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How does the institutional context affect government responses to fiscal austerity? Despite the "institutional turn" in political science, we still possess an incomplete understanding of the relationship between a core aspect of the institutional setting of countries—namely institutional fragmentation—and the policy consequences of fiscal pressure. The article advances research on this question by integrating theories on the blame-avoidance effect of institutional fragmentation with theories on the effect of party constituencies on social policies. The result is a set of novel hypotheses about the conditional effects of institutional fragmentation that are tested empirically on quantitative time series data on unemployment protection from 17 advanced democracies. The analyses show that institutional fragmentation is an important determinant of government responses to fiscal austerity, but the effect depends on the partisan composition of the government.

AbstractThe outbreak of COVID-19 unleashed a severe crisis in society. The suddenness and speed with which the disease spread into a global pandemic makes it an outstanding case for showing how bureaucracy acts in response to a crisis marked by uncertainty and urgency. This article focuses on the role played by the central government bureaucracy in preparing and enacting the Danish government's response to the COVID-19 crisis. It is based on full access to internal government files related to crisis management during the winter and spring of 2020. These files include memos, e-mails, decision notes, and draft decisions from key civil servants. The article demonstrates the strength of the theory of bounded rationality when it comes to analyzing the interaction between top civil servants and political executives. Moreover, it shows how administrative and political executives can mold a governmental organization to overcome the inertia inherent in bureaucratic organization and procedures.

Governments produce vast and growing quantities of freely available text: laws, rules, budgets, press releases, and so forth. This information flood is facilitating important, growing research programs in policy and public administration. However, tightening research budgets and the information's vast scale forces political science and public policy to aspire to do more with less. Meeting this challenge means applied researchers must innovate. This article makes two contributions for practical text coding—the process of sorting government text into researcher‐defined coding schemes. First, we propose a method of combining human coding with automated computer classification for large data sets. Second, we present a well‐known algorithm for automated text classification, the Naïve Bayes classifier, and provide software for working with it. We argue and provide evidence that this method can help applied researchers using human coders to get more from their research budgets, and we demonstrate the method using classical examples from the study of policy agendas.

AbstractTheories of public policy change, despite their differences, converge on one point of strong agreement: the relationship between policy and its causes can and does change over time. This consensus yields numerous empirical implications, but our standard analytical tools are inadequate for testing them. As a result, the dynamic and transformative relationships predicted by policy theories have been left largely unexplored in time series analysis of public policy. This article introduces dynamic linear modelling (DLM) as a useful statistical tool for exploring time-varying relationships in public policy. The article offers a detailed exposition of the DLM approach and illustrates its usefulness with a time series analysis of United States defense policy from 1957 to 2010. The results point the way for a new attention to dynamics in the policy process, and the article concludes with a discussion of how this research programme can profit from applying DLMs.

Most research on policy agendas is based on the assumption that space on the agenda is fixed and, hence, focuses on how problems compete for this limited agenda space. This article holds that policy agendas may be limited but not fixed, meaning that problems may not always be traded off but confronted through a larger policy agenda. Based on an extensive collection of local council agendas from 98 Danish municipalities over time, this article investigates variations in agenda size across local governments and examines the extent to which this reflects the local problem environment. The analysis reveals that a large council agenda arises in response to an unfriendly problem environment, particularly if there are many committees to channel problems onto the agenda and, to a lesser extent, if center‐left parties hold office.

All democratic countries have ministries for issues like foreign affairs, defense, transportation, education, and social affairs. Yet, we know little about what determines the number and issue content of ministries. Why do some policy issues have their own ministry while others do not and when are new ministries created? The article offers a theoretical argument for how creation and termination of ministries may be patterned from a policy agenda setting perspective that focuses on the importance of changes in political attention. The basic claim is that such changes in attention in combination with the issue preferences of the incumbent government are crucial for understanding significant changes in the ministerial structure. In a broader perspective, the article attempts to bring the literature on agenda dynamics into the study of bureaucratic structure in order to better understand organizational changes in the top bureaucracy. Adapted from the source document.

A substantial literature claims that political parties compete over issues by selectively emphasizing favorable issues and avoiding issues emphasized by their opponents. In recent years, this understanding of issue competition has been challenged by empirical studies showing issue engagement to be the rule rather than the exception. To move the discussion beyond the descriptive question about degree of issue avoidance or issue engagement, this article offers a theoretical framework of issue competition that addresses central but hitherto neglected questions about which parties respond to which parties. The main implications of the theoretical framework are tested in a set of statistical time-series analyses of party interaction in Denmark covering more than 50 years, 24 major issues and 21 elections. These analyses offer support to the ideas that parties are more responsive to the issue agendas of parties from their own party family than to the issue agendas of non-family parties and that large mainstream parties are more responsive than niche parties to the common issue agenda of the other parties in the party system.

AbstractInspired by the agenda‐setting literature, this article outlines a model of issue competition focusing on the interaction between government and opposition parties through the party‐system agenda. Unlike previous studies of issue competition, the model makes it possible to answer questions such as why some parties have greater success than others in forcing other parties to address unpleasant issues. One of the central implications of the model is that opposition parties are freer to focus continually on issues that are advantageous to themselves, whereas government parties more often are forced to respond to issues brought up on the party‐system agenda. Using data on issue competition in Denmark covering 25 years and 23 issue categories, the issue competition model is evaluated and finds strong support in a set of cross‐sectional time‐series analyses.

Many scholars have struggled to explain stability and change in public resource allocation. What ultimately matters to most citizens, however, are the effects of such spending patterns on organizational performance. In this article, we investigate the relationship between stability of resource allocation and organizational performance. Using time-series data on municipal school budgets and population data on more than 140,000 students including their examination scores as well as detailed information about the socioeconomic status of their parents, the analysis lends empirical support to the more or less implicit proposition underlying much literature on budgetary incrementalism, namely that stable budgets have a beneficial effect on organizational outcome. In that way, this article not only renews the old interest in budget incrementalism but also raises new perspectives for research on the performance of public organizations. Adapted from the source document.