This article addresses whether responses to COVID-19 created opportunities for future policy change. We explore this matter by presenting a framework rooted in political economy and the literature on pandemics. We argue that the opportunities created by emergency responses are context-specific and that narratives, policy tools, and pro-equity state actors are variables that mediate emergency responses and future opportunities. We ground our analytical contribution on the emergency cash transfers deployed during 2020 following the COVID-19 outbreak in two contrasting Central American countries, Costa Rica and Guatemala. The paper promotes further policy discussion on the opportunities for progressive change in unequal contexts.

Research on policy shifts has found that repositioning can be costly as it affects candidates’ perceived honesty, reliability, and competence. It remains unclear, however, whether a politician’s gender affects perceptions of repositioning. Research on gender stereotypes has found that while male politicians are viewed as more competent, decisive, and displaying strong leadership, female politicians are believed to be more honest. Applying expectancy-violation theory, I test the hypothesis that the reputational cost of repositioning is more pronounced for female politicians in a preregistered survey experiment fielded on a large convenience sample in Flanders, Belgium (n = 6,957). I find that while frequent repositioning is evaluated negatively, the negative effect of repositioning is not more pronounced for female candidates than for male candidates on most outcome measures.

State Medical Boards (SMBs) can take severe disciplinary actions (e.g., license revocation or suspension) against physicians who commit egregious wrongdoing in order to protect the public. However, there is noteworthy variability in the extent to which SMBs impose severe disciplinary action. In this manuscript, we present and synthesize a subset of 11 recommendations based on findings from our team’s larger consensus-building project that identified a list of 56 policies and legal provisions SMBs can use to better protect patients from egregious wrongdoing by physicians.

Policy change is not an instantaneous or linear process. In fact, change includes several mechanisms working in tandem and even against one another. This article examines the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on homelessness policy in Canada. In a sector that is already plagued with emergency responses – rather than long-term solutions – the pandemic has initiated a critical juncture where policy change is possible, but not guaranteed. Although the existing failures to alleviate homelessness in Canada make policy failings even more obvious, aspects of the pre-existing Canadian response to homelessness negate change. The pandemic, however, has led to temporary solutions and created a setting where long-term change is possible. Using over 150 primary sources, this article analyses mechanisms of change and path dependence in the pandemic response to homelessness. The presence of such mechanisms is tested in three major Canadian cities.

Coronaviruses have emerged as a potential disruptive force in policymaking. Using a comparative case study method, we examine two social policy responses in Jakarta, Indonesia: the Social Safety Nets (SSN) programme and the health policy. Such examples demonstrate an aggressive change in policy direction from means-tested systems and government-centred approaches to a total relaxation of conditions with the involvement of non-state actors in the provision of services. Our study analyses the ideational dimensions of the policy process that produces abrupt and radical change. From our analysis, the policy change may be explained by the emergence of a new policy paradigm created through the emulation-contextual process – an alternative model of policy learning. The theoretical implication of our research is that policy response in this study cannot be viewed in a completely path-dependent process. Instead, we propose a ‘path-creation accelerator,’ which represents an infrequent instance of policy change.

Studies of multi-level blame avoidance strategies generally assume that (1) governments prefer to shift responsibility to other levels and (2) an unclear distribution of formal responsibilities complicates blame allocation to a single actor. Considering the temporal location of such strategies – in anticipation or as a reaction to adverse events – the article tests these assumptions. Drawing on the case of air quality policy in Mexico City, the article uses causal process tracing to develop the mechanism leading to an anticipatory strategy and its unfolding. If the distribution of responsibilities on connected policy instruments is clear and major political actors share power, then government levels from different parties engage in a joint anticipatory strategy to avoid crisis and keep stability. The mechanism breakdown leads to reactive behaviour and policy change. Contextual changes redistributing power can destabilise the arrangements, leading to reactive blame games, fostering policy change.

This article explores the politics of policy change by focusing on agenda setting through the lens of the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA), which has been travelling to ever-larger geographies. We aim to produce signposts for future case studies of policy change by bringing together insights from MSA and New Institutionalism. We ask: Which institutions should we focus on when studying agenda-setting politics in different geographies? How do these institutions shape MSA’s structural elements – problem stream, policy stream, political stream, policy windows, and policy entrepreneur? In answering these questions, we hope to weave not only formal but also informal institutions into MSA’s backbone more tightly. We bring together diverse case studies that are sufficiently abstract and whose findings travel easily across other institutional contexts. We revisit the structural elements of MSA and illustrate how key formal and informal rules structure the politics in these structural elements.

After more than a decade of leftist governments in Latin America, the left turn began to reverse course, giving way to the rise of rightist political forces. Even moderate right-wing governments undertook reforms to reduce public spending. This agenda, however, encountered important obstacles. Focusing on the 2017 Argentine pension reform and based on extensive qualitative research, including in-depth interviews with key players, the findings here uphold previous work on the strength of policy legacies in opposition to promarket reforms. This study contributes to the existing theory by showing that protests against retrenchment favor the formation of opposition coalitions only in places where left-leaning governments had established inroads with organized popular sectors, maintaining relationships of coordination and collaboration. In these cases, the cost of specific reforms can jeopardize the broader project of retrenchment.

Pension policy is a highly political issue across Latin America. Since the mid-2000s, several countries have re-reformed their pension systems with a general trend toward more state involvement, yet with significant variation. This article contends that policy legacies and the institutional political setting are key to understanding such variation. Analyzing the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, this article shows that where a weak legacy, characterized by low coverage and savings rates, a weakly organized pension industry, and strong societal groups that oppose the private system, combines with a strong institutional setting, characterized by a government with large support in Congress and where the president concentrates decisionmaking, re-reform outcomes may lead to the outright elimination of the private pillar. Conversely, where a strong legacy combines with a weak institutional setting, re-reform outcomes will tend to maintain the private pillar and expand only the role of the public one.