State governments, often described as “laboratories of democracy,” design and implement many public policies, but this moniker also implies course correction when initial efforts fail. But how do states learn from failure? Existing hypotheses about policy learning and broad research capacity are insufficient. Using case studies of failed juvenile justice policies in Texas and Washington, I explore when failure acknowledgment occurs at all. I argue that a state’s bureaucratic capacity to gather data—distinct from its analytical capacity—is necessary for public officials to acknowledge failure, highlighting the impact of policy and institutional design on evidence-based policy making and policy corrections.

The UK, and England in particular, has suffered egregiously poor outcomes in managing the Covid-19 pandemic. This short perspective points to the explanation in terms of both current British politics and the public health policy inheritance. Boris Johnson's Premiership was born in an opportunistic assertion of British exceptionalism, and Johnson's initial, fate-tempting reaction to the novel Coronavirus set the UK on the wrong path. Furthermore, the gradual erosion of professionalism in (especially health) policy-making over almost four decades, and the hollowing-out of the health protection infrastructure, both facilitated and accentuated a toxic approach to managing Covid-19.

Studies examining the policy implications of elite polarisation usually concentrate on policy formulation and change, but neglect the impact of polarisation on the day-to-day application of policies. Applying the method of causal process tracing to the Swiss “Carlos” case, a blame game triggered by the reporting about an expensive therapy setting for a youth offender, this article exposes and explains a hitherto neglected, but highly important, mechanism between political elites engaging in blame generation and changes in policy practice. A policy’s distance and visibility to mass publics, as well as the incentives and resources of elites to engage in blame generation, explain the dynamics within blame games, which, in turn, effect organisational and behavioural changes that help institutionalise a more politicised policy practice. Politicised policy practice can make an important difference to policy target populations, as well as damage output legitimacy and undermine democracy.

Policy protagonists are keen to claim that policy is successful while opponents are more likely to frame policies as failures. The reality is that policy outcomes are often somewhere in between these extremes. An added difficulty is that policy has multiple dimensions, often succeeding in some respects but not in others, according to facts and their interpretation. This paper sets out a framework designed to capture the bundles of outcomes that indicate how successful or unsuccessful a policy has been. It reviews existing literature on policy evaluation and improvement, public value, good practice, political strategy and policy failure and success in order to identify what can be built on and gaps that need to be filled. It conceives policy as having three realms: processes, programs and politics. Policies may succeed and/or fail in each of these and along a spectrum of success, resilient success, conflicted success, precarious success and failure. It concludes by examining contradictions between different forms of success, including what is known colloquially as good politics but bad policy.