LIST OF PANELS

The Political Economy of Public Policy: Bringing New Models and Methods in

At its start, the study of public policy lacked unity, reflecting on the nature of the topic itself (John 2003). One major strand focused on the differences across policies: different instruments, different constraints and opportunities etc. The result was a descriptive study of public policy (e.g., policy taxonomies). The other strand was more concerned with the support of specific policies and their evaluation. The goal in this case was more normative, than analytical (Birkland 2015).

In the 1970s, public policy students became more concerned with explaining public policy, instead of categorising or evaluating it. Public policy theories started to emerge. Some theories focused on how ideas spread across countries and enter the political agenda (Hall 1993). Others were more concerned with the role of societal actors and their interaction with the public sector (Maass 1951). Others again studied the role of socio-economic change. Despite their focus on explaining public policy, these strands focused on single factors.

In the 1990s, the so called ‘synthetic approaches’ emerged, emphasising that ideas, socio-economic factors and policy networks interact with each other and affect policy dynamics: the multiple stream approach (Kingdon 1995), the advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993) and the punctuated equilibrium theory (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). These approaches have dominated the discipline ever since, despite calls for an institutionalist/comparative turn.

In order to move the discipline forward, this panel seeks to capitalise on a recent trend in public policy: the use of economic models and methods that have already been applied to the study of international relations (IR) and comparative politics (John 2018). In the last decades, comparative politics and IR have embraced the use of advanced data gathering methods and statistical models. The use of text data has expanded rapidly in recent years (Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson 2011; Lucas et al. 2015), with major examples including the detection of legislative agendas or topics and estimating the ideological positions of parties or single legislators. Attention in this area has recently moved from supervised approaches to unsupervised approaches, most notably machine learning. Also, the use of quasi-experimental research designs, such as natural experiments, instrumental variable approaches, difference-in-difference approaches etc., structural equations and spatial regression models has become common practice in comparative politics and IR. Finally, we have witnessed an increasing use of game theoretic models to drive the study of parties, voting behaviour, conflict and so on.

In the past years, some work has started to use these models and methods to study public policy topics. For instance, Bertelli and John (2012) use an economic theory of investment and Monte Carlo simulation to study uncertainty in policy prioritization in the UK. Kreppel and Oztas (2017) use a veto player model to study agenda setting in the EU. König and Mäder (2014) look at policy implementation in the EU with a strategic game between a central monitoring agency and multiple implementers. Vannoni et al. (2020) apply Natural Language Process (NLP) techniques to study the degree of control legislators leave to bureaucrats and executives in policy implementation.

Call for Papers

We very much welcome papers on the following areas

-       Policy diffusion

-       Agenda setting

-       Public opinion

-       Policy prioritization

-       Policy networks

-       Media and political attention

Building on the success of the panel in 2019 with 15 papers presented and discussed, we are looking for papers that embody political economy approaches, such as advanced data gathering and statistical analysis methods, or contributions that use game theoretic models or make other theoretical contributions, or papers that mix both theory and empirics.