How governments strategically time welfare state reform legislation: empirical evidence from five European countries

Wenzelburger, Georg; Jensen, Carsten; Lee, Seonghui; Arndt, Christoph

doi:10.1080/01402382.2019.1668245

Cited by 22 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…In such situations, blame-avoidance strategies are used to delegate, blur or shift responsibility for the decision-just in case that it turns out to have negative consequences (Hinterleitner 2017;Weaver 1986;Vis and Van Kersbergen 2007;König and Wenzelburger 2014;Hood 2011). This is true for unpopular welfare state cutbacks (Jensen et al 2018;Wenzelburger et al 2019;Vis 2009) as well as for decisions in the area of crime (Hinterleitner 2018). In fact, blame-avoidance behavior is a much more common phenomenon and can be expected to structure the public decisionmaking process in many cases, and especially when risky decisions are involved (Hood 2011).…”

Section: Algorithms and Decision-making In A Context Of Uncertainty And Fatal Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncertainty, risk and the use of algorithms in policy decisions: a case study on criminal justice in the USA

Hartmann

Wenzelburger

2021

Policy Sci

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Algorithms are increasingly used in different domains of public policy. They help humans to profile unemployed, support administrations to detect tax fraud and give recidivism risk scores that judges or criminal justice managers take into account when they make bail decisions. In recent years, critics have increasingly pointed to ethical challenges of these tools and emphasized problems of discrimination, opaqueness or accountability, and computer scientists have proposed technical solutions to these issues. In contrast to these important debates, the literature on how these tools are implemented in the actual everyday decision-making process has remained cursory. This is problematic because the consequences of ADM systems are at least as dependent on the implementation in an actual decision-making context as on their technical features. In this study, we show how the introduction of risk assessment tools in the criminal justice sector on the local level in the USA has deeply transformed the decision-making process. We argue that this is mainly due to the fact that the evidence generated by the algorithm introduces a notion of statistical prediction to a situation which was dominated by fundamental uncertainty about the outcome before. While this expectation is supported by the case study evidence, the possibility to shift blame to the algorithm does seem much less important to the criminal justice actors.

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Section: Algorithms and Decision-making In A Context Of Uncertainty And Fatal Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncertainty, risk and the use of algorithms in policy decisions: a case study on criminal justice in the USA

Hartmann

Wenzelburger

2021

Policy Sci

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“…Timing has been acknowledged as an important instrument to exploit dynamics in public attention to politics and policy action (e.g., Becher & Christiansen 2015; Strobl et al 2019; Wenzelburger et al 2020). On the level of legislative action, parties could time cooperative behaviour in such a way that voters are less likely to perceive parties as too close.…”

Section: Theoretical Assumptions and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Timing in Opposition Party Support under Minority Government

Müller

König

2021

Scand Pol Stud

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Opposition parties under minority governments find themselves in a fundamental dilemma. They are competing with other parties, including the government, for electoral support while also having a common responsibility to make stable government work. This dilemma is especially pronounced for opposition parties signing support agreements with the government. While not formally in a coalition, they nonetheless publicly commit to supporting a government. They may thus be concerned about losing distinctiveness and have an interest in strategically timing cooperation with the minority government. The present paper tests whether this is the case using data on opposition party voting on committee proposals from 23 years of Swedish minority governments between 1991 and 2018. The findings indicate that support parties are less likely to support the government towards the beginning and end of the election cycle, that is, when public attention is intense -a pattern that is not observable for other opposition parties.

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“…This is particularly the case in relation to understandings of the specific tools and instruments that governments actually use to maintain the legitimacy and function of key programmes. Where detailed work has been done, this is largely in relation, timing and the role that distribution of benefits and costs can play in avoiding blame and claiming credit (Nelson, 2016;Slothuus, 2007;Wenzelburger et al 2020) or a more general 'institutional capacity' to insulate decision-making from external pressure (Jacobs 2011). Comparatively less attention has been paid to procedure, and the ways in which procedural and substantive tools may interact in the longer-term management of complex social programmes.…”

Section: Policy Tools and The Welfare State In The Long Runmentioning

confidence: 99%

Procedural tools and pension reform in the long run: the case of Sweden

Hannah

2021

Policy and Society

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Welfare state reform is understood to be risky, difficult and still ongoing. As such, there is a need for analytic tools that can aid understanding of how governments are able to overcome the various barriers they face in seeking change, and the challenges of managing complex and hybridised welfare arrangements. This article argues that the policy tools literature provides several promising avenues for doing so. Specifically, it suggests that procedural policy tools -increasingly recognised in policy studies -are often critical for mitigating risk of blame, sustaining coalitions and supporting the ongoing adaptation of social policy systems to changing conditions and information. This is especially critical where policy innovations entail new substantive relationships between states, citizens and markets, as initial assumptions about individual and group behaviour are likely to be flawed. Procedural tools can enable learning and recalibration in the pursuit of public legitimacy for changing arrangements. To demonstrate the argument, this article engages closely with a case study of public pension reform in Sweden in the 1990s. The case study finds that, initially, reformers made use of a politically insulated parliamentary working group to design a new system, one which attempted to automate elements of policymaking and transfer risk from the state to the individual. However, this goal has proved more difficult to realise than imagined, and in the longer-term, the government used procedural tools for the purposes of learning and recalibration, and in doing so has gone some way to re-establishing modified forms of state accountability.

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How governments strategically time welfare state reform legislation: empirical evidence from five European countries

Cited by 22 publications

References 68 publications

Uncertainty, risk and the use of algorithms in policy decisions: a case study on criminal justice in the USA

Uncertainty, risk and the use of algorithms in policy decisions: a case study on criminal justice in the USA

Timing in Opposition Party Support under Minority Government

Procedural tools and pension reform in the long run: the case of Sweden

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