LIST OF PANELS

The “public-void policy”: how systemic corruption affects the policy process, and how theories could accommodate it.

Oliver Meza, Elizabeth Perez-Chiques, Irma Guerra, Miguel Guajardo

Policy process theories have clearly addressed the many factors involved in the policy process. From an agent-driven perspective, politics is widely studied through the actions of interest groups and advocacy coalitions (e.g., Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1988, 1993; Weible, 2007), bureaucracies at many levels, including street-level and front-line officials (e.g., Lipsky, 1980, 2010; Brodkin, 2003, 2011), parties (e.g., Schmidt, 1996), politicians (e.g., Arnold, 1990; Kingdon, 1993) and office incumbents (e.g., Svara, 2006). Policy processes have also been explained through other more intangible factors such as public opinion (e.g., Page & Shapiro, 1983; Monroe, 1998; Burstein, 2003), discourse and policy narratives (e.g., Shanahan, Jones, & McBeth, 2011; Jones, 2021), social construction of policy targets (e.g., Ingram & Schneider, 1991, 1993, 1995; Schneider & Ingram, 1993), problem definition (e.g., Bardach, 1981; Rochefort & Cobb, 1993; Baumgartner & Jones 2015) among other technical factors featuring the intricacies of specific policies such as ambiguity in policy objectives (e.g., Matland, 1995; Cairney, Oliver, & Wellstead, 2016), measuring indicators (e.g., De Neufville, 1978; Innes, 1990; Bovaird & Loffler, 2003), evaluation schemas (e.g., Smith & Larimer, 2013). With varying degrees, however, an idea that has traditionally guided these streams of literature rests upon the premise that a functional democracy is working. Therefore, while fully acknowledging that politics play in policies, this game is played within the frame of a democratic governance.

In this panel we are interested in exploring what happens to the policy processes when a democratic frame is jeopardized. This could mean many things, however, the panel is mostly interested in understanding what is the effect over public policy and its processes when for instance, the “public interest” is systematically withdrawn from the scenery, when systemic or political corruption plays a key role in the policy process and/or when democratic values have faded against a more autocratic set of principles. Work in other areas such as public administration, sociology, and political economy has realized that systemic corruption and public-void policy decisions severely impact the quality of governance and government (e.g., Rothstein, 2018; Mungiu-Pippidi, 2006; Jancsics, 2019; Marquette & Peiffer, 2017); this panel invites to reflect in the understanding of how it affects the policy process. More importantly, the panel will contribute by bringing insights to the mainstream theoretical accounts of the policy process that could and should integrate their explanatory frame in order to accommodate different governance contexts.  

The panel is open to a diverse set of methodological approaches. However, the authors should be prepared to make a critical review and to offer theoretical contributions to any of the many existing streams that currently explain the policy processes or policies.