Explaining accountability for public policies: an fsQCA analysis of health policy in Spain

Abstract

Which conditions foster accountability for health policy implementation in Spain’s 17 regional governments? We analyze five conditions: private management of health services, political salience of health policies, governments’ left ideological position, strong presence of non-statewide parties, and minority governments. We use fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify how necessary and/or sufficient these conditions are (alone or in combination) to foster accountability. We find that there is no single recipe to ‘cook’ accountability. Three conditions appear to be ‘quasi-necessary’ but must be combined with others to foster accountability, thus defining three routes to accountability. The implications of the findings are discussed in light of current debates on the effects of decentralization, left-right ideologies, and privatization, on accountability for public policies.

Disentangling the factors driving electronic word-of-mouth use through a configurational approach

“…In the past few years, the application of the fsQCA method has increased in various research fields, including organization management (Mikalef and Pateli, 2017), politics (Pérez Durán and Rodríguez Menés, 2017), social science (Tho, 2018), IS behavior (Li et al , 2018; Liu et al , 2017; Pappas et al , 2017), innovation research (Bacon et al , 2019; To et al , 2019), and hospitality management (Pappas, 2018, 2019). For instance, Kraus et al (2018) reviewed 77 journal articles in business and management research applying the fsQCA method and suggested that fsQCA is an accepted and growing analysis method that shapes thinking and crafts theory, given its capability to capture the complexity of causally relevant conditions.…”