When policy entrepreneurs fail: Explaining the failure of long‐term care reforms in Poland

Abstract

AbstractThis article explains the failure of two long‐term care (LTC) reforms attempted between 2005 and 2019 in Poland, and driven by policy entrepreneurs—individuals with a personal understanding of the challenges faced by LTC and determined to initiate policy change in the domain. The article inductively identifies the ‘outsider policy entrepreneur’ mechanism of policy reform. LTC in Poland is a negative case (or breakdown) of this mechanism, which occurs when a policy entrepreneur has enough political influence to initiate a formal reform proposal, but not enough to convince decision‐makers to adopt it. The article combines an examination of the role of policy entrepreneurs in social policy change with an analysis of their interactions with domestic and foreign epistemic communities. Through showing how ‘foreign’ policy models are used by policy entrepreneurs to pursue domestic reform, the study contributes to the literature on transnational policy diffusion/transfer. The analysis is based on document analysis and 16 semi‐directed expert interviews, which were used to process trace the explained outcome (failed reforms). The article concludes that the mechanism failures were due to the fact that involved policy entrepreneurs did not convince decision‐makers of the need to reform LTC. Specifically, the contribution identifies two features of the political context in illiberal post‐transition polities that interrupt the persuasion efforts of outsider policy entrepreneurs—the impossibility of inter‐partisan cooperation and continuity, and the declining role of Western policy models as catalysts for change.