Special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis
Marleen Easton, Jennifer Yarnold, Valerie Vervaenen, Jasper De Paepe & Brian Head
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the critical role of expert advice in shaping policy responses globally. Beyond health implications, these measures significantly impacted education, economy, law, and various societal aspects. Understanding how expertise was harnessed and adapted during the crisis provides valuable insights for improving policy advisory systems to effectively respond to future challenges. Our research study, just published in Policy & Politics delves into the dynamics of COVID-19 policy advisory systems in Belgium and Australia, drawing on interviews with 34 experts involved during the initial two years of the crisis.
Policy Advisory Systems in Action: In both Belgium and Australia, intergovernmental forums played a key role in aligning national and regional interests within policy advisory systems advising on responses to COVID-19. While Belgium experienced more rapid changes and adjustments in expert advisers, Australia maintained a relatively stable system with occasional additions of non-health sub-groups. The diversity of expert opinions was more pronounced in Belgium, on contrast with Australia where experts tended to be more cautious in expressing critical perspectives publicly.
Policy Learning and Expert Advice: As the pandemic unfolded, policy learning evolved, necessarily drawing on a broader range of expertise beyond the initial health-centric focus. Institutional contexts shaped the provision of expert advice, influencing the actions of policy advisors and decision-makers. Our study sheds light on the evolving priorities within advisory bodies, the relationships between different types of experts and policymakers, and the challenges of communicating scientific knowledge amid uncertainty and stress.
Our recent article published in Policy & Politics sets out its research context by building upon the assumptions of Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), which state thatpolicymaking in democratic countries tends to follow patterns of long periods of policy stability interrupted by rapid large scale policy shifts, or ‘punctuations’. PET explains this pattern of policymaking as arising from the friction built into political systems and the cognitive limitations of decisionmakers. Friction is necessarily built into democratic political systems to prevent the arbitrary exercise of political authority and, when combined with the cognitive limitations of decision makers, policymaking favours the status quo. Large-scale policy shifts tend to occur sparingly and only after a build-up of political pressure for change.
More recently, punctuated policymaking has been observed to exist in a few autocratic countries with one important distinction—policymaking features more large-scale shifts in autocracies compared to more open systems of government. This is attributable to the limitations in the flow of information through formal and informal mechanisms—press censorship and restrictions on the exercise of civil liberties, particularly expressions of opposition—found in autocratic regimes.
Policymakers frequently introduce policies originating in other countries, even when they are initially sceptical that they will work in their own country. Researchers have called this phenomenon ‘policy transfer’ and have sought to explain why and how it happens. However, frequently it is hard to distinguish why policymakers in one country adopt a foreign-inspired model: Is it because the policy is imposed by a powerful country or an international organization as part of a trade deal or membership negotiations? Or do policymakers imitate other countries’ policies voluntarily but rather automatically, without reflecting on whether it is appropriate for them? Alternatively, do they learn from other countries, observing how they tackle similar problems and borrowing from successful examples?
DORA, a public declaration launched in 2013 with now over 23,000 signatories worldwide, aims to radically revise the current methods of research assessment. It speaks of an urgent need to improve the ways in which research is currently evaluated by moving beyond the monopoly of the Impact Factor to a more diverse and inclusive set of measures.
At Policy & Politics, we recognise this need very well. So many in our community tell us how their professional lives are dominated by the Impact Factors of journals: from winning funding awards, to getting jobs and promotions. Indeed, many of our authors tell us that’s their main driver for publishing with us. We want to be part of the journey to change this, recognising the value of taking a broader view of how we’re evaluating research quality. But we can’t do it single-handedly. So we stand alongside those in our community in seeking to diversify the ways in which research is evaluated.
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a major social crisis, putting people out of work and unable to satisfy primary needs such as affording food. In response, Italy experimented with a programme of emergency food stamps funded by the national government and delivered by municipalities—a form of assistance never experimented with before in the country. Programme implementation followed the peaks of the pandemic waves; it started with the first lockdown in March 2020, was terminated in the summer when COVID-19 cases approached zero, but was restarted in late autumn when the pandemic struck back. The repetition of the programme over a short time and with the same budget offers a unique opportunity to investigate inter-crisis learning, i.e. if and how lessons from the first wave of implementation contributed to reforms in the second delivery. Did administrations learn from the first food stamp delivery and redesign the second round accordingly? These research questions underpin our recent article published in Policy & Politics entitled Policy Learning in a crisis: Lessons learned from the Italian Food Stamp Programme.
Over recent years and with a rising number of crises and complex policy issues, policymakers are increasingly engaging in systematic and continuous policy learning. These policy learning processes aim at reaching better understandings of policy issues and their contexts. One of the aims of this learning is to develop better ways of solving societal challenges (through forms of technical learning) or consolidating and cultivating political power (through political learning). In other words, policymakers face problems that are difficult to solve, so they seek out knowledge and information from different sources in order to learn how to effectively solve these problems.
With its longstanding tradition, policy learning research has illuminated several aspects, mainly focused on explaining how policy actors learn, what lessons they come out with, and the role that learning processes play in policymaking. During crises, policy learning can contribute to effective crisis responses. However, it can also cause confusion or induce policy failure.
In spite of the best efforts of government, sometimes policies do not work as designed. As scholars of the policy process and citizens in a representative democracy, our normative expectation is that government should learn when policies do not work to improve outcomes for communities. This is especially true in the wake of a natural disaster. Disasters can serve as an opportunity for governments to engage in policy learning by updating beliefs about policies and learning lessons about policy tools, instruments, and politics. Often, disasters can reveal physical and social vulnerabilities and gaps in preparedness that unevenly distribute the risk of damage within a community. In our recent article in Policy & Politics , we investigate which conditions constrain or promote policy learning. Understanding these conditions is of critical importance in gaining a better understanding of why some governments learn to improve policies after a disaster and some do not.
I conducted a meta-review of policy diffusion studies that focus on the American states. By casting a wide net using Google Scholar and Web of Science, I identified all (to my knowledge) studies published between 1990 and 2018 that referred to “policy diffusion” and “berry and berry.” Berry and Berry are important because their 1990 study of state lotteries introduced the unified model of policy diffusion. Essentially, this model combined the internal characteristics of states with influences external to the states to explain policy adoption. Over time, scholars also recognized that the attributes of the policy innovations themselves condition how far and how quickly they spread. Continue reading →
This quarter’s highlights collection focusses on the popular theme of policy diffusion, bringing new analyses offering fresh perspectives on this extensive area of scholarship.
In our first featured article on policy diffusion, Daniel Mallinson continues his efforts in offering the most comprehensive analysis to date on how policy innovation diffuses across American states. Although hundreds of articles have tackled the fundamental question of why innovative policies spread, none has fully grappled with the scope of their disparate results.
To fill that gap, this article presents a state-of-the-art systematic review and meta-analysis of how policy innovation flows from US state to US state and the average effects of commonly used variables in the study of policy diffusion. In doing so, it highlights important biases in the research and makes recommendations for addressing those biases and increasing international collaboration on policy innovation research and results. Continue reading →
Daniel J. Mallinson
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 