Policy Drift Research Articles

Devolved education policymaking in the UK: a four jurisdictions perspective

This short paper addresses the pace, ebb and flow of policy moves in education in the context of the continuing process of political and administrative devolution in the UK. The concept of policy making is explicitly approached as a process. Given the potentially broad policy arena, the focus is necessarily selective and restricted to policy for schools. The paper identifies areas of policy mobility and immobility drawing on the concepts of ‘policy mortality’ ‘drift’, ‘paralysis’ and ‘reversal’ (Gunter and Courtney, 2023; Béland et al., 2016; Gallagher, 2021). This brief review aims to show how policy possibilities in the four closely-linked jurisdictions are influenced by varying degrees of coordinative capacity, ministerial influence, policy styles and advisory systems, and the power and influence of potential veto players. Critical attention is afforded to the enactment of the principle of subsidiarity in relation to education change. Rather than progressive linear advance, the paper notes three alternate moves: continuing tension between central control and local autonomy in education governance in Wales and Scotland, paralysing policy drift from political division in Northern Ireland, and rapid acceleration of market-oriented change in England.

When incumbents successfully retrench big and popular social policies: policy design matters

AbstractUnder what conditions do incumbents succeed in curtailing programs benefitting large constituencies of low-income voters? We undertake a within-country comparison of four highly popular cash transfer policies in Brazil in the 2010s. Our contribution is threefold. First, we refine the concept of policy drift by distinguishing executive-driven drift (resulting from incumbents’ decisions) from opposition-driven drift (resulting from the veto power of welfare opponents). The latter results from the dispersion of authority; the former is favored by its concentration. Second, we show that executive-driven drift is a successful strategy when programs give incumbents discretion over entitlement and benefits, meaning authority to make unilateral decisions. Third, we argue that executive-driven drift explains retrenchment outcomes better than partisan orientation, size of program’s clientele, and fiscal impacts. Incumbents were more successful in their retrenchment initiatives when concentration of authority in the executive branch allowed them to bypass legislative and judicial veto points.

Examining universal access to acute hospital care in Ireland during the first three months of COVID-19: Lessons from the policy process

Background The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the Irish state to address unprecedented challenges by prioritising public health and equitable access to care. Confronted with the threat of overwhelmed capacity in acute public hospitals, Ireland, initiated a historic Safety Net Agreement (SNA) with 19 private hospitals in March 2020, marking the inaugural establishment of universal single-tier access to hospital care in Ireland. This research aimed to comprehensively examine the policy process underlying the agreement, deriving insights for the implementation of Universal Healthcare. Methods Employing a retrospective qualitative case study approach, the research examined the policy process, including the content, context, actors, and mechanisms involved in the SNA’s implementation. The study used a dataset of 68 policy documents and conducted seven key informant interviews. Results Responding to the pandemic, Ireland classified COVID-19 as a notifiable infectious disease under the 1947 Health Act, exempting affected patients from public hospital charges. The government swiftly implemented health policy measures for universal access through the SNA, recognising challenges in public healthcare capacity and ethical dilemmas within the two-tier hospital system. The agreement's discontinuation was heavily influenced by private hospital consultants, revealing strained relationships and misunderstandings of the private sector. The ongoing policy drift since the pandemic highlights the need for a reassessment of private-sector strategies to alleviate capacity pressures in Ireland's public health system. The SNA also sparked the consideration of a Universal Health Insurance model for Ireland's hospital care. Conclusions Exploring the policy dynamics at the intersection of public and private healthcare, the study imparts lessons for health system reform. The insights have the potential to contribute to long-term goal alignment, robust governance practices, and trust-building mechanisms for effective public-private collaborations in a two-tier health system, offering valuable guidance for future healthcare policy and implementation.

The potential of budgetary discharge for political accountability: Which lessons from the case of Frontex?

AbstractWith the discharge procedure of the 2020 budget of Frontex, the European Parliament played a primary role in addressing the policy drift of the most important decentralised agency operating in the area of freedom, security and justice (AFSJ). This case demonstrates the potential of the discharge tool in steering the performance of decentralised agencies at a time when the mandate of these agencies within the EU executive order is affected by a structural accountability deficit. Confronted with a Rule of Law crisis in the AFSJ, the European Parliament has effectively leveraged the evolving normative framework to imbue the discharge process with significant political oversight functions. In this article, I aim to show that a constitutional dimension of the discharge procedure can be conceptualised, enabling the European Parliament to reaffirm its political account‐holder role as derived from the Treaties and ensure agencies' compliance with their EU‐oriented mandate.

Media Policy, Structural Power, and Political Development at the US State-Corporate Interface

This article illuminates an underappreciated political dimension of capitalism by elaborating media policy as a site for the dynamic interaction of corporate power and the state. Synthesizing Marxian analyses of monopoly capital, American political development (APD) perspectives on public policymaking, and communication studies conceptions of media systems as fields of democratic struggle, I trace the institutional mechanisms that enable corporate media interests to reinforce systemic imperatives and maintain political-economic dominance. I illustrate my argument with examples from the Telecommunications Act of 1996. My analysis sharpens APD’s critical edge by defining path dependency, policy feedback, and policy drift as processes through which capital leverages structural power to fend off political challenges under changing economic, social, and technological conditions. State-sanctioned ownership and control of news outlets, communication platforms, and information networks furnish a unique mechanism for influencing the structural terms of public discourse on all issues, including media policy. This implicates corporate media power in the ongoing US political communication crisis and as a central force in the entrenchment of inegalitarian and undemocratic social relations. Lending greater theoretical coherence and empirical grounding to these material and ideological dynamics historicizes public communication and highlights contingent political openings for radical engagement with media policy.

The end of welfare states as we know them? A multidimensional perspective

AbstractThis article highlights the limitations of unidimensional analyses in the comparative welfare state literature and emphasises the need for a more holistic, multidimensional approach incorporating social spending, welfare state outputs and outcomes. To illustrate the utility of a multidimensional approach, we examine the long‐term welfare state trajectories of Sweden and Germany, prototypical social‐democratic and conservative welfare states, respectively, and compare them against the baseline of Europe's prototypical liberal welfare state, the United Kingdom. The social spending (expenditure) and output (generosity) allowed us to identify significant changes in the Swedish welfare state (i.e., retrenchment). The outcome dimension alerts us to a policy drift in the German Welfare State, as relatively stable public spending and welfare generosity until the first half of the 2000s were nonetheless associated with sharply increased inequality and poverty. Overall, our findings suggest that a holistic, multidimensional approach is necessary to fully understand the complexities of welfare state change and continuity, as focusing solely on one dimension can lead to analytical misjudgments. The sharp rise in inequality and poverty across countries raises doubts about whether policymakers and researchers rely too much on outdated assumptions of normality that fail to meet the welfare state realities of today.

Threats of sovereign debt overhang in the EU, the new fiscal rules and the perils of policy drift

Threats of sovereign debt overhang in the EU, the new fiscal rules and the perils of policy drift

Litigating Policy Drift: Frozen Categories and Thresholds in Court

The combination of rigid policy rules with shifting political, economic, and social environments can produce drift: policy change without formal modification. We know much about the political origins and consequences of drift but little about the legal battles that accelerate or impede it. I identify two distinct forms of policy rigidity that generate drift: interval freezing and categorical freezing. Drawing from recent and historical cases encompassing voting rights, racial discrimination, religious conscience protections, and other hot-button issues, I argue that drifting policies possess several sources of legal resilience: injuries are difficult to identify; judges can be persuaded of the merits of restraint, textual formalism, and bright-line rules; and policy makers plausibly deny any intentional action in pursuit of controversial outcomes. Drift is not an automatic and unremarkable process of continual policy change but rather the outcome of high-stakes political and legal contestation over how rigid policy thresholds and categories should be adapted to meet shifting conditions.

Policy Drift as an Inevitability and an Occasional Success

Policy Drift as an Inevitability and an Occasional Success

Explaining Policy Drift—An Analytical Template Drawn from the World's Most Populous Democracy

Explaining Policy Drift—An Analytical Template Drawn from the World's Most Populous Democracy

Mind the gap! UK employment policy both during and beyond EU membership: from policy layering to policy drift

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the impact of EU employment policy on the UK both during and after EU Membership. To do so, it adopts insights from both historical institutionalism and discursive institutionalism. The argument made is that integration in the area of employment policy resulted in a process of ‘layering’ whereby EU policy ultimately tamed some of the more liberal elements of the UK’s employment model. Such layering, however, failed to generate a more fundamental change within the UK’s path dependency owing to the emergence of a powerful discourse within British politics. This discourse portrayed EU legislation as a threat to the UK’s ability to generate growth and jobs. As an ‘independent’ country, however, overtime UK employment policy is likely to experience policy drift from the EU, albeit the extent of such remains unclear.

Monetary Policy and Bond Prices with Drifting Equilibrium Rates

AbstractWe study the drift and cyclical components in U.S. Treasury bonds. We find that bond yields are drifting because they reflect the drift in monetary policy rates. Empirically, modeling the monetary policy drift using demographics and productivity trends, plus long-term inflation expectations, leads to cyclical deviations of bond prices from their drift that predict bond returns in- and out-of-sample. These bond cycles can be interpreted as term premia or/and temporary deviations from rational expectations in a behavioral framework. Through the lens of our model, we detect a significant role of the latter in determining the cyclical properties of yields with short maturities.

Panacea or Pandora's Box? An institutional analysis of the contested long-term rental apartments development in China

The dramatic growth of long-term rental apartments (LRAs) in China's megacities since 2015, spurred by a series of state policies encouraging the development of the private rental sector (PRS), has culminated in many LRA firms encountering capital chain rupture and even going bankrupt within a short period. As a result, thousands of tenants were rendered homeless and many property owners were left unpaid. The present study analyses the boom and bust of LRA development in China under housing financialisation and explores the relationship between the transformative institutions – characterised by policy deregulation/re-regulation – and market performance stimulated by capital speculation. The findings of this study reveal the institutional changes in China's PRS to have been closely linked to the socio-economic changes emanated from endogenous opportunism and exogenous shocks. Specifically, the policy drift in the PRS was closely associated with deregulation and capital speculation, while policy layering was employed to institutionalise, regulate and legalise the PRS, thus mitigating the housing shortage crisis and ensuring the retention of social stability. Adapting to the volatile politico-economic circumstances as a form of punctuated equilibrium, policies governing the PRS require constant assessment and reflection to safeguard people's basic housing rights.

From Lisbon to Copenhagen, London, Helsinki and Edinburgh - a study of vocational education and training (VET) policy making in four European countries (Denmark, England, Finland and Scotland)

ABSTRACT In this study I explored the complex relationships developed during vocational education and training (VET) policy making by the European Union (EU), three member states (Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom) and a region, Scotland, between 2000 and 2019. Discourse and thematic analyses of EU and national VET policy documents were used to compare the distinctive nature of VET policy making in the four countries. Illustrative thematic case studies were then compared with selected policy change theories of convergence, Europeanisation, Europeification and policy drift. Using a critical realism framework to support analyses of different layers of discourse, it was found that there was no consistent understanding of the purpose of VET between the EU and its member states, or, indeed, within the nations of the UK. The purpose of VET policy was varyingly perceived as either social, economic, educational or political between 2000 and 2019. This led me to the conceptualisation of a VET policy making gyre, developed as an alternative to the policy making cycle. The gyre was found to represent more fully the ebb and flow of aspects of policy purposes and goals over time as well as the dynamics of structure and agent relationships in policy formulation.

Dealing with drift: Comparing social care reform in the four nations of the UK

AbstractReform of social care for older and disabled people has become a pressing political issue, given demographic change and shifting public expectations. In the UK, social insurance for long‐term care wasn't included in the post‐war welfare state and remains unfinished business. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with policy stakeholders and analysis of policy documents, the concept of policy drift is used here to explain the incomplete and variable progress on social care funding reform in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each nation has jurisdiction over its own care system and each has taken a different path towards introducing a form of risk pooling for social care. Of the factors which are known to create policy drift (e.g., veto players, complexity, agenda overload), Scotland has the least of these and England the most. This is consistent with the reform trajectories in which Scotland has gone furthest on care funding reform, introducing free personal care in 2002, whereas England has lagged behind the others and is only now introducing reform. The article contributes to the drift literature by exposing its comparative element: polities define their progress or justify their delays in reference to their neighbours.

The Supreme Court as an Agent of Policy Drift: The Case of the NLRA

Scholars have made important advances in explaining policy drift, uncovering the prevalence of drift in veto-riddled systems, the importance of bureaucratic discretion and statutory ambiguity in combatting drift, and its feedback effects. Despite research demonstrating the potential for judicial action to alleviate drift, we know little about the potential for the Supreme Court to facilitate policy drift. I argue that the Supreme Court may operate as a powerful agent of drift by stripping statutes of ambiguity, foreclosing policy innovation in institutions outside of Congress, and curtailing bureaucratic discretion and authority. To demonstrate these mechanisms, I show how in the case of federal labor law, the Court’s jurisprudence addressing the right to strike, federal preemption, and National Labor Relations Board authority played a central role in gradually undoing the efficacy of The National Labor Relations Act. This inquiry has important implications for understanding public policy, judicial power, the development of American labor law, and American democracy.

Policy drift in ideologically heterogeneous governments: tax policy in Latin America

Abstract The relation between taxation and partisanship is a widely studied topic in Political Science. However, previous works have provided conflicting findings without clarifying which parties are most prone to progressive taxation. These studies also did not consider one distinctive feature of Latin American politics: coalition governments. Using the level of direct tax collection as a proxy for progressive taxation and panel data of Latin American countries since 1990, we investigate how progressive taxes vary across a scale of ideology observed in the executive branch along with the ideological heterogeneity of its coalition. The results show that ideologically heterogeneous governments present a policy drift, as the policies being enacted depart from parties’ original preferences. Homogeneous left-wing governments collect more direct taxes than ideologically heterogeneous coalitions led by governments with the same ideology. The same dynamic is observed with homogeneous right-wing governments, which collect more indirect taxes in ideologically homogeneous coalitions. These results create new paths of research highlighting the need to include the government’s composition in the analysis to understand policy design and the need to unravel the mechanism through which policy drift occurs in ideologically heterogeneous governments.

Diffusion of Complex Governance Arrangements: State Approaches to Addressing Intimate Partner Violence

AbstractIn the 1970s, many viewed domestic violence as a private concern. Since then, every state has adopted a domestic violence coalition to address intimate partner violence (IPV) through government intervention. States vary, however, in the structure of the coalitions, participation in federal programs, and the comprehensiveness of IPV services offered. Using the theoretical lenses of policy diffusion and policy drift, this study assesses the development of IPV coalitions from 1976 to 2018, paying particular attention to institutional structures, intergovernmental resources, and strategic service priorities. We find evidence of policy drift and multidirectional policy diffusion in state IPV institutional structures, service delivery, federal program participation, and strategic priorities of these activities. Federal grant programs increase the likelihood of program emulation among states and may encourage innovation within existing institutional and policy structures for the development of comprehensive services and a preventive approach to IPV that best serve vulnerable groups.

Different, Yet the Same: Three Decades of Family Policy Change in Hungary, Lithuania and Romania

The article analyses over-time changes in family transfers in Hungary, Lithuania and Romania from 1990-2018 to seek evidence of similarity in the ethos of policy adaptation. Informed by recent scholarship signalling growing disparities in social entitlements along socio-economic lines in Hungary and Romania, the analysis assesses whether three decades of change in family transfers in three different policy contexts might exhibit the selective, pro-wealthy ethos of social policy transformation described. Using data from an original dataset drawing on exhaustive social legislation pertaining to family allowances, family tax breaks and paid parental leave-related transfers, the article shows that, for most of the last three decades, institutional dualisms in the protection of families with dependent children have grown. Policy drift undercuts the rights of the neediest and policy layering leads to programme expansion targeting dual-earner, high-income families especially. This trend has intensified over the last fifteen years and is most evident in paid leave schemes.

How does the composition of the European Parliament shape its role in EU decision-making?

ABSTRACT If the European Parliament (EP) is responsive to electoral outcomes, then the positions it takes during negotiations on policy issues with other EU institutions will reflect its ideological composition. However, the dominance of a grand coalition of the centrist party groups may limit the extent to which changes in the composition of the EP affect the policy positions that it adopts. The EP may also suffer from an integrationist bias, as further integration enhances its power. This paper tests whether the positions taken by the EP in legislative negotiations reflect its ideological composition, drawing on data covering the period 1999–2019. The findings indicate that the policy positions adopted by the EP more closely reflect the ideological profile of the grand coalition than the median MEP. While the EP generally adopts pro-integration positions, this is in line with its ideological composition; there is no evidence of systematic policy drift in this direction.