Policy Styles and Trust in the Age of Pandemics

Analyzing national policy styles empirically using the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI): insights into long‐term patterns of policy‐making

“…This is not purely a historical or speculative enterprise. As studies of the COVID-19 pandemic have noted, policy styles can be a helpful perspective for explaining different national responses to this health crisis (Bakir, 2020;Capano et al, 2020;Howlett, 2021;Mazey & Richardson, 2020;Mei, 2020;Migone, 2020;Zahariadis et al, 2021Zahariadis et al, , 2022. Both contemporary and historical studies examining such styles have tended to focus on the national level and contend that policy-making processes need to be studied in light of how the institutional make-up of a government generates the routines and standard operating procedures that constitute its decision making structure and processes.…”

“…This conceptualization of the nature and significance of national policy styles, put forth by Richardson et al (1982), commenced an intellectual process out of which alternative conceptualizations have emerged and been critically appraised (Howlett & Tosun, 2019aKnill & Tosun, 2020;Unger & van Waarden, 1995;Zahariadis et al, 2021Zahariadis et al, , 2022. Although all these alternative versions follow the same logic as the original, some differ in crucial aspects.…”

“…Richardson attributes the change in the British policy style to the change in the ideological composition of the government-a finding also reported by Ertugal (2021) for Turkey. More precisely, it is the entering into office of right-wing populist governments that Richardson (2018aRichardson ( , 2018b, Tosun et al (2022), and some contributions to the volume edited by Zahariadis et al (2022) associate with a more impositional and less anticipatory policy style.…”

“…However, the data also revealed instances of changes in policy styles. Consequently, for conceptual advancement, it appears useful to invest more effort in theorizing those factors that could potentially bring about change in policy styles, such as crises (Zahariadis et al, 2021(Zahariadis et al, , 2022, changes in political regimes (Ertugal, 2021), or European integration (Candel et al, 2020) and disintegration (Richardson, 2018a(Richardson, , 2018b, and putting into perspective those factors that have a supposedly stabilizing effect. To our knowledge, this is the first time that this aspect could be assessed in a systematic fashion at the country level, since the design of previous research was not suitable for capturing a large number of countries over a longer period of time.…”

“…Future research is invited to help disentangling the direct effects of institutions and the moderating effects of institutions for the policy-makers' behavior. Fortunately, there exists a small but growing body of empirical research on policy styles that can serve as the point of departure for such efforts (Candel et al, 2020;Ertugal, 2021;Howlett & Tosun, 2019aTosun et al, 2022;Zahariadis et al, 2021Zahariadis et al, , 2022.…”