This paper explores the legitimacy of third sector organizations in the policy process in the United Kingdom. It draws on empirical research to examine how legitimacy is defined, both by third sector organizations and by those they target within government. The paper argues that while many third sector organizations give high priority to political forms of legitimacy—in the sense of participatory structures and accountability to members and beneficiaries—government is generally more likely to give priority to technical forms of legitimacy, e.g., the quality of research and the ability to implement policy. Nonetheless, political legitimacy is still important, first because this is the form of legitimacy that third sector organizations claim for themselves and second because, as government gives way to governance with an increase in partnerships and collaboration, the dilemmas faced by third sector organizations in achieving political legitimacy are being faced on a broader canvas.

Inspired by “extra-market” initiatives to ensure media diversity in social-democratic Northern Europe, the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA) is a path-breaking attempt by a developing country to support the media needs of marginalized communities too poor to be of interest to advertising-driven commercial media. This paper examines the policy process towards the establishment of the MDDA as a partnership between the state, capital, and civil society within the constraints of South Africa’s re-entry into a global economy that privileges “free market” solutions to developmental problems. Under these conditions, do partnerships between the state, the private sector, and civil society facilitate or hinder the achievement of social objectives aimed primarily at uplifting the poor and marginalized?.

NGOs are recognized as active participants in the policy process. There is general agreement that they are agenda setters and important actors in the framing of public issues. They are well-recognized providers of social services on behalf of, or in partnership with, private and public actors. Previous research demonstrates that the institutional context accounts for the extent of NGOs’ access to and influence over public policy making. Nonetheless, we know less about why there are important differences in the way they approach the policy process. Comparing the organizational evolution of two Spanish NGOs, both active in the field of humanitarian aid and poverty alleviation over a period of more than 50 years, this article contributes to our understanding of the relevance of organizational structure in NGOs as a determining factor in their role in public policy. Drawing on institutional organizational analysis, a theoretical framework is developed to assess the importance of organizational structure in explaining why NGOs take on different roles in the policy process, even when sharing the same institutional context. NGOs are driven by pre-existing institutions and legacy that affect the way they resolve conflict and engage in internal bargaining.

Environmental governance, often characterized as a tug-of-war between central ambitions and local reluctance, provides a valuable lens for examining the dynamics of China’s central–local relations and their impact on policy processes, enhancing our understanding of both the changes and continuities of the Xi Jinping era. By analysing the eco-transformation of waste management through the framework of political steering theory, this article presents a nuanced avoidance strategy used by local governments, which we term minimum compliance. This strategy allows local authorities to cope with and sidestep centrally mandated policies while avoiding the consequences of policy failure. This study enriches the discourse on China’s central–local relations by exploring why top-level design has not reduced policy implementation deviations. It also highlights how local governments in the Xi era evade policy responsibilities in their daily operations and hedge against political pressure.

This paper investigates the increasing, but complex, support for reparations among Democratic elected officials—highlighting their tendency to endorse the concept while deferring discussion of policy details. This strategic ambiguity is common in policy discourse and can be embedded within policy design, such as legislative proposals to create commissions tasked with studying and recommending future actions on reparations. The effectiveness of these reparations commissions is uncertain. They could represent productive steps toward genuine reparations or simply serve to alleviate political pressure without any substantial policy changes. We explore these potential outcomes in three inter-related analyses: a compilation and comparison of all bills mentioning slavery reparations introduced at the federal and state level, the first nationally representative public opinion poll asking about support for reparations commissions, and a content analysis of legislative bill texts establishing reparations commissions. Our findings suggest that while reparations commissions offer an effective way for Democratic policymakers to manage conflicting constituency pressures in the short term, their potential to propel forward, rather than stall, the reparations debate hinges on their design and execution.

Research on the activities and influence of interest groups in state legislatures faces a data problem: we are missing a comprehensive, systematic dataset of interest groups’ policy preferences on state legislation. We address this gap by introducing the Dataset on Policy Choice and Organizational Representation in the United States (CHORUS). This dataset compiles over 13 million policy positions stated by tens of thousands of interest groups and individuals on bills in 17 state legislatures over the past 25 years. We describe the process used to construct CHORUS and present a new network science technique for analyzing policy position data from interest groups: the layered stochastic block model, which groups similar interest groups and bills together, respectively, based on patterns in the policy positions. Through two demonstrative applications, we show the utility of these data, combined with our novel analytical approach, for understanding interest group configurations in different state legislatures and policy areas.

As policy emerges from the interplay of economic, political, and social forces, determining whether research has made a difference to policy choices on aging issues is extremely difficult. Such a determination demands attention to the "black box" of the policy process, and the setting within which policy ultimately operates. This paper presents a Seniors' Independence Research Program as a case illustration of how research has made a difference to policy choices by stakeholder involvement throughout the research process. Strategies ensure stakeholder collaboration in policy issue search, filtration, definition, and prioritization; involvement in the design, implementation, and evaluation of health services models; and participation in achieving long-term evidence-based changes in policy and practice.

Standards developed by standard-setting organisations (SSOs) – sometimes labelled private rulemaking – are part of larger practices of governance in most societies yet are underinvestigated from a policy process perspective. Utilising and developing the multiple streams approach (MSA), this article investigates a policy process moving between government and the SSO Standards Norway (SN). The study finds standardisation by SSOs to be an ambiguous institutional arrangement. Strong institutional barriers in theory did not work as such in the case investigated. This article argues that the differentiation between responsibility for process (SN) and content (committee) makes the standardisation process vulnerable. The concept of “institutional deficit” is introduced to describe a potential mismatch between SSOs producing policy in a government-like institution, but where the SSOs are not capable of taking responsibility for policies in a government-like way. This article finds the adjusted MSA useful in this potentially least likely case.

This article examines the state of the English-language peer-reviewed literature published over the 2011–2021 period whose objective is to describe and explain processes of development of Canadian public policies and their consequences. It first presents a profile of the surveyed literature's attention to different policy sectors, elements of public policy, and its chosen methodologies to study them. It then examines the empirical and theoretical contributions of the literature to uncovering the constitutive actors and their interactions in policy processes in policy domains of Canadian jurisdictions; the logics of chosen policy instruments and their distributive effects; and the interactions among Canada's structural, institutional and ideational features and policy actors’ motivations and behaviour with processes of policy innovation, continuity and change. A foremost contribution of Canadian policy studies to comparative policy studies is to demonstrate the causal impacts of the interaction of institutional, structural and ideational/cultural factors on processes of policy development.

Most literature finds a detrimental effect of amalgamation on voter turnout in municipal elections. Some other studies reveal instead null or even positive effects. We argue that this inconsistency derives from the fact that previous research has only analysed the amalgamation/turnout relation in single case studies. The contribution of this article is therefore twofold. First, it proposes a unified framework to investigate the amalgamation/turnout relation in comparative perspective, which clarifies the shortcut between size and amalgamation, disentangles the multifaced nature of municipal amalgamation, and outlines clear testable hypotheses related to its implementation – both at the national and at the local level. Secondly, it provides an original 10-European-country dataset of municipal amalgamations in the last decades (comprising Albania, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway) to empirically verify such hypotheses concerning the effects of the amalgamation features on voter turnout. Our study crucially reveals the relevance of the characteristics of the amalgamation process. When the amalgamation is imposed by the national government, turnout is particularly low, similarly to when the amalgamation occurs independently from a wide reform scheme. On the other hand, municipal turnout after amalgamation is higher when a larger number of municipalities are merged and when the amalgamated municipalities had a similar population before being merged. Moreover, our empirical evidence confirms the importance of traditional second-order predictors of turnout in municipal elections, even with specific reference to the post-amalgamation elections. Conversely, in such elections, the overall size of the (final) municipality is not a significant predictor of voter turnout.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and China's state-led model for economic globalization more generally, have attracted controversy: Are state-led overseas investment and lending driven by strategic motives or market rationale? How have the recipient economies reacted to the influx of Chinese capital? This special issue sheds light on these questions by first outlining the fragmented state system driving the BRI, a system featuring both Beijing's strategic logic at the top and market considerations in policy implementation. The role of the state is unpacked further in China's globalizing coal industry and in the growth of Chinese industry export to BRI countries. Finally, the issue explores the mechanisms behind public backlash and political pushback facing China in Zambia and Australia. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to shift China's relationship with the world, this special issue contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the modus operandi of Chinese capital going global.

The rapidly ageing population and increasing care needs provide the rationale for care systems progressively shaped by a growing market in a global context. In China the approach to policy making, which has been largely experimental, has involved market-oriented reforms since the 1980s. While marketisation processes have been well studied in various European care systems, very little is known about their implementation in the Chinese context. Based on qualitative interviews with local government officials and care providers in Shanghai, this article discusses the Chinese policy process in the field of care for older people and the barriers to effective implementation. It investigates the experiment-based marketisation policy process, the power hierarchy and the lines of accountability of the state in the care field. Multi-layered barriers are identified in the market-oriented policy process. These include (1) inherent bureaucratic obstacles at practice level: reluctance to exercise discretionary power, administrative inefficiency, incoherence of care schemes and poor inter-department communication; and (2) complexities and failures at policy-making level: the infeasibility of policies, underestimation of operational capacity and inadequate involvement of practice knowledge. These findings have implications for balancing the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of care policies in an era of public service austerity.

The regression discontinuity design (RDD) is a valuable tool for identifying causal effects with observational data. However, applying the traditional electoral RDD to the study of divided government is challenging. Because assignment to treatment in this case is the result of elections to multiple institutions, there is no obvious single forcing variable. Here, we use simulations in which we apply shocks to real-world election results in order to generate two measures of the likelihood of divided government, both of which can be used for causal analysis. The first captures the electoral distance to divided government and can easily be utilized in conjunction with the standard sharp RDD toolkit. The second is a simulated probability of divided government. This measure does not easily fit into a sharp RDD framework, so we develop a probability restricted design (PRD) which relies upon the underlying logic of an RDD. This design incorporates common regression techniques but limits the sample to those observations for which assignment to treatment approaches “as-if random.” To illustrate both of our approaches, we reevaluate the link between divided government and the size of budget deficits.

What explains the passage of Thailand's landmark universal healthcare (UHC) policy? In separate contributions, Selway and Harris emphasized the role of electoral rules and political parties, on one hand, and “professional movements” of developmentally minded state bureaucrats on the other. Which is correct? In this article, Selway and Harris respond to each other's work. While Selway agrees that the actions of the professional movement constitute an underappreciated necessary condition for universal healthcare in Thailand, he argues that Harris overstates the role of the movement in implementation. Harris defends his position and maintains that an institution-focused account is insufficient, arguing that the actions of Thailand's Rural Doctors’ Movement not only explain universal healthcare but also gave rise to the very electoral rule changes that Selway argues were so critical to facilitating universal coverage. Selway responds to these criticisms, and the two researchers jointly consider implications for causation, qualitative research, and policymaking theory.

What factors influence agenda setting behavior in state legislatures in the United States? Using the localized effects of climate change, we examine whether notable changes in temperature can raise the salience of the issue, thus encouraging a legislative response. To evaluate the behavior of individual legislators around climate policy, we utilize an original data set that includes geographic mapping of climate anomalies at the state legislative district level and incorporates individual, chamber, district, and state characteristics to predict climate bill sponsorship. Using a multilevel model that estimates climate change bill sponsorship among 25,000 legislators from 2011 to 2015, we find a robust relationship between temperature anomalies and bill sponsorship for Democratic members of state legislators while Republicans are unresponsive to such factors. Our data and methodological approach allow us to examine legislative action on climate change beyond final policy passage and offers an opportunity to understand the motivations behind climate innovation in the American states.