Looping to success (and failure): second-order mechanisms and policy outcomes

Abstract

Significant accomplishments of public policy successes are not always – or even rarely – noticed and appreciated for what they are. Much of the Dutch population lives happily and safely well below sea level, Brazil leads the world in tackling poverty and inequality, and Botswana has avoided the resource curse against all odds. In each case, smartly designed, well-executed, broadly supported and continuously evolving public policy programs make this happen. In this chapter, we examine how second-order mechanisms can remake political and social institutions to reinforce performance and contribute to the success of public policies. In doing so, we assume that public policy analysis and design necessitates a dynamic perspective, that policy processes unfold over time, and that temporality is an essential aspect of explanatory public policy theory. The study of success in public policy has been a modest affair compared to ongoing efforts to expose public policy failures and scandals and the inherent pathologies of government (Bovens and ‘t Hart, 1996, 2016; Hall, 1982; King and Crewe, 2014; Peirce, 1981; Schuck, 2014). The stubborn few who insist on studying public policy achievements have mainly focused on conceptualizing what “success” looks like in the complex contentious endeavor that is a public policy, program, or project. Scholars have advanced frameworks for assessing typologies and scales of success in real cases. This work enabled analysts to progress beyond the elegant but oversimplified emphasis on goal achievement that dominated classic program evaluation methodologies and the analytical vagaries of subsequent constructivist and goal-free approaches to evaluation (Bovens, ‘t Hart and Peters, 2001; McConnell, 2010). What this line of research has yet to deliver, however, is a robust framework explaining differential performance of otherwise similar policy endeavors, though it has