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.