Policies that Succeed and Programs that Fail: Ambiguity, Conflict, and Crisis in Greek Higher Education

Abstract

Why do some policies adopted by a wide margin fail to be implemented? Highlighting the role of policy entrepreneurial strategies within the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA), we examine the implementation of Greek higher education reform in 2011 to argue that when policies adversely affect the status quo, successful entrepreneurial strategies of issue‐linkage and framing, side payments, and institutional rule manipulation are more likely to lead to implementation failure under conditions of crisis, centralized monopoly, and inconsistent political communication. The findings clarify MSA by specifying the conditions that increase the coupling strategies’ chances of success or failure and illuminate the role ambiguity and conflict play in policy reform and implementation.

Multiple streams in member state implementation: politics, problem construction and policy paths in Swiss asylum policy

“…Zahariadis and Exadaktylos (2015) highlight the crucial role of policy entrepreneurs to couple the streams in order enact and implement policy changes. The main difference between the two cantons lies in the personalities of the individual members of the executive responsible for asylum policy as policy entrepreneurs.…”

“…We consider the Federal Decree on measures to decrease spending on the asylum system from 1999 as opening an implementation window (Zahariadis and Exadaktylos, 2015;Ridde, 2009) within which the cantons had to choose their implementation strategies. The MSA allows us to model different constellations of actors, problem perceptions and policy contexts to understand the respective decisions.…”

“…Even though "Kingdon did not attempt to provide a framework that explained the dynamics of subsequent stages in the policy process (Zahariadis, 1995(Zahariadis, , 2007Zahariadis and Allen, 1995)" (Howlett et al, 2015: 421), we argue that MSA can be fruitfully used for the study of member state implementation. While Zahariadis and Exadaktylos (2015) focus on entrepreneurial strategies to understand implementation decisions, we show that the MSA is also well suited to understand implementation decisions in federalist systems. Switzerland is an extreme case of decentralised member state implementation of federal law (Ehrler and Sager, 2011;Sager and Zollinger, 2011).…”

“…Like Zahariadis and Exadaktylos (2015: 3, also Ridde, 2009) we "view policy outputs as constituting implementation windows". The federal policy decision thus opens an implementation window that implies additional political decision-making processes at the level of the constituent states when transposed into cantonal law.…”

Proposing a methodology for the operationalisation of Multiple Streams Approach, using the Inner-City Technology Colleges as an empirical example

“…We are not innovating, as it has been used before to explain why policies were not enacted as expected (Teodorovic, 2008), or why they have perverse effects (Zahariadis & Exadaktylos, 2016). Our intention is to prove that when a policy is legislated before the streams are ripe and couple at the right moment, they have a low probability of being successfully implemented.…”