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AbstractPolicies are continually subjected to turbulence and crises. Interest in policy robustness as a fundamental way to deal with what cannot be foreseen is increasing. Thus, there is a flourishing stream of literature suggesting that policies need to be designed to be agile and flexible. However, the associated characteristics remain undeveloped. This article fills this gap by drawing on lessons obtained from the unplanned behaviors that were adopted in the management of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Individual and organizational behaviors characterized by outside the box thinking, improvisation, and fast learning yielded solutions to unexpected problems. In this article, some of these emblematic unplanned behaviors are assessed, and the research builds on the literature on policy robustness, crisis management, and organizational theory to identify three enabling conditions to design more robust policies: coordinated autonomy, training for unplanned responses, and political institutional capacity.

This article uses a systematic review of the main literature in the field to shed light on different operationalizations of the main classifications of policy instruments. Although the literature offers a large number of instrument taxonomies, many of them act as theoretical guidelines rather than operational concepts that can help to disentangle the different features of governing actions. This article provides a review of the most frequently used policy instrument typologies and, through a meta‐analysis, it analyses how instrument typologies have been differentially adopted to explain real‐world phenomena. The results are a high degree of heterogeneity in citation frequency, the polyhedral nature of the concept of policy instruments, a divide between typologies focused on governmental resources and those focused on drivers of expected behaviour, and 'labellism'. Thus, what emerges is the urgency of a process of convergence towards a common framework.

AbstractThis article uses a systematic review of the main literature in the field to shed light on different operationalizations of the main classifications of policy instruments. Although the literature offers a large number of instrument taxonomies, many of them act as theoretical guidelines rather than operational concepts that can help to disentangle the different features of governing actions. This article provides a review of the most frequently used policy instrument typologies and, through a meta‐analysis, it analyses how instrument typologies have been differentially adopted to explain real‐world phenomena. The results are a high degree of heterogeneity in citation frequency, the polyhedral nature of the concept of policy instruments, a divide between typologies focused on governmental resources and those focused on drivers of expected behaviour, and 'labellism'. Thus, what emerges is the urgency of a process of convergence towards a common framework.

Policies are made and pursue their goals through policy instruments. Furthermore, policy instruments have become a relevant topic in many policy fields due to their theoretical and empirical relevance. The study of this field dates back to Lowi and others who developed many typologies and theories in classic works by authors such as Hood, Salamon, Linder and Peters, Peters and van Nispen, Schneider and Ingram, Lascomes and Le Galès, among others. This is important work that is linked closely to current research on policy design but, despite much effort, many fundamental issues remain unknown or understudied with respect to the topic. It is time to take inventory of the knowns and unknowns about policy tools. The current article examines four clusters of basic issues in the field which require further research.

AbstractAs a result of domestic pressure or international prescription, many national higher education systems (HESs) in Europe have undergone structural changes over the last 30 years. These changes have been made primarily to enhance the overall performance – defined as students' access, quality of teaching, and excellence in research – of universities. As such, almost all of these countries have decided to adopt similar policy strategies to foster institutional autonomy and differentiation, and greater managerial steering. However, although similar policy patterns have been replicated, performance indicators are remarkably variable across Western European countries. Thus, many of the proposed explanations may be oversimplifications of reality. This issue leads to our main research question: Which factors are associated with (teaching) performance improvement in HE? This paper focuses on university‐level education to explore the possibility that this association is conjunctural in nature. In other words, when considering the performance of university systems (i.e. teaching), it is important to identify the most effective combination of institutional autonomy, evaluation, internal governance, and public funding. Qualitative comparative analysis was employed to test this expectation on developments (1988–2008) in 12 HESs in Western Europe: Austria, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden. The results suggest that giving more institutional autonomy to universities is much less important than expected, whereas severe evaluation, generous public funding, and verticalized governance emerge as more relevant.

Policy design undertakes to develop effective policies and hence must understand whether and how effective policies can be formulated and implemented. However, very often policy design has failed to focus on the causal chain that represents the actual driver of policy effects and thus misconstrues the potential effectiveness of a policy design. A mechanistic perspective is extremely helpful for conceptualising and pinpointing such causal chains, as it focuses on the real processes that must be activated by policy-makers in implementing policy designs. This article identifies the main steps to be taken when adopting such a mechanistic approach to policy design.

AbstractThis paper seeks to achieve a better understanding of how and under what conditions current digital communication technologies can become an asset to the design of effective policies. In order to do so, we bridge two strands of reflection that have hitherto developed quite independently – i.e. policy design studies and researches on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to reform the public sector. We start from the assumption that different governmental political and technical capacities shape different spaces for action and thus different types of policy design in which policy-makers can involve citizens via ICTs in three modes: co-design; design fine-tuning; crowdsourced policy design. According to this framework, we analyse three different 'revelatory case studies' in which ICTs have been employed by governments while designing policies: Iceland's recent experiment to redraft collectively its constitution; La Buona Scuola, the latest Italian public education law; and the Finnish Avoin Misteriö, a platform for crowdsourced legislation. By exploring the different modes in which ICTs have been integrated in the formulation of these three policies, we show that it is possible to disentangle different and more or less effective ways of exploiting ICTs' networking and communicative potential for designing successful public policies.