Previous scholarship has shown that experience with public policies can affect citizens’ willingness to participate in politics. However, few studies have examined whether the effect of experience with policy is moderated by existing policy environments. We focus on the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and examine how it affects foreign-born Latinos’ political orientation and behavior. We find a relationship between enrollment in DACA and political orientation and that the effect on participation is moderated by the intensity of enforcement in an immigrant’s county of residence.

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly embracing systems approaches to deal with the complexity of public service delivery and policy evaluation. However, there is little agreement on what exactly constitutes a systems approach, conceptually or methodologically. We review and critically synthesize systems literature from the fields of health, education, and infrastructure. We argue that the common theoretical core of systems approaches is the idea that multi-dimensional complementarities between a policy and other aspects of the policy context are the first-order problem of policy design and evaluation. We distinguish between macro-systems approaches, which focus on the collective coherence of a set of policies or institutions, and micro-systems approaches, which focus on how a single policy interacts with the context in which it operates. We develop a typology of micro-systems approaches and discuss their relationship to standard impact evaluation methods as well as to work in external validity, implementation science, and complexity theory.

How do cultural biases, trust in government, and perceptions of risk and protective actions influence compliance with regulation of COVID-19? Analyzing Chinese (n = 646) and American public opinion samples (n = 1,325) from spring 2020, we use Grid–Group Cultural Theory and the Protective Action Decision Model to specify, respectively, cultural influences on public risk perceptions and decision-making regarding protective actions. We find that cultural biases mostly affect protective actions indirectly through public perceptions. Regardless of country, hierarchical cultural biases increase protective behaviors via positive perceptions of protective actions. However, other indirect effects of cultural bias via public perceptions vary across both protective actions and countries. Moreover, trust in government only mediates the effect of cultural bias in China and risk perception only mediates the effect of cultural bias in the United States. Our findings suggest that regulators in both countries should craft regulations that are congenial to culturally diverse populations.

Why do citizens support or reject climate change mitigation policies? This is not an easy choice: citizens need to support the government in making these decisions, accept potentially radical behavior change, and have altruism across borders and for future generations. A substantial literature argues that political trust facilitates citizen support for these complex policy decisions by mitigating the cost and uncertainty that policies impose on individuals and buttressing support for government intervention. We test whether this is the case with a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in Germany in which we vary fundamental aspects of policy design that are related to the cost, uncertainty, and implementation of climate change policies. Contrary to strong theoretical expectations and previous work, we find no difference between those with low and high trust on their support for different policy attributes, assuaging the concern that low and declining trust inhibits climate policymaking.

Unilateral presidential action is thought to be limited by the ability of successors to easily reverse past decisions. Yet, most executive actions are never formally revoked. We argue that because of presidents’ unique position as chief executive, some actions create outcomes that make policy reversal more difficult or even infeasible. We develop a novel measure of policies with more immutable consequences and analyze the revocation of executive orders issued between 1937 and 2021. We find the degree of outcome immutability reduces the influence of political conditions on policy revocation. We further examine these dynamics in three cases in which presidents have substantial discretion – diplomacy, non-combatant detention, and police militarization. Scholarship has long highlighted the president’s first-mover status relative to other institutional actors as a key source of their power. Collectively, our argument and evidence demonstrate this applies to their relationship with successors.

This study analyzes the link between egalitarian ideals and the rise in party polarization in Congress. To demonstrate how philosophical differences over conceptions of fairness, equality, and justice help explain the recent growth in partisanship over the past few decades, I argue one overlooked explanatory factor which assists in capturing this ideological rift is noncontributory welfare spending. Recovering annual ideal point estimates between 1947 and 2018 that are comparable with annual federal spending, I use multivariate time series models and find convincing evidence which suggests welfare outlays have a strong short- and long-run effect on polarization. Moreover, analysis of the roll call record also shows when ideal point estimates are recovered by specific policy area, lawmakers exhibit higher levels of ideological separation on welfare compared to, among others, policies such as defense and transportation. Robustness checks confirm these findings also hold even when controlling for income inequality.

Through the pooling and exchange of resources such as expertise and knowledge between network participants, European Administrative Networks (EANs) are expected to play a significant role in enhancing policy learning. Yet, scarce empirical evidence has been presented concerning the learning process taking place within EANs. This paper addresses this gap through the analysis of the Network of the Heads of European Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA Network). Based on a unique survey dataset, social network analysis and exponential random graph models are used to trace the interaction patterns within the network and test which factors shape them. The analysis highlights the relevance of national political factors – i.e. the preferences of national governments and ministries – in shaping the learning processes taking place in the EPA Network. While the network is an important venue for disseminating knowledge between directly and indirectly connected actors, learning processes are mainly limited to like-minded peers.

In contrast to other studies on policy entrepreneurship that address frontline officials’ roles in formal legislative procedures, this case study focuses on how frontline officials promote policy innovation within inconspicuous administrative routines. Because frontline officials have no legislative power, they must overcome officialism by using bureaucratic skills and seeking consensus among multiple stakeholders. “Citizen agents” and “state agents” are both necessary roles. This case provides administrative details on how a deadlocked policy was gradually enlivened within undramatic administrative routines. The findings bridge the legislative–administrative gap and improve the understanding of the long-term effects of frontline administrative activities on policy innovations.

The conventional policy analyses with a path-dependent framework are featured by sequential causation composed of analytically two distinct phases: path production that occurs through a significant policy change at critical junctures and the subsequent path reproduction. This paper explores one policy area where the two-phase framework falls short in explaining path-making and maintenance – college education expansion in Korea. We argue that the shortcomings of the two-phase model can potentially be overcome by incorporating the underlying rule of the countries into the model. We identify the underlying rule relying on Esping-Andersen’s welfare regimes to highlight the political underpinnings of the countries. We show that the underlying liberal rule is a fundamental causal force behind the production and reproduction of college education expansion in Korea, using qualitative comparative analysis. Our framework based on the underlying rule provides a richer understanding of path dependency.