IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v115y2021i3p931-947_15.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Studying Policy Design Quality in Comparative Perspective

Author

Listed:
  • FERNÁNDEZ-I-MARÍN, XAVIER
  • KNILL, CHRISTOPH
  • STEINEBACH, YVES

Abstract

This article is a first attempt to systematically examine policy design and its influence on policy effectiveness in a comparative perspective. We begin by providing a novel concept and measure of policy design. Our Average Instrument Diversity (AID) index captures whether governments tend to reuse the same policy instruments and instrument combinations or produce policy solutions that are carefully tailored to the policy problem at hand. Second, we demonstrate that our AID index is a valid and reliable measure of policy design quality with a strong explanatory power for the outcome variables tested. Analyzing the composition of environmental policy portfolios in 21 OECD countries, we show that higher levels of AID are positively associated with a country’s policy effectiveness in environmental matters. Based on this finding, we analyze, in a third step, the factors that lead countries to adopt more or less diverse policy portfolios. We find that the policy design quality is significantly improved when policy makers are not bound by high institutional constraints and, more importantly, are backed by well-equipped bureaucracies.

Suggested Citation

  • Fernández-I-Marín, Xavier & Knill, Christoph & Steinebach, Yves, 2021. "Studying Policy Design Quality in Comparative Perspective," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 115(3), pages 931-947, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:115:y:2021:i:3:p:931-947_15
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055421000186/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cunial, Santiago, 2024. "Policy legacies and energy transitions: Greening policies under sectoral reforms in Argentina and Chile," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 188(C).
    2. Réka Juhász & Nathan Lane, 2024. "The Political Economy of Industrial Policy," CESifo Working Paper Series 11143, CESifo.
    3. Christina Steinbacher, 2024. "The pursuit of welfare efficiency: when institutional structures turn ‘less’ into ‘more’," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 57(2), pages 353-378, June.
    4. Roth, Florian & Wittmann, Florian & Hufnagl, Miriam & Lindner, Ralf, 2022. "Putting mission-oriented innovation policies to work: A case study of the German high-tech strategy 2025," Discussion Papers "Innovation Systems and Policy Analysis" 75, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:115:y:2021:i:3:p:931-947_15. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.