Exploring How Institutional Arrangements Shape Stakeholder Influence on Policy Decisions: A Comparative Analysis in the Energy Sector

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an expansion of efforts to include stakeholders in administrative policy making. Despite significant potential to improve policy decisions, empirical evidence suggests that not all participatory processes provide meaningful opportunities for stakeholders to shape policy and may even give the most powerful stakeholder groups disproportionate influence over policy decisions. This article argues that the institutional arrangements for stakeholder engagement-the rules and norms that determine which stakeholders can participate and how-affect stakeholders' influence on policy decisions. This article uses state energy efficiency policy making as a context in which to compare how different institutional arrangements shape the ways in which stakeholders engage in and influence the policy process across two states, Connecticut and Maryland. Findings highlight that institutional arrangements can be used to increase participation, mitigate undue influence of industrial stakeholders, and increase the influence of public interest stakeholder organizations.

Social Accountability and Institutional Change: The Case of Citizen Oversight of Police

“…Furthermore, we found that by-district COA governance reduces racial disparity in DCAs, which shows that institutional rules for stakeholder engagement in participatory processes affect stakeholders' influence on policy outcomes. This result adds to the prior finding in the literature that stakeholder engagement in participatory processes enhances stakeholder influence on policy decisions (Baldwin 2019).…”

Stakeholder participation in the formulation of Brazilian biofuel policy (RenovaBio)

“…The participation of biofuel producers, fossil producers and distributors as obligated parties is noted. These observations are in accordance with previous literature, which indicates that in many processes where there is primarily participation by stakeholders directly involved in the regulated industry, there may be limited political impact or the impact may favor those who participated to the detriment of the public interest (CROW; ALBRIGHT; KOEBALE, 2017;BALDWIN , 2019).…”

Perceptual Bias and Public Programs: The Case of the United States and Hospital Care

“…Although replicating studies in different national contexts has a long history in psychology (see Rokeach and the seminal work of Hofstede ), spawning an entire field of cultural psychology (Kitayama and Cohen ; applied to organizations, see Smith, Peterson, and Schwartz ), public administration scholarship is just beginning such work. First, there is some evidence that generic macro factors such as unemployment (Olsen ), the state of the economy (Powell and Whitten ; Singer ), organizational past performance (Olsen ), the performance of others (Charbonneau and Van Ryzin ), institutional logics (Ngoye, Sierra, and Ysa ), institutional arrangements (Baldwin ), and social capital (Beugelsdijk and Van Schaik ) influence individual attitudes and behaviors.…”