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  3. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Public Policy

The Cambridge Studies in Comparative Public Policy series was established to promote and disseminate comparative research in public policy. The objective of the series is to advance the understanding of public policies through the publication of the results of comparative research into the nature, dynamics and contexts of major policy challenges and responses to them. Works in the series will draw critical insights that enhance policy learning and are generalizable beyond specific policy contexts, sectors and time periods. Such works will also compare the development and application of public policy theory across institutional and cultural settings and examine how policy ideas, institutions and practices shape policies and their outcomes. Manuscripts comparing public policies in two or more cases as well as theoretically informed critical case studies which test more general theories are encouraged. Studies comparing policy development over time are also welcomed.

  • General Editors: M. Ramesh, National University of Singapore, Xun Wu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Michael Howlett, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
  • Editorial Boards: Amitav Acharya, American University, Washington DC, Mark Considine, University of Melbourne, Andrew Jordan, University of East Anglia, David Levi-Faur, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Martin Lodge, London School of Economics and Political Science, M. Jae Moon, Yonsei University, Seoul, Paul Pierson, University of California, Berkeley, Christine Rothmayr-Allison, Université de Montréal, Grace Skogstad, University of Toronto, Diane Stone, University of Canberra and University of Warwick, Dale Whittington, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Lan Xue, Tsinghua University, Beijing

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14 results in Cambridge Studies in Comparative Public Policy

Health Policy in Asia
  • A Policy Design Approach
  • M. Ramesh, Azad S. Bali
  • Published online:
    02 December 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021
  • The book assesses the policy actions of select Asian governments (China, India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand) to address critical health system functions from a policy design perspective. The findings show that all governments in the region have made tremendous strides in focussing their attention on the core issues and, especially, the interactions among them. However, there is still insufficient appreciation of the usefulness of public hospitals and their efficient management. Similarly, some governments have not made sufficient efforts to establish an effective regulatory framework which is especially vital in systems with a large share of private providers and payers. A well-run public hospital system and an effective framework for regulating private providers are essential tools to support the governance, financing, and payment reforms underway in the six health systems studied in this book.

Public Governance as Co-creation
  • A Strategy for Revitalizing the Public Sector and Rejuvenating Democracy
  • Christopher Ansell, Jacob Torfing
  • Published online:
    21 May 2021
    Print publication:
    10 June 2021
  • We need new governance solutions to help us improve public policies and services, solve complex societal problems, strengthen social communities and reinvigorate democracy. By changing how government engages with citizens and stakeholders, co-creation provides an attractive and feasible approach to governance that goes beyond the triptych of public bureaucracy, private markets and self-organized communities. Inspired by the successful use of co-creation for product and service design, this book outlines a broad vision of co-creation as a strategy of public governance. Through the construction of platforms and arenas to facilitate co-creation, this strategy can empower local communities, enhance broad-based participation, mobilize societal resources and spur public innovation while building ownership for bold solutions to pressing problems and challenges. The book details how to use co-creation to achieve goals. This exciting and innovative study combines theoretical argument with illustrative empirical examples, visionary thinking and practical recommendations.

Government Statistical Agencies and the Politics of Credibility
  • Cosmo Wyndham Howard
  • Published online:
    05 March 2021
    Print publication:
    18 March 2021
  • Who decides how official statistics are produced? Do politicians have control or are key decisions left to statisticians in independent statistical agencies? Interviews with statisticians in Australia, Canada, Sweden, the UK and the USA were conducted to get insider perspectives on the nature of decision making in government statistical administration. While the popular adage suggests there are 'lies, damned lies and statistics', this research shows that official statistics in liberal democracies are far from mistruths; they are consistently insulated from direct political interference. Yet, a range of subtle pressures and tensions exist that governments and statisticians must manage. The power over statistics is distributed differently in different countries, and this book explains why. Differences in decision-making powers across countries are the result of shifting pressures politicians and statisticians face to be credible, and the different national contexts that provide distinctive institutional settings for the production of government numbers.

Advising Governments in the Westminster Tradition
  • Policy Advisory Systems in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand
  • Jonathan Craft, John Halligan
  • Published online:
    18 December 2020
    Print publication:
    05 November 2020
  • In turbulent environments and unstable political contexts, policy advisory systems have become more volatile. The policy advisory system in Anglophone countries is composed of different types of advisers who have input into government decision making. Government choices about who advises them varies widely as they demand contestability, greater partisan input and more external consultation. The professional advice of the public service may be disregarded. The consequences for public policy are immense depending on whether a plurality of advice works effectively or is derailed by narrow and partisan agendas that lack an evidence base and implementation plans. The book seeks to addresses these issues within a comparative country analysis of how policy advisory systems are constituted and how they operate in the age of instability in governance and major challenges with how the complexity policy issue can be handled.

Convergence and Diversity in the Governance of Higher Education
  • Comparative Perspectives
  • Edited by Giliberto Capano, Darryl S. L. Jarvis
  • Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    19 November 2020
  • For several decades, higher education systems have undergone continuous waves of reform, driven by a combination of concerns about the changing labour needs of the economy, competition within the global-knowledge economy, and nationally competitive positioning strategies to enhance the performance of higher education systems. Yet, despite far-ranging international pressures, including the emergence of an international higher education market, enormous growth in cross-border student mobility, and pressures to achieve universities of world class standing, boost research productivity and impact, and compete in global league tables, the suites of policy, policy designs and sector outcomes continue to be marked as much by hybridity as they are of similarity or convergence. This volume explores these complex governance outcomes from a theoretical and empirical comparative perspective, addressing those vectors precipitating change in the modalities and instruments of governance, and how they interface at the systemic and institutional levels, and across geographic regions.

Policy Controversies and Political Blame Games
  • Markus Hinterleitner
  • Published online:
    30 October 2020
    Print publication:
    12 November 2020
  • In modern, policy-heavy democracies, blame games about policy controversies are commonplace. Despite their ubiquity, blame games are notoriously difficult to study. This book elevates them to the place they deserve in the study of politics and public policy. Blame games are microcosms of conflictual politics that yield unique insights into democracies under pressure. Based on an original framework and the comparison of fifteen blame games in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and the US, it exposes the institutionalized forms of conflict management that democracies have developed to manage policy controversies. Whether failed infrastructure projects, food scandals, security issues, or flawed policy reforms, democracies manage policy controversies in an idiosyncratic manner. This book is addressed not only to researchers and students interested in political conflict in the fields of political science, public policy, public administration, and political communication, but to everyone concerned about the functioning of democracy in more conflictual times. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A Matter of Style?
  • Organizational Agency in Global Public Policy
  • Louisa Bayerlein, Christoph Knill, Yves Steinebach
  • Published online:
    04 July 2020
    Print publication:
    23 July 2020
  • International public administrations (IPAs) have become an essential feature of global governance, contributing to what some have described as the 'bureaucratization of world politics'. While we do know that IPAs matter for international politics, we neither know exactly to what extent nor how exactly they matter for international organizations' policy making processes and subsequent outputs. This book provides an innovative perspective on IPAs and their agency in introducing the concept of administrative styles to the study of international organizations and global public policy. It argues that the administrative bodies of international organizations can develop informal working routines that allow them to exert influence beyond their formal autonomy and mandate. The theoretical argument is tested by an encompassing comparative assessment of administrative styles and their determinants across eight IPAs providing rich empirical insight gathered in more than 100 expert interviews.

Policy Consultancy in Comparative Perspective
  • Patterns, Nuances and Implications of the Contractor State
  • Caspar van den Berg, Michael Howlett, Andrea Migone, Michael Howard, Frida Pemer, Helen M. Gunter
  • Published online:
    09 December 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019
  • Many Western countries have seen an increase in the volume and importance of external consultants in the public policy process. This book is the first to investigate this phenomenon in a comparative and interdisciplinary way. The analysis shows who these consultants are, how widely and for what reasons they are used in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands and Sweden. In doing so, the book addresses the positive and negative implications of high levels of external policy consultancy, including its implications for the nature of the state (transforming into a contractor state?) and for democratically legitimized and accountable decision-making (transforming into consultocracy?). It provides valuable new insights for students and practitioners in the fields of public administration, public policy, public management, political science and human resource management.

Hyper-active Governance
  • How Governments Manage the Politics of Expertise
  • Matthew Wood
  • Published online:
    21 June 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019
  • Hyper-active Governance is a new way of thinking about governing that puts debates over expertise at the heart. Contemporary governing requires delegation to experts, but also increases demands for political accountability. In this context, politicians and experts work together under political stress to adopt different governing relationships that appear more 'hands-off' or 'hands-on'. These approaches often serve to displace profound social and economic crises. Only a genuinely collaborative approach to governing, with an inclusive approach to expertise, can create democratically legitimate and effective governance in our accelerating world. Using detailed case studies and global datasets in various policy areas including medicines, flooding, water resources, central banking and electoral administration, the book develops a new typology of modes of governing. Drawing from innovative social theory, it breathes new life into debates about expert forms of governance and how to achieve real paradigm shifts in how we govern our increasingly hyper-active world.

Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap
  • Christian Adam, Steffen Hurka, Christoph Knill, Yves Steinebach
  • Published online:
    25 March 2019
    Print publication:
    11 April 2019
  • The responsiveness to societal demands is both the key virtue and the key problem of modern democracies. On the one hand, responsiveness is a central cornerstone of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, responsiveness inevitably entails policy accumulation. While policy accumulation often positively reflects modernisation and human progress, it also undermines democratic government in three main ways. First, policy accumulation renders policy content increasingly complex, which crowds out policy substance from public debates and leads to an increasingly unhealthy discursive prioritisation of politics over policy. Secondly, policy accumulation comes with aggravating implementation deficits, as it produces administrative backlogs and incentivises selective implementation. Finally, policy accumulation undermines the pursuit of evidence-based public policy, because it threatens our ability to evaluate the increasingly complex interactions within growing policy mixes. The authors argue that the stability of democratic systems will crucially depend on their ability to make policy accumulation more sustainable.

Healthy or Sick?
  • Coevolution of Health Care and Public Health in a Comparative Perspective
  • Philipp Trein
  • Published online:
    27 July 2018
    Print publication:
    16 August 2018
  • The book analyses how policies to prevent diseases are related to policies aiming to cure illnesses. It does this by conducting a comparative historical analysis of Australia, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. It also demonstrates how the politicization of the medical profession contributes to the success of preventative health policy. The book argues that two factors lead to a close relationship of curative and preventative elements in health policies and institutions: a strong national government that possesses a wide range of control over subnational levels of government, and whether professional organizations (especially the medical profession) perceive preventative and non-medical health policy as important and campaign for it politically. The book provides a historical and comparative narrative to substantiate this claim empirically.

The Politics of Shale Gas in Eastern Europe
  • Energy Security, Contested Technologies and the Social Licence to Frack
  • Andreas Goldthau
  • Published online:
    21 April 2018
    Print publication:
    29 March 2018
  • Fracking is a novel but contested energy technology – so what makes some countries embrace it whilst others reject it? This book argues that the reason for policy divergence lies in procedures and processes, stakeholder inclusion and whether a strong narrative underpins governmental policies. Based on a large set of primary data gathered in Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, it explores shale gas policies in Central Eastern Europe (a region strongly dependent on Russian gas imports) to unveil the importance of policy regimes for creating a 'social license' for fracking. Its findings suggest that technology transfer does not happen in a vacuum but is subject to close mutual interaction with political, economic and social forces; and that national energy policy is not a matter of 'objective' policy imperatives, such as Russian import dependence, but a function of complex domestic dynamics pertaining to institutional procedures and processes, and winners and losers.

Asia after the Developmental State
  • Disembedding Autonomy
  • Edited by Toby Carroll, Darryl S. L. Jarvis
  • Published online:
    06 October 2017
    Print publication:
    12 October 2017
  • Asia after the Developmental State presents cutting-edge analyses of state-society transformation in Asia under globalisation. The volume incorporates a variety of political economy and public policy oriented positions, and collectively explores the uneven evolution of new public management and neoliberal agendas aimed at reordering state and society around market rationality. Taken together, the contributions explore the emergence of marketisation across Asia, including China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam - what is now often described as the world's most economically dynamic region - and the degree to which marketisation has taken root, in what forms, and how this is impacting state, society and market relationships.

In Defense of Pluralism
  • Policy Disagreement and its Media Coverage
  • Éric Montpetit
  • Published online:
    05 March 2016
    Print publication:
    07 April 2016
  • The work of early pluralist thinkers, from Arthur Bentley to Robert Dahl, inspired much optimism about democracy. They argued that democracy was functioning well, despite disagreements arising among the diversity of interests represented in policy-making processes. Yet it is unlikely that anyone paying attention to news coverage today would share such optimism. The media portray current policy-making processes as intractably polarized, devoid of any opportunity to move forward and adopt essential policy changes. This book aims to revive our long-lost sense of optimism about policy-making and democracy. Through original research into biotechnology policy-making in North America and Europe, Éric Montpetit shows that the depiction of policy-making offered by early pluralist thinkers is not so far off the present reality. Today's policy decision-making process - complete with disagreement among the participants - is consistent with what might be expected in a pluralist society, in sharp contrast with the negative image projected by the media.