Assessing policy success and failure: targets, aims and processes

Begley, Philip; Bochel, Catherine; Bochel, Hugh; Defty, Andrew; Gordon, Jan B.; Hinkkainen, Kaisa; Kisby, Ben; McKay, Stephen; Strange, Gerard

doi:10.1080/01442872.2018.1557134

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…This form of political analysis implies that fiascos (Bovens and Hart, 1998), scandals (Allern and Pollack, 2012), blunders (King and Crewe, 2014), project and agency failures (Schuck, 2015), ineffective policy implementations (Begley et al, 2019;Hall, 1982) and so on are viewed as contributing factors that cause a government to fail and damage its prospects for re-election (Light, 2014;McConnel, 2010). Similarly, any divergence from expected electoral outcomes (i.e.…”

Section: Beyond Reason? Populist Rupture Performativity and Identific...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Donald Trump in Power: Discourse, Performativity, Identification

Venizelos

2022

Critical Sociology

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Donald Trump’s style is often described as provocative and his administration as catastrophic. Despite this, his popularity remained high throughout his term in office, and in the 2020 US elections, he received 10 million votes more than in 2016. This paper investigates the paradox of political identification through a discursive, performative and stylistic framework. It argues that policy outcomes and rhetorical consistency do not suffice in understanding identification. Rather, transgression – which is typical of populist performativity – plays a pivotal role in interpellating affective collective subjectivities. This article investigates the case of Donald Trump, from his emergence in 2015 until the 2021 Capitol insurgence. It employs discourse and visual analysis to study Trump’s rhetoric and performativity, integrating this with in-depth interviews and ethnographic research to examine the ways his style resonated with his supporters. It concludes that charismatic performativity and transgression play a crucial role in political identification regardless of the quality of institutional performance.

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Section: Beyond Reason? Populist Rupture Performativity and Identific...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Donald Trump in Power: Discourse, Performativity, Identification

Venizelos

2022

Critical Sociology

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“…Policy learning requires institutional will, capacity and the appropriate mechanisms to assess the success or failure of past policy-making. Assessing policy through this binary is difficult due to challenges in quantifying success and failure over time and problematic in assessing how evidence supporting such judgements can be captured and analysed (Begley et al, 2019). Moreover, the success or failure of a policy is not mutually exclusive (McConnell, 2010).…”

Section: Learning From the Past? Policy Memory Institutional Amnesia ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The lessons of 1969: policy learning, policy memory and voting age reform

2021

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“…Most empirical examinations of policy failure include whether the policy has met its stated policy objectives (Begley et al, 2019;McConnell, 2010;Nair & Howlett, 2017;Peters, 2015). Of course, many policies have multiple goals (McConnell, 2010), these might be mutually exclusive or nested, so that meeting one objective is dependent on first meeting a second objective.…”

Section: Policy Failurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…They might also be contradictory. Identifying the objectives of a policy is not always a straightforward task (Begley et al, 2019), nor is determining how achievement (or not) of objectives might be measured. For us, it might mean underachieving against a target, having no discernible impact, or having the opposite impact to that which was intended.…”

Section: Policy Failurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several authors have noted the methodological challenges of using stated policy objectives to assess whether a policy has succeeded or failed. These methodological challenges include identifying the goals of policy (Begley et al, 2019), multiple goals, failure for whom (McConnell, 2015), and issues of measurement. We faced several of these challenges in the analysis we present here; and conclude that there is no objective or unbiased means by which some of the questions raised by this analysis can be addressed, and judgement is an inevitable part of such approaches.…”

Section: Conclusion and Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Policy failure or f***up: homelessness and welfare reform in England

O’Leary

Simcock

2020

Housing Studies

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Since 2009, homelessness has been on the rise, with growing evidence that welfare reforms are a key driver of this increase (NAO, 2017). However, does this mean that welfare reform has failed? In this paper, we use policy failure as a lens through which to critically examine welfare reform and homelessness in England. Drawing on McConnell's definition of failure (2015), which seeks to bridge the gap between objective definitions of policy failure (where failure is understood as the gap between policy objectives and actual outcomes) and subjective definitions (where failure is understood as actors' perceptions), we examine welfare reform and homelessness to understand whether, how and by whom policy in this area might be considered to have failed.

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Assessing policy success and failure: targets, aims and processes

Cited by 8 publications

References 25 publications

Donald Trump in Power: Discourse, Performativity, Identification

Donald Trump in Power: Discourse, Performativity, Identification

The lessons of 1969: policy learning, policy memory and voting age reform

Policy failure or f***up: homelessness and welfare reform in England

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