Recent studies on institutional theory and the public policy field called for efforts to pry open the black box of institutional and policy change. This article offers a response to this call. It demonstrates that historical and discursive institutionalist approaches are complementary to explain how and why institutional change occurs. In addition, it shows how these approaches can add value to and benefit from the public policy and administration fields that seek to explain policy change and success. In particular, it emphasizes the interactions between structure and agency that contribute to the change. The empirical finding is based on qualitative analysis of central banking reform in Turkey. It suggests that institutional and policy change is more likely to occur when policy entrepreneurs, with joint membership in domestic and transnational policy communities, mediate various ideas and discourse within and among these communities in a punctuated institutional equilibrium.
While there is a considerable literature concerning policy entrepreneurship and institutional isomorphism, significantly less literature has emerged addressing the impact of context on policy and institutional entrepreneurship and of the interactions between various contexts and agency. In this article, we demonstrate that the actions of entrepreneurs in the public sector are most likely to generate policy and institutional changes when they are reinforced by complementarities arising from context-dependent, dynamic interactions among interdependent structures, institutions and agency-level enabling conditions.
This article focuses on how the Turkish state has been responding to limit the public health effects of COVID-19 pandemic to date. It aims to explain and understand the introduction, implementation and effect of health policy instrument mixes. It argues that although 'presidentialisation' of executive, and 'presidential bureaucracy' under presidential system of government are critical to introduce policies and implement their instrument mixes without delay or being vetoed or watered down which would otherwise occur in the parliamentary system of government, these features of impositional and exclusive policy style pose risks of policy design and implementation failures when the policy problems are poorly diagnosed, their policy solutions are wrong and/or complementary policy instrument mixes implemented ineffectively. However, a temporal, albeit temporary divergence from a dominant administrative tradition and policy style is most likely when a policy issue is esoteric (i.e. technical, scientific and expert-led) and framed as an existential crisis under high uncertainty that require scientific, expert-led, inclusive, early, quick and decisive responses to pressing policy problems.
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