Abstract This study examines the systemic politicization of public policy in Indonesia, rooted in its historical, political, and sociocultural contexts. Adopting a Global South perspective, it challenges Northern-centric frameworks by showing how political elites strategically set agendas to consolidate power, while bureaucrats respond through adaptive strategies prioritizing visibility over substantive service delivery. Analysis of official documents from Indonesia’s Supreme Audit Agency, Corruption Eradication Commission, Ombudsman (2023–2025), and Ministry of Administrative Reform (LAKIP 2022–2024) reveals systematic decoupling: performance metrics indicate progress, yet independent assessments show persistently medium service quality at 74.64 percent. Donor influence fosters isomorphic mimicry, with 43 percent of foreign-funded e-government platforms inactive. The study develops a five-dimensional framework, elite agenda-setting, bureaucratic adaptation, donor-induced isomorphism, symbolic compliance, and digital governance paradox, capturing their self-reinforcing interaction. This framework offers an analytical tool for understanding governance in Indonesia and comparable Global South contexts.
Abstract Public policies are shaped not only by institutions and interests but also by interactions between policy construction and ideology, which define social problems, determine who is deserving, and set the boundaries of legitimate public provision. This study examines how these dynamics shape support for contested health services, asking how medicalization and social constructions of deservingness influence public attitudes. Using a survey experiment with 2,000 respondents in Canada, the analysis examines support for IVF, abortion, gender-affirming care, and HPV vaccination. Findings suggest that medicalization significantly increases support for public funding for select services, while constructions of deservingness mediate these effects. Policy feedback operates not only through institutional arrangements but also through how citizens perceive the boundaries of healthcare and the deservingness of recipients. The study advances research on policy feedback and health politics by showing how medicalization and social constructions shape public opinion and debates over medical necessity.
Decentralization sought to bring effective, people-centric local governance to post-colonial societies that were predominantly centrally planned. Tamil Nadu has been an emblem of effective decentralization, ranking in the top three of India's Panchayat Devolution Index 2024-2025. It thus stands to reason that the state would be useful in telling us the story of how decentralization could manifest in the global South. However, bringing the CAGE (cultural, administrative, geographic, economic) framework into dialogue with interviews conducted with farmers in Tamil Nadu reveals that decentralization has not bridged the gap between governments and farmers and has instead created distance between them. The paper contributes to the rich corpus of scholarship on policy studies by examining the Tamil Nadu example and its implementation of Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (national micro-irrigation policy) as a case study of agricultural decentralization in the Global South. It draws on fieldwork over three years in the districts of Kanchipuram, Chengalpattu, and Tiruvallur in Tamil Nadu.
The twin digital and green transition constitutes a major societal challenge in the upcoming decades. To remain competitive, governments need to invest in both transformations. However, budgetary limits constitute trade-offs in addressing both simultaneously. At the same time, both transformations have far-reaching consequences for labor markets. Yet, we know very little about citizens' preferences for relative public spending on both transitions and their determinants. Here, we examine the role of subjective labor market risk resulting from these transitions in shaping relative spending preferences. We argue that individuals might prefer to spend less on the societal transformation they perceive as a job threat (single-pressuredness), while cross-pressuredness by both transitions leads to an equal split. Drawing on novel comparative survey data from six countries, we find that individuals prefer to divert investment from the transition they perceive as a threat to their jobs, while cross-pressuredness moves people slightly towards equal investment.
This study examines how citizens' discursive strategies influence street-level bureaucrats' (SLBs) prioritization decisions. Drawing on the research regarding deservingness heuristics, citizen voice behavior, and citizen resistance strategies, we conceptualize discursive strategies as showing deservingness, threatening to petition higher-level authorities, and threatening to engage in self-harm. Using a dataset of 254,257 transcribed interactions between citizens and hotline operators recorded on the government service hotline system (similar to the US 311 system) across 2019 in China, we identify discursive strategies in citizen complaints through a supervised machine learning (SML) algorithm. Our analysis shows that SLBs are significantly more likely to prioritize responding to citizens' complaints that include the discursive cues of showing deservingness, petitioning higher-level authorities, and engaging in self-harm, with deservingness exerting the weakest effect. These findings contribute to our understanding of SLBs' prioritization decisions in government-citizen interactions.
How do media systems shape which interests are heard in AI policy debates? We analyze 37,954 articles published between 2018 and 2024 in eight leading newspapers from Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, using a large language model to identify the organizations cited and to classify the tone of their coverage. Three patterns stand out. First, economic actors dominate everywhere, appearing in roughly 85 per cent of articles, but liberal systems give noticeably more space to NGOs, academics and trade unions than polarized-pluralist ones. Second, the cross-national diversity gap does not come from how individual articles are composed; it comes from how often newsrooms publish multi-source stories at all. Third, sourcing profiles diverge across outlets in liberal systems and converge in polarized-pluralist ones, suggesting that market competition matters more than ideological alignment for editorial differentiation. Trade unions, notably, slip into negative territory in Spain.
Local government amalgamations lead to pre-merger overspending. To prevent this, higher levels of government can temporarily restrict local fiscal autonomy. However, scholars have been unable to demonstrate the effect of reform-specific regulations due to the difficulty in comparing regulated and non-regulated scenarios. Reformers consequently cannot assess the costs and benefits of regulations, resulting in cases of unrestricted overspending incentives. The article studies the effect of regulating opportunistic fiscal behavior in the context of mergers of local governments. It compares local government reforms in Norway (non-regulation) and Denmark (multiple regulations), using a Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference design to estimate the cost of non-regulation. The results show that the costs are significant. In the final year before merging, Norwegian municipalities overspent substantially in relation to both current expenditure and capital investment compared to their regulated Danish counterparts. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, including the case for not implementing regulations of opportunistic fiscal behavior.
Health and well-being are fundamental to sustainable development and central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as they entail coordinated, cross-sectoral policies that systematically and effectively integrate these considerations. This study applies a novel quantitative policy mapping method to Indonesia's legislation from 1945 to 2024, examining how health and well-being have evolved in the policy discourse amid shifting socio-political contexts. The findings indicate that while few policy documents are specifically dedicated to health and none to well-being, these considerations are consistently embedded across legislation within the national policies. The analysis reveals a partial, often reactive alignment with the SDGs and Health in All Policies. Indonesia's 2023 Health Law represents a notable step toward prioritizing health, yet gaps remain in strategic planning and implementation. This paper advances policy mapping methodologies and contributes to discussions on integrated, data-driven policy frameworks to support equitable and sustainable public health outcomes.
How does preference disclosure by political principals shape regulatory outcomes downstream? While existing literature approaches this question in terms of principal-agent maneuvers, we argue that how leaders reveal their policy preferences and the effect on regulatory behavior can be understood through the lens of information processing. In-depth interviews with elite actors in China's film sector indicate that leaders facing elite contestation limit disclosure to stabilize coalition support, whereas leaders free from such contestation often comment directly and expansively on regulatory decisions, while tying their revealed preferences to "big picture" considerations beyond the business of filmmaking. The expanded scope and scale of disclosure following regime consolidation transformed the informational environment for the film sector, prompting regulators to prioritize out-of-domain issues and curtail discretionary action to mitigate political risk. The findings point to the informational determinants of regulatory behavior in comparative settings.
Authoritarian regimes have long faced governance challenges arising from decentralization, as central governments struggle to control local government behavior due to information barriers. This paper argues that promoting the disclosure of local government information to the public is an effective strategy to alleviate issues associated with decentralization. Using a policy mandating the disclosure of local government information on social governance as a quasi-natural experiment, we examine its impact on a critical governance challenge emerging from decentralization - the decline of county seats. Using China's county-level panel data (2015-2022) and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that local information disclosure significantly promotes county seat development. Specifically, it increases land allocation for both economic and public service purposes, thereby breaking the vicious cycle between deficient public services and economic stagnation. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that these effects are more pronounced in counties with higher citizen responsiveness and more constrained fiscal capacity.
What determines incumbent chief executives' re-election in local government? Most of the literature focuses on the impact of political or economic factors. Yet, given that incumbents also strive to manage the administrative performance of local government, this is an important oversight. We examine whether and to what extent incumbents' administrative innovation, as a new administrative factor vis-& agrave;-vis conventional political and economic factors, determines incumbents' re-election. Analyzing 292 incumbents' re-election and vote shares in the two most recent local government elections in South Korea, we find that both political and administrative factors are significant determinants. While political determinants, such as partisan alignment with the central government and affiliation with major parties, have the largest impact, administrative innovation also has a statistically and substantively significant effect. The implications of our findings are clear: incumbents are held accountable not only for their political attributes but also for their administrative performance in local government.
The COVID-19 pandemic presented a window of opportunity for policy change, but was not exploited as such everywhere. Surprisingly, in Switzerland, usually characterized by a stable political landscape and incremental policy changes, an unexpected reform, the Nursing Initiative, was adopted. This paper examines the underlying mechanisms driving this adoption, employing a cross-fertilization of the multiple streams framework with the programmatic action framework and relying on expert interviews. The analysis shows that partial streams coupling began years before the pandemic, facilitated by the strengthening of nursing care professions' identity into a programmatic group. Switzerland's direct democracy enabled the opening of an agenda window, allowing the programmatic group to effectively couple their policy with political dynamics in the policy process. Finally, the COVID-19 crisis acted as a decision window, opening from the problem stream and providing momentum for policy action and decision-making.
Policymakers in cities in the United States of America (U.S.) must tailor the right bundle of policies to promote the diffusion of battery electric vehicles (BEVs). We investigate the interplay of (non-)monetary incentives on U.S. state, city and utility-related policy levels. For doing so, we deploy fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of BEV policies in 16 cities in the U.S. to identify policy configurations that promote BEV uptake. We provide a first-ever study to systematically evaluate BEV policy bundles across different U.S. policy levels. Results indicate two policy configurations: monetary incentives received upon/after BEV purchase in conjunction with (non-)monetary incentives for home charging infrastructure extension in conjunction with recurring monetary incentives by utilities (I); the absence of recurring (non-)monetary incentives at the local level in conjunction with (non-)monetary incentives for home charging infrastructure extension in conjunction with recurring monetary incentives by utilities (II) lead to successful progress in BEV adoption.
The concept of social inclusion meets the criteria of a "magic concept" because it is broadly stretched, normatively attractive, and denies the possibility of conflicting interests and logics. However, when this broad concept is operationalized in policies targeting specific groups it is often reduced in scope by narrowly defined policy designs. This paper asks how do disability policies define and operationalize social inclusion? Drawing from a critical frame analysis of all disability policies at Canada's provincial and federal levels, six policy frames are identified that encapsulate different meanings of social inclusion for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Canadian policy design. Comparison is facilitated by engaging critiques of inclusion policy from the disability politics literature to help explain emergent trends and areas of divergence in social inclusion framing. This facilitates a discussion of policy design characteristics during the "inclusion era" of Canadian disability policy.
A potentially powerful argument for police abolition appeals to root causes of crime. The root causes of crime are (e.g.) poverty and inequality caused by capitalism. By targeting crime at the roots, we can render the police obsolete and abolish them. I argue here that the root cause argument fails. Despite the suggestive metaphor, the fundamental causes of crime are deep and valuable, or in other words not uproot-able. They are essential to us, or we have good reason not to uproot them. To show this, I develop some simple models or recipes for crime inspired by Thomas Hobbes's model of conflict in the state of nature and by contemporary theories of crime. The models suggest that at best we can manage these causes, and in turn the resulting crime. There is, however, no hope of fundamental reforms that do away with the need for social monitoring and sanctioning, or policing.
The topic of this paper is fiscal equalization among municipalities in the four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Fiscal equalization refers to transfers of financial resources to and between municipalities with the aim of mitigating regional differences in fiscal capacities and spending needs. More specifically, we ask the following research question: How does fiscal equalization impact spatial inequalities? We conduct a comparative empirical analysis of fiscal equalization policies in the Nordic countries. A main contribution is that we construct a granular dataset consisting of all municipalities in the four countries in 2020. We leverage this dataset to analyze inequalities before and after fiscal equalization. Our main finding is that equalization is strongest in Sweden and weakest in Norway, while Denmark and Finland are ranked in the middle.
Population health is shaped not only by global and national processes but equally by decisions taken at the local level. Yet comparatively little is known about why municipal public health policies differ. This study examines how structural conditions, previously found to influence local policymaking, combine with the presence or absence of universal targeting in public health policies across Poland's 23 largest cities. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis and building on the Local Welfare Regimes perspective, the analysis consistently links universal targeting in municipal public health policy to a combination of strong civil society, substantial representation of women in city councils, and the absence of an unhealthy population. As one of the first explicit applications of the LWR theory with fsQCA, the study contributes to debates on universal targeting, confirming that it can be implemented in a range of ways, while simultaneously highlighting the risk of Matthew Effects.
Between 2000 and 2019, Portugal and Spain adopted divergent youth-oriented active labor market policies (ALMPs) to address rising youth unemployment. Drawing on data from the LABREF database, National Reform Programmes, and key economic indicators, we show that Portugal targeted higher education graduates with internship and innovation schemes aligned with its transition to a knowledge-based economy. In contrast, Spain developed a dual vocational education and training system centered on apprenticeships to support its manufacturing sector. These contrasting approaches reflect distinct national growth strategies and demonstrate how governments shape ALMPs in line with broader economic objectives. The findings offer a comparative perspective on policy divergence in Southern Europe and highlight the role of growth strategies in explaining variation in activation policies, even among countries with similar institutional and macroeconomic conditions.
How do citizen interest groups influence policy in domains dominated by political and economic elites? Recent research suggests their success hinges on outsider strategies to pressure policymakers, such as mobilizing public opinion. In contrast, a feminist platform named Platform for Equal and Non-transferable Birth and Adoption Leave (PPiiNA) built insider alliances with female politicians across party lines to make paternity and maternity leave equal and non-transferable in Spain in 2019. This article explores this case in depth by tracing almost 20 years of policy evolution through parliamentary documents and interviews. Against employer opposition and the absence of trade unions, the case corroborates the relevance of women in politics by illustrating how descriptive representation can open insider channels of influence to feminist advocacy groups. Nonetheless, the approval of the reform ultimately depended on left-wing governing power, while policy formulation was dominated by political elites and employer groups, limiting the capacity of cross-partisan feminist alliances to shape final policy output.
Expert-produced information and data hold significant potential for adoption by decision-makers; however, this potential can be compromised by barriers related to language, communication channels, and formats. The literature emphasizes the differing languages, timelines, and incentives between specialists and lay decision-makers who seek practical solutions to real-world issues, rather than theoretical dilemmas. We conducted a mixed-method study, based on a survey and interviews with Italian regional lawmakers and local decision-makers in land-use planning. This is an area characterized by high levels of technicality and hence appears challenging to most decision-makers. We discovered that when they easily grasp the meaning and implications of policy documents, their understanding seems more influential in their legislative behavior. Consequently, a key challenge in promoting evidence-informed policy-making seems to translate expert knowledge into accessible languages and codes for laypeople and to present it in practical and concise ways.
