Comparing blunders in government

Will Jennings, Martin Lodge and Matt Ryan

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Much attention has been paid to government ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. National political and administrative systems have been frequently blamed for being disproportionately prone to generating mishaps. However, little systematic evidence exists on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. Based on a comparative perspective on blunders in government, this article suggests that constitutional features do not play a prominent role. In order to establish this finding, this article (a) develops theory-driven expectations as to the factors that are said to encourage blunders, (b) devises a systematic framework for the assessment of policy processes and outcomes, and (c) uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify sets of causal conditions associated with particular outcomes (i.e. blunders). The article applies this novel approach to a set of particular policy domains, finding that constitutional features are not a contributory factor to blunders in contrast to instrument choice, administrative capacity and hyper-excited politics

Keywords: government blunder; policy fiasco; fsQCA; large projects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2018-02-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in European Journal of Political Research, 1, February, 2018, 57(1), pp. 238 - 258. ISSN: 0304-4130

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/83523/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:83523

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().