison presumes the researcher’s familiarity with the cases he or she analyzes, as not every political phenomenon can be dissociated from the culture in which it is inscribed (Hassenteufel 2005). The researcher needs to understand contexts and the underlying lines of reasoning, which implies a certain level of contact and personal engagement with the cases. This panel aims at bringing this perspectives to comparative and qualitative analysis of policy implementation and the actors and the organizations involved in it, with a particular emphasis on cross-national comparisons.

Comparing policy implementation often poses challenges to researchers, as functionally similar institutions do not always generate the same data or operate the same way. This panel seeks to investigate conditions for successful qualitative comparison - conceptual, methodological and theoretical - by inviting scholars from all policy fields to present and identify indicators for good comparisons of policy implementation.

This panel seeks to discuss strategies for fruitfully comparing policy implementation agents. We seek to broaden the debate on comparative policy implementation by cutting across policy areas and internationalizing the debate, including non-"Western" and decolonial perspectives on policy implementation. Within this broad approach, we are looking for successful utilisations of a qualitative, actor-oriented approach to comparative policy implementation.

 We invite scholars of implementation from all policy fields and continents to contribute to this debate. Successful abstracts should indicate a) the level of comparison adopted b) factors that contributed to successful comparisons across institutions, states, or governments agencies despite empirical and theoretical challenges and c) the research design with a particular focus on the case selection and the ways in which the qualitative methodologies are used. We would like to invite papers that focus on more classical comparisons among different localities and administrations within one state as well as international comparisons. We are particularly interested in the determinants of cross-national/cross-local differences as well as the emergence of similarities that a comparative, qualitative research might put forward. Contributions might focus on a variety of actors and organizations that put policies into practice, including state and non-state actors. Papers that focus on new qualitative methodologies to comparing policy implementation are particularly welcome.