Policy Theories in Hard Times? Assessing the Explanatory Power of Policy Theories in the Context of Crisis

Georg Wenzelburger (), Pascal D. König and Frieder Wolf
Additional contact information
Georg Wenzelburger: TU Kaiserslautern
Pascal D. König: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Frieder Wolf: Universität Heidelberg

Public Organization Review, 2019, vol. 19, issue 1, No 7, 97-118

Abstract: Abstract Can the behavior of political actors in business-as-usual conditions be analyzed with the same theoretical framework as decision-making in situations characterized by uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity and urgency? After comparing major existing approaches and evaluating their explanatory logic under crisis circumstances, the present article develops a theoretical framework which explicitly accounts for the crisis characteristics at two stages of the policy making process, agenda-setting and decision-making. The bearing of policy-entrepreneurs, international networks, institutions and partisanship on policy outcomes critically depends on the specific workings on these levels in crisis-mode. These expectations are probed in an empirical re-evaluation of the 2011 Spanish pension reform.

Keywords: Policy-making; Policy theory; Agenda-setting; Crisis; Spain; Pension reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11115-017-0387-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:porgrv:v:19:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s11115-017-0387-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11115/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11115-017-0387-1

Access Statistics for this article

Public Organization Review is currently edited by Ali Farazmand

More articles in Public Organization Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().