Three streams of research address these questions.
What might be termed the “accountability” approach starts from the premise that decision makers have as their primary goal maintaining their political influence, for example, by retaining office. Policy failure exposes decision makers to public criticism and demands more effective action; failing to act on such demands may weaken decision makers’ influence. This gives them strong incentives to alter policy in ways that will be more effective in the future. One strand of work in this tradition examines how some political institutions more effectively insulate decision makers from the political consequences of policy failure (Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, & Morrow, 2003).
Another analyzes how institutional arrangements that diffuse authority over policy raise the bar for advocates of change, requiring them to convince many political and bureaucratic leaders of the merits of their position (Checkel, 1997). A third shows why decision makers may reject a convincing new policy proposal because they lack the institutional capacity to implement its prescriptions (Ikenberry, 1988).
The insight that decision makers must produce some level of policy success to retain office and influence is important.
Decision makers should respond to failure by searching for and implementing new policies. But this does not shed much light on which alternative policy they will select. The implicit conclusion is that decision makers will select the alternative policy they believe will be most successful in the future. But this begs the question of how decision makers decide which alternative will succeed. If decision makers had perfect information about the relationship between policies and outcomes, policy failure would never occur as they would always select the most successful policy. Below, I discuss how the experience of failure itself influences decision makers’ estimates of the viability of alternatives in important ways.
Research on ideas and public policy has devoted considerable attention to analyzing how failure influences subsequent policy choices. This work takes seriously the point that decision makers often face great uncertainty about the available policy options and the outcomes associated with each. Policy ideas are important because they identify alternatives, provide explanations about the expected effects of such policies, and supply political criteria for selecting among them. Policy ideas are useful to decision makers, especially those that are not expert in the policy area and whose time and resources are stretched across many issues, because they identify coherent solutions to 492
Comparative Political Studies pressing policy problems.
Policy failure is an important reason why decision makers seek out and evaluate new policy ideas. Decision makers are never certain about the true relationships between the policy options available to them and the outcomes each will produce. Implementing a policy provides concrete evidence about its effects. Negative effects undermine decision makers’ confidence in their estimates of the relationship between actions and outcomes and create pressure for decision makers to consider alternative policy ideas.
More specifically, it is unexpected policy failure that influences the likelihood of change. As Legro puts it, “Ideational prescriptions carry a set of social expectations of what should or should not result from group action. When expectations of what should happen are not matched by the consequences of experienced events, there is pressure for collective reflection and reassessment”(Legro, 2000, pp. 424-425). In sum, unanticipated policy failure with dramatically negative consequences provides decision makers with self-interested reasons to consider alternative ideas previously marginalized in policy
debates.
There is empirical support across a wide array of issue areas that failure can prompt dramatic changes in ideas and policy. Many works on foreign policy explore this connection. Policy failure figures prominently in Jervis’s psychological model of policy learning (Jervis, 1976, pp. 275-279). Levy’s (1994) review of the literature of learning and foreign policy accords a key role to policy failure, often in combination with other variables, in prompting change.
Checkel (1997) shows how the failure of many of the Soviet Union’s foreign and domestic policies led Mikhail Gorbachev to consider seriously and then attempt to implement a wide array of alternatives grouped under the term “new thinking.”
1 Reiter (1996) argues that the success or failure of a state’s choice between alliance and neutrality in one period has a decisive impact on alliance policy in subsequent periods.
McNamara (1998) shows how the failure of monetary and fiscal expansion in Western Europe in the 1970s to produce acceptable economic outcomes led to the diffusion of new policy ideas that supported tightening monetary policy, granting independence to national central banks, and cooperating more closely to stabilize exchange rates in the 1980s. Others working on the role of ideas in domestic policy reach similar conclusions. Hall (1993) shows that policy failure led to a fundamental rethinking of the goals and tools of macroeconomic policy in Britain during the 1970s. Heclo’s influential study of the development of the welfare state in Walsh / British Security Policy after the Cold War 493
Britain and Sweden in the 20th century demonstrates that decision makers in each country responded to negative national experiences when developing new policies (Heclo, 1974, especially pp. 315-318). In his study of the diffusion of policies across polities, Rose (1993, pp. 50-76) attaches much importance to how failure in one polity leads its decision makers to investigate the
policies pursued in other polities.
But this work on ideas and policy leaves two questions unanswered. First, why does failure sometimes not cause changes in policy? In some cases, policy after failure drifts in the sense that it lacks coherent intellectual links between policy tools and desired outcomes. This drift can take the form of continuing to implement failed policies or altering the selection and settings of policy tools in cosmetic or contradictory ways that do not address the sources of failure.
For example, every informed observer has concluded that the U.S. health care system fails to achieve important objectives, but significant policy change in this area has proven impossible to achieve despite the
fact that countless serious reform proposals have circulated for years. Second, assuming that failure leads decision makers to abandon current policy,which alternative policies will they find most attractive? Many of the empirical studies of policy failure cited earlier do not explain why decision makers are persuaded to adopt one rival policy rather than another after experiencing failure and often assume (e.g., Legro, 2000) or select cases in which only a single rival policy is considered seriously.
A third strand of work that addresses the links between policy failure and change grows out of the “garbage-can approach” to decision making (Cohen,March, & Olsen, 1972), which has been applied to public policy in important works by Kingdon (1995) and Zaharaides (2003). In Kingdon’s influential formulation, the public policy agenda is set by the intersection of three independent “streams”: the problem stream, which identifies issues where extant policy is seen as deficient; the policy stream, which identifies specific solutions to problems; and the political stream, which includes the larger political forces and coalitions operating within the polity. Issues or problems dominate the agenda when these three streams interact to form a policy window,an “opportunity for advocates of proposals to push their pet solutions, or to push attention to their special problems” (Kingdon, 1995, p. 165). Such “policy entrepreneurs” seek openings in the political stream to call attention to failure in the problem stream and to push their preferred solutions in the policy stream.
This approach is important and influential because it acknowledges that the policy agenda is set and policy choices are made by forces beyond the control of any one political actor or set of political actors. Yet it has proved difficult to use the garbage-can approach to generate clear expectations about decision making.
It is not apparent if this is the deliberate conclusion of the theory’s formulators. Some work in this tradition, particularly the early work of Cohen et al. (1972), seems intent on emphasizing the role of chance in determining how the agenda is set and decisions are made. March and Olsen (1986) themselves later described the approach as a metaphor rather than a theory that makes clear predictions about the content of the policy agenda or of policy choices.
Much subsequent work, as well the influential computer simulation in Cohen et al., would seem to imply that the garbage-can model can in fact be used to generate expectations about outcomes under various conditions. But as one influential review concludes, such formulation still “lacks the rigor, discipline, and analytic power needed for genuine progress”(Bendor, Moe, & Shotts, 2001, p. 169). An additional difficulty with this approach is how it conceptualizes the role of solutions. Solutions are advocated by policy entrepreneurs, and their degree of success in advocating solutions depends on their “time, energy, reputation, money” (Kingdon, 1995, p. 179).
Little attention is given to how the actual content of a solution, the concrete policy goals and tools that it identifies, makes it more or less appealing to decision makers. Instead, the influence of a solution depends solely on the political and lobbying skills of its advocates.
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