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Sorting through the garbage can: under what conditions do governments adopt policy programs?

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Abstract

The paper aims at explaining the adoption of policy programs. We use the garbage can model of organizational choice as our theoretical framework and complement it with the institutional setting of administrative decision-making in order to understand the complex causation of policy program adoption. Institutions distribute decision power by rules and routines and coin actor identities and their interpretations of situations. We therefore expect institutions to play a role when a policy window opens. We explore the configurative explanations for program adoption in a systematic comparison of the adoption of new alcohol policy programs in the Swiss cantons employing Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The most important conditions are the organizational elements of the administrative structure decisive for the coupling of the streams. The results imply that classic bureaucratic structures are better suited to put policies into practice than limited government.

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Notes

  1. For the analysis, we assigned the contradictory combination to outcome 0 as that was theoretically more plausible (Yamasaki and Rihoux 2009: 132–135), i.e. we included Glarus and excluded Lucerne in the analysis. Before doing so, we aimed to find ways to lift these contradictions by going back to the cases. Due to the limited information, however, this strategy was not successful.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center of Competence for Public Management, University of Bern, Schanzeneckstrasse 1, P.O. Box 8573, 3001, Bern, Switzerland

    Fritz Sager

  2. polsan GmbH—Büro für Politikanalyse und—beratung, Effingerstrasse 54, Postfach 6052, 3001, Bern, Switzerland

    Yvan Rielle

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  1. Fritz Sager
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  2. Yvan Rielle
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Correspondence to Fritz Sager.

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Sager, F., Rielle, Y. Sorting through the garbage can: under what conditions do governments adopt policy programs?. Policy Sci 46, 1–21 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-012-9165-7

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