Better understanding sectorial and national variations and patterns /styles in tool use including links to national traditions in administration and implementation
Sectoral variation is one of the most evident problems in policy instrument research which current research has described but failed to address theoretically or analytically. Although we have a deep knowledge of the list of substantial and procedural policy instruments in different fields, especially in environmental, climate change and innovation policy as well in social and education policy (Hannaway and Woodroffe 2003; Jensen, Arndt and Lee 2018; Capano et al 2019). Thus while much is known about instruments in different policy sectors, at the same time, this knowledge is either very descriptive or so specialized on a specific policy field that the empirical richness does not lead to theoretical generalization.
The key point which has not been systematically addressed has to do with the persistence of specific patterns of instrument preferences and adoptions either by sector or jurisdictionally, or both. The insights of Freeman (1985) concerning sectoral policy styles and patterns of instrument deployment have been under-investigated. Are there can be different types of policy instruments adopted in different policies according to the characteristics of the policy issues? Can we expect to, for example, have more incentive-driven or cooperative-based instruments in environmental policy (Bouwma et al. 2015) than in education policy (Hannaway and Woodroffe 2003)?
Similarly, we do not know much about why and how national variations develop in a comparative perspective and thus whether and how these variations are due to national policy styles, national administrative traditions, or to the characteristics of bureaucracy. We know that policy styles exist and that national traditions in administration and implementation are crucial. There is, in fact, a stimulating empirical literature showing that there are national policy styles of formulation (Howlett and Tosun 2018) and of implementation (Tosun and Treib 2018), and that these different ways of designing and implementing policies must be contextualized into the related types of politico-administrative regimes (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). In addition, these theoretical lenses and empirical evidence only design the borders of the contexts in which policy instruments are selected over time. We know that there are particular styles and politico-administrative traditions and assume that policy instruments are handled in different ways accordingly. There is also some empirical evidence that these styles tend to become highly institutionalized and persist over time.
However, there is no significant empirical research on the instrument-based dimensions of national styles and politico-administrative regimes, although it is intuitive that these styles should influence the way instruments are designed and then implemented. Here, the most intuitive hypothesis is that the institutionalization of policy/implementation styles as well as the characteristics of politico-administrative regimes should create permanent effects and path dependency in terms of instrument adoption. However, we also know that new instruments have also been adopted in countries where they could be considered novel (as a consequence, for example, of the diffusion of New Public Management, New Environmental Tools, and Evaluation) as different methods of implementation have also been introduced.
Thus, there are many unanswered empirical questions about the relationships between policy styles and politico-administrative regimes. All in all, this means that “comparative policy instruments research” is quite undeveloped and consequently there is often a mismatch between empiricism and conceptualization and between the descriptive nature of instruments and the typologies offered by the literature, as well an under-theorization of the causes of the variations between sectors.