Autonomy of policy instrument attitudes: concept, theory and evidence

Several of the most respected policy scholars, including H. Simon, J. W. Kingdon, G. Peters and M. Howlett, have observed a long time ago that decision makers often form their views on policy solutions irrespectively of concrete policy issues, and that their views on policy means often “chase problems.” This proposition labeled in this article as “autonomy of policy instrument attitudes” (APIA) claims that individuals have stable attitudes toward policy instruments that are relatively independent of their perspectives on given policy problems and policy goals. Despite its growing popularity, the APIA literature is fragmented and lacks coherent theoretical framework and review of available empirical evidence. First, APIA is conceptualized in terms of attitudes and differentiated from similar concepts. Second, the core theoretical literature on APIA is summarized with emphasis on its possible explanations. Four distinct individual-level mechanism of APIA is then distinguished: beliefs-based, values-based, heuristics-based and affect-based. The paper concludes with an overview of available empirical evidence and with some recommendations for further research.