Political Institutions and Public Policy

Abstract

In order to shed light on this missing link between programmatic action and political institutions, this chapter reviews how institutions are currently discussed in policy process research in order to derive hypotheses that may explain under which institutional conditions programmatic action should or should not take place. The goal of this overview of the state of the art is twofold. On the one hand, it serves to assess the contribution of the PAF to existing theories of the policy process and the understanding of institutions in it. In doing so, it becomes clear why a new theoretical lens is needed and where and why the PAF is able to fill gaps left by others. On the other hand, the established approaches to explaining policy change and stability with respect to policy processes contain assumptions and hypotheses about the role of institutions that can be integrated into the PAF and help sharpen the analytical power of a look at the institutional conditions for programmatic action. They do this by formulating mechanisms between theoretical concepts that can also be adapted, or at least assumed to be relevant, to the formation of programmatic groups and the success of the group and its program. At the very least, they lay the groundwork for the question that asks about the influence of institutional settings familiar in comparative politics on policy change.