非正式社会团体和政策方案:关于政策制定的方案行动框架

IF 2.7 Q1 POLITICAL SCIENCE
Nils C. Bandelow, Johanna Hornung
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Telling this story and presenting the final project results is the core theme of this introductory contribution on “Informal Social Groups and Policy Programs: A Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) on Policymaking.”</p><p>Even before the meeting in 2016, the core research group around the programmatic approach, consisting majorly of (in alphabetical order) William Genieys, Patrick Hassenteufel, and Marc Smyrl, postulated the idea that biographical homogeneity may build the basis for cooperation between policy actors and shape public policy over a longer period of time. This idea dates back to the beginning of the 2000s and is rooted in the observation of sectoral elites emerging in France from the grounds of homogenous education and resources (Genieys, <span>2005</span>; Genieys &amp; Hassenteufel, <span>2001</span>). Defending the budget and authority in their policy sector, the elite actors have been denoted as custodians of state (Genieys, <span>2010</span>), struggling with their counterparts, designated as austerians (derived from austerity), over financial and regulative resources. In doing so, they coalesced around a definable policy program, which led the researchers to name the theoretical perspective “programmatic approach” (Genieys &amp; Hassenteufel, <span>2012</span>).</p><p>Building on these bases, the programmatic approach has been extended further and applied to a variety of policy sectors and countries (Darviche et al., <span>2013</span>). In two more research projects by the French research group (MIRE and OPERA), the programmatic approach sheds light on elite trajectories and their influence on policymaking in France and the United States. Hence, programmatic actors have been found primarily in health policy, from within the state shaping the transformation of health care in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK (Genieys &amp; Smyrl, <span>2008b</span>; Hassenteufel et al., <span>2010</span>).</p><p>Originally sticking to the idea of programmatic elites and the idea of sectoral competition between elite actors that eventually leads to policy change, Hornung and Bandelow (<span>2020</span>) published the first version of the “Programmatic Action Framework.” As Figure 1 shows, the framework included a variety of elite sociological considerations on the transformation of programmatic actors into programmatic elites, the methodological tools to identify these actors, and a struggle between elites as the major explanation for policy change and sectoral strength of an elite group. Thereby, it keeps the terminology of elites and “austerians” as counterparts to custodians of state, as depicting a conflict between spending ministries and the Ministry of Finance as the ministry seeking to implement austerity measures (Genieys &amp; Smyrl, <span>2008b</span>, p. 78). It did not yet include testable hypotheses on the success of elites and programs, apart from the implicit postulations that the elements that would identify collective action of a programmatic elite would also be drivers of their success the more present they are.</p><p>Although empirical research on the phenomenon of programmatic elites lives on and has been recently applied to Turkish foreign policy (Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm, <span>2020</span>), the PAF has been further developed by the integration of social psychological insights of the Social Identity Approach (SIA) (Haslam, <span>2001</span>; Hogg &amp; Reid, <span>2006</span>; Hornsey, <span>2008</span>; Light, <span>2015</span>) and the respective relevance of social group memberships and group dynamics. In this view, the programmatic groups that actors form are informal social groups whose identity influences the preferences and behaviors of actors populating the policy process (Hornung et al., <span>2019</span>). While the key argument remains the same—programmatic groups form on the basis of biographical ties and use policy programs as means to career-related and ideological ends—the assumptions and hypotheses are slightly modified to further clarify the theoretical argument and distinguish PAF from existing theories of the policy process. The PAF thereby is also suitable to add to the combination of theory and empirics in public administration research, which has been criticized as lacking in contemporary research (Peters &amp; Pierre, <span>2017</span>).</p><p>A first, central modification has been carried out with regard to the inclusion of the SIA approach, as a psychological model of the individual underlying all further theorizing on actor strategies, preferences, and behavior. With the programmatic approach assuming policy change to be the result of competing programmatic elites that are shaped by their common biographical trajectories, there is a clear combination bureaucratic objective to enhance authority and careers with the biographical social identity of policy actors, or what Thorne (<span>2017</span>) terms professional identity.</p><p>Figure 2 visualizes this version of the PAF. It assumes that policy professionals with their respective social identities coexist. At the some point in time, some policy professionals will be bound together by their homogeneous career trajectories and experiences, although they each occupy different positions and hold different resources. Mostly, they are in a somewhat medium position in their respective organization, be it civil service, politics, or sectoral associations. When they meet and collaborate at some occasion, and when this collaboration is repeated and intensified, the actors will become programmatic actors and develop a joint policy program. At this point, the policy program takes over the role as defining element of the social identity of this programmatic group and thus shapes a programmatic identity. In this perspective of PAF, programmatic groups either pursue policy change or policy stability, depending on whether they are already dominant or still emerging. Who wins in the struggle for influential positions and authority is decided by several program-related and actor-related characteristics. These factors of success include actors’ resources, alliances, institutionalization, and the program's coherence, flexibility, and narrative.</p><p>However, this picture of PAF implicitly assumes that an emerging programmatic group always faces a dominant programmatic group with whom it competes over authority. It also does not explicitly include the term programmatic group, but only programmatic actors and policy professionals, which are defined in the original programmatic approach as those directly involved in public policymaking (Genieys &amp; Smyrl, <span>2008a</span>, p. 29) and an established term in policy process research to describe those that are employed rather than elected to positions in which they can directly influence policymaking (Svallfors, <span>2016</span>). Up to then, however, PAF applications were still confusing in who exactly would or even could be members of programmatic groups. It remained open whether members would only be policy professionals and for the most part bureaucrats, or whether they would also include other policy actors (such as elected partisan professionals). The question here is, also, whether this matters to the key argument of PAF, namely that actors that are directly concerned with the policymaking process—in one way or the other—always seek to increase their authority and advance their careers and use biographical ties and programmatic content to achieve these goals. In other words, studies on ministerial careers in France also indicate that there are many ways to the top, which are less dependent on personal characteristics—apart from ambition—but personal relations that are established through various channels (Dogan, <span>1979</span>, p. 1 + 16). Furthermore, the question of how institutional opportunities and constraints would further or hinder programmatic action was insufficiently addressed in this PAF version. This critique fostered an update of the PAF, which is presented by Bandelow et al. (<span>2021</span>) in this issue.</p><p>The contributions by Bandelow et al. (<span>2021</span>) and Hassenteufel and Genieys (<span>2021</span>) in this issue present the twin pillars of the current state of research on programmatic action, both theoretically and empirically. The first explicitly sets out the theoretical assumptions upon which the model and the hypotheses of the PAF are built. Supposing that policy actors are motivated by and seeking increased authority in a policy sector, their behavior is to follow the strategies that are likely to help them achieve this goal. Further assuming that increased authority is the result of a successfully promoted policy idea and collaboration with other actors, the notion of programmatic groups describes exactly the coming together of policy actors around policy programs to foster their careers. The policy program then becomes the guiding normative principle for programmatic actors, not out of an ideological but a strategic interest. Building on these assumptions, the PAF presents a theoretical model of policy change described in detail in the contribution by Bandelow et al. (<span>2021</span>) and formulates hypotheses on the formation of programmatic groups, and their personal and programmatic success (Figure 3):</p><p>Proceeding from the theoretical foundations, Hassenteufel and Genieys (<span>2021</span>) emphasize how to empirically assess programmatic action. They outline the methodological duality in the study of programmatic action that rests on two different but by far not incompatible approaches, that of elite sociology and policy research. Combining these methodologies leads to a unified research protocol that is intentionally standardized to allow for comparability of findings in programmatic action research across contexts. Figure 4 visualizes this dual approach to programmatic action, one elite sociological starting from positional and sociological analyses, and one rather inspired by policy research, with a focus on discourse and relational analyses in the form of networks. Both task 1 and task 2 can therefore be taken as starting points, respectively, proceeding with the other and finally ending with task 3. Even if not applied in full, parts of this research protocol may well be used to gather stand-alone evidence on the existence of programmatic action. This has been done with regard to the biographical analysis (Hassenteufel, <span>2012</span>) and discourse analysis (Bandelow &amp; Hornung, <span>2019</span>).</p><p>That the methods established to research programmatic action are indeed suitable to investigate programmatic action also in other parts of the world, beyond Europe and “Western” democracies, is demonstrated by two more contributions in this issue. These follow partly the elite sociological approach to programmatic action and partly that of policy research. Duque (<span>2021</span>) applies the former perspective to higher education policies in Chile and Colombia. Comparing quality assurance policies, he poses the question why despite similar policy instruments used in the two countries, the approaches to assure quality in higher education differed substantially after the adoption of the policy program. An integration of institutional perspectives of layering and path dependence corroborates the finding extracted also from interviews that while one programmatic group was able to institutionalize its policies, the other suffered from instrumental layering that weakened the original ideas of its policy program.</p><p>Studying health policy in Brazil, Davidian (<span>2021</span>) equally applies the PAF in an elite sociological way to the policies of social protection. Brazilian health policy reforms have been found to be essentially shaped by the sanitaristas, a group of actors from medical professions and healthcare professionals. Tracing the influence of this group as a programmatic group, she shows how the programmatic actors under the authoritarian regime first needed to stay at the universities, and they managed to occupy central positions in the context of institutional transformation and decentralization. Thereby, the contribution outlines how the PAF may enhance the explanations of stability in times of institutional change.</p><p>Enhancing the original field of application of French defense policy, Faure (<span>2020</span>) analyzes French warfare policy against the backdrop of the PAF. Two competing groups whom Faure denotes as custodians and austerians, respectively, advocated the import of external or further use of national fighter jets. The victory of the sovereigntist public action program can be explained by closer interpersonal ties at the level of decision making and a larger termed programmatic clique that also involves industrial actors. Thereby, the contribution is strongly inspired by the original view on programmatic groups as competing elite groups that are struggling over authority in a sector.</p><p>Adding more explicitly to the institutions of programmatic action and policy research, Hornung (<span>2021</span>) investigates the institutional characteristics in France and Germany that have led to the success or failure of policy programs beyond the financial crisis. She finds that a crucial explanation for long-term policy program stability in the stability of institutions themselves. However, the durability of policy programs, at the top of their cyclical pattern (Bandelow &amp; Hornung, <span>2020</span>), seems to also depend on the extent to which the policy program fits the existing institutional structures of a policy sector. If it contradicts the institutions, chances are high that the policy program will only insufficiently be institutionalized, which will eventually seal its end.</p><p>The published contributions on the PAF in this issue show numerous tying knots for further studies. One concerns the extension of PAF analyses to other policy sectors, which Duque (<span>2021</span>) exemplifies by his application to higher education policy. Another concerns the application to other political systems. Here, also, Duque (<span>2021</span>) and Davidian (<span>2021</span>) have made the case for a fruitful transferability of the PAF to authoritarian regimes like Chile, Colombia, and Brazil. These contributions turn attention to the institutions relevant to programmatic action, something which Hornung (<span>2021</span>) also looks further into. Future research should therefore place more emphasis on how political and sectoral institutions impact programmatic action. This also concerns the type of programmatic groups that one is likely to find in different systems, as Faure (<span>2020</span>) shows for warfare policy.</p><p>Apart from these research agendas concretely addressed by the contributions in this issue, the core concepts of the PAF are open to further refinement. Especially the notion of programmatic groups as social groups in the understanding of social psychology would profit from a further cross-fertilization of policy process research and psychological research. This encompasses among others the following research questions: In what way do group dynamics impact programmatic action and the change of programmatic groups and policy programs? How do social group memberships and programmatic group membership in particular affect policy actors and individual preferences and behavior? To what extent do programmatic group characteristics play out in inter-group relations? How can the concept of programmatic action be combined with other theoretical perspectives, such as policy instruments (Brunn, <span>2020</span>)?</p><p>What should also be addressed and reflected on in further studies is the relation between programmatic action and the public. Partly, this has been done with regard to discourse analyses through which programmatic actors can be identified via shared discourse elements in the media. But programmatic actors may also instrumentalize and use the public to push for their policy program and to provide a favorable environment to foster programmatic action.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"7 S1","pages":"6-13"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7000,"publicationDate":"2021-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1110","citationCount":"4","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Informal social groups and policy programs: A Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) on policymaking\",\"authors\":\"Nils C. Bandelow,&nbsp;Johanna Hornung\",\"doi\":\"10.1002/epa2.1110\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>It was summer 2016 when the research group of the later funded project on “Programmatic Action in Times of Austerity” (ProAcTA) first met in the south of France. Six months later, it had worked out a project proposal that was granted by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under the grant numbers ANR-17-FRAL-0008–01 and DFG BA 1912/3-1. This is where the story of the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) formally begins, although it bases on a variety of previous work on the programmatic approach. Telling this story and presenting the final project results is the core theme of this introductory contribution on “Informal Social Groups and Policy Programs: A Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) on Policymaking.”</p><p>Even before the meeting in 2016, the core research group around the programmatic approach, consisting majorly of (in alphabetical order) William Genieys, Patrick Hassenteufel, and Marc Smyrl, postulated the idea that biographical homogeneity may build the basis for cooperation between policy actors and shape public policy over a longer period of time. This idea dates back to the beginning of the 2000s and is rooted in the observation of sectoral elites emerging in France from the grounds of homogenous education and resources (Genieys, <span>2005</span>; Genieys &amp; Hassenteufel, <span>2001</span>). Defending the budget and authority in their policy sector, the elite actors have been denoted as custodians of state (Genieys, <span>2010</span>), struggling with their counterparts, designated as austerians (derived from austerity), over financial and regulative resources. In doing so, they coalesced around a definable policy program, which led the researchers to name the theoretical perspective “programmatic approach” (Genieys &amp; Hassenteufel, <span>2012</span>).</p><p>Building on these bases, the programmatic approach has been extended further and applied to a variety of policy sectors and countries (Darviche et al., <span>2013</span>). In two more research projects by the French research group (MIRE and OPERA), the programmatic approach sheds light on elite trajectories and their influence on policymaking in France and the United States. Hence, programmatic actors have been found primarily in health policy, from within the state shaping the transformation of health care in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK (Genieys &amp; Smyrl, <span>2008b</span>; Hassenteufel et al., <span>2010</span>).</p><p>Originally sticking to the idea of programmatic elites and the idea of sectoral competition between elite actors that eventually leads to policy change, Hornung and Bandelow (<span>2020</span>) published the first version of the “Programmatic Action Framework.” As Figure 1 shows, the framework included a variety of elite sociological considerations on the transformation of programmatic actors into programmatic elites, the methodological tools to identify these actors, and a struggle between elites as the major explanation for policy change and sectoral strength of an elite group. Thereby, it keeps the terminology of elites and “austerians” as counterparts to custodians of state, as depicting a conflict between spending ministries and the Ministry of Finance as the ministry seeking to implement austerity measures (Genieys &amp; Smyrl, <span>2008b</span>, p. 78). It did not yet include testable hypotheses on the success of elites and programs, apart from the implicit postulations that the elements that would identify collective action of a programmatic elite would also be drivers of their success the more present they are.</p><p>Although empirical research on the phenomenon of programmatic elites lives on and has been recently applied to Turkish foreign policy (Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm, <span>2020</span>), the PAF has been further developed by the integration of social psychological insights of the Social Identity Approach (SIA) (Haslam, <span>2001</span>; Hogg &amp; Reid, <span>2006</span>; Hornsey, <span>2008</span>; Light, <span>2015</span>) and the respective relevance of social group memberships and group dynamics. In this view, the programmatic groups that actors form are informal social groups whose identity influences the preferences and behaviors of actors populating the policy process (Hornung et al., <span>2019</span>). While the key argument remains the same—programmatic groups form on the basis of biographical ties and use policy programs as means to career-related and ideological ends—the assumptions and hypotheses are slightly modified to further clarify the theoretical argument and distinguish PAF from existing theories of the policy process. The PAF thereby is also suitable to add to the combination of theory and empirics in public administration research, which has been criticized as lacking in contemporary research (Peters &amp; Pierre, <span>2017</span>).</p><p>A first, central modification has been carried out with regard to the inclusion of the SIA approach, as a psychological model of the individual underlying all further theorizing on actor strategies, preferences, and behavior. With the programmatic approach assuming policy change to be the result of competing programmatic elites that are shaped by their common biographical trajectories, there is a clear combination bureaucratic objective to enhance authority and careers with the biographical social identity of policy actors, or what Thorne (<span>2017</span>) terms professional identity.</p><p>Figure 2 visualizes this version of the PAF. It assumes that policy professionals with their respective social identities coexist. At the some point in time, some policy professionals will be bound together by their homogeneous career trajectories and experiences, although they each occupy different positions and hold different resources. Mostly, they are in a somewhat medium position in their respective organization, be it civil service, politics, or sectoral associations. When they meet and collaborate at some occasion, and when this collaboration is repeated and intensified, the actors will become programmatic actors and develop a joint policy program. At this point, the policy program takes over the role as defining element of the social identity of this programmatic group and thus shapes a programmatic identity. In this perspective of PAF, programmatic groups either pursue policy change or policy stability, depending on whether they are already dominant or still emerging. Who wins in the struggle for influential positions and authority is decided by several program-related and actor-related characteristics. These factors of success include actors’ resources, alliances, institutionalization, and the program's coherence, flexibility, and narrative.</p><p>However, this picture of PAF implicitly assumes that an emerging programmatic group always faces a dominant programmatic group with whom it competes over authority. It also does not explicitly include the term programmatic group, but only programmatic actors and policy professionals, which are defined in the original programmatic approach as those directly involved in public policymaking (Genieys &amp; Smyrl, <span>2008a</span>, p. 29) and an established term in policy process research to describe those that are employed rather than elected to positions in which they can directly influence policymaking (Svallfors, <span>2016</span>). Up to then, however, PAF applications were still confusing in who exactly would or even could be members of programmatic groups. It remained open whether members would only be policy professionals and for the most part bureaucrats, or whether they would also include other policy actors (such as elected partisan professionals). The question here is, also, whether this matters to the key argument of PAF, namely that actors that are directly concerned with the policymaking process—in one way or the other—always seek to increase their authority and advance their careers and use biographical ties and programmatic content to achieve these goals. In other words, studies on ministerial careers in France also indicate that there are many ways to the top, which are less dependent on personal characteristics—apart from ambition—but personal relations that are established through various channels (Dogan, <span>1979</span>, p. 1 + 16). Furthermore, the question of how institutional opportunities and constraints would further or hinder programmatic action was insufficiently addressed in this PAF version. This critique fostered an update of the PAF, which is presented by Bandelow et al. (<span>2021</span>) in this issue.</p><p>The contributions by Bandelow et al. (<span>2021</span>) and Hassenteufel and Genieys (<span>2021</span>) in this issue present the twin pillars of the current state of research on programmatic action, both theoretically and empirically. The first explicitly sets out the theoretical assumptions upon which the model and the hypotheses of the PAF are built. Supposing that policy actors are motivated by and seeking increased authority in a policy sector, their behavior is to follow the strategies that are likely to help them achieve this goal. Further assuming that increased authority is the result of a successfully promoted policy idea and collaboration with other actors, the notion of programmatic groups describes exactly the coming together of policy actors around policy programs to foster their careers. The policy program then becomes the guiding normative principle for programmatic actors, not out of an ideological but a strategic interest. Building on these assumptions, the PAF presents a theoretical model of policy change described in detail in the contribution by Bandelow et al. (<span>2021</span>) and formulates hypotheses on the formation of programmatic groups, and their personal and programmatic success (Figure 3):</p><p>Proceeding from the theoretical foundations, Hassenteufel and Genieys (<span>2021</span>) emphasize how to empirically assess programmatic action. They outline the methodological duality in the study of programmatic action that rests on two different but by far not incompatible approaches, that of elite sociology and policy research. Combining these methodologies leads to a unified research protocol that is intentionally standardized to allow for comparability of findings in programmatic action research across contexts. Figure 4 visualizes this dual approach to programmatic action, one elite sociological starting from positional and sociological analyses, and one rather inspired by policy research, with a focus on discourse and relational analyses in the form of networks. Both task 1 and task 2 can therefore be taken as starting points, respectively, proceeding with the other and finally ending with task 3. Even if not applied in full, parts of this research protocol may well be used to gather stand-alone evidence on the existence of programmatic action. This has been done with regard to the biographical analysis (Hassenteufel, <span>2012</span>) and discourse analysis (Bandelow &amp; Hornung, <span>2019</span>).</p><p>That the methods established to research programmatic action are indeed suitable to investigate programmatic action also in other parts of the world, beyond Europe and “Western” democracies, is demonstrated by two more contributions in this issue. These follow partly the elite sociological approach to programmatic action and partly that of policy research. Duque (<span>2021</span>) applies the former perspective to higher education policies in Chile and Colombia. Comparing quality assurance policies, he poses the question why despite similar policy instruments used in the two countries, the approaches to assure quality in higher education differed substantially after the adoption of the policy program. An integration of institutional perspectives of layering and path dependence corroborates the finding extracted also from interviews that while one programmatic group was able to institutionalize its policies, the other suffered from instrumental layering that weakened the original ideas of its policy program.</p><p>Studying health policy in Brazil, Davidian (<span>2021</span>) equally applies the PAF in an elite sociological way to the policies of social protection. Brazilian health policy reforms have been found to be essentially shaped by the sanitaristas, a group of actors from medical professions and healthcare professionals. Tracing the influence of this group as a programmatic group, she shows how the programmatic actors under the authoritarian regime first needed to stay at the universities, and they managed to occupy central positions in the context of institutional transformation and decentralization. Thereby, the contribution outlines how the PAF may enhance the explanations of stability in times of institutional change.</p><p>Enhancing the original field of application of French defense policy, Faure (<span>2020</span>) analyzes French warfare policy against the backdrop of the PAF. Two competing groups whom Faure denotes as custodians and austerians, respectively, advocated the import of external or further use of national fighter jets. The victory of the sovereigntist public action program can be explained by closer interpersonal ties at the level of decision making and a larger termed programmatic clique that also involves industrial actors. Thereby, the contribution is strongly inspired by the original view on programmatic groups as competing elite groups that are struggling over authority in a sector.</p><p>Adding more explicitly to the institutions of programmatic action and policy research, Hornung (<span>2021</span>) investigates the institutional characteristics in France and Germany that have led to the success or failure of policy programs beyond the financial crisis. She finds that a crucial explanation for long-term policy program stability in the stability of institutions themselves. However, the durability of policy programs, at the top of their cyclical pattern (Bandelow &amp; Hornung, <span>2020</span>), seems to also depend on the extent to which the policy program fits the existing institutional structures of a policy sector. If it contradicts the institutions, chances are high that the policy program will only insufficiently be institutionalized, which will eventually seal its end.</p><p>The published contributions on the PAF in this issue show numerous tying knots for further studies. One concerns the extension of PAF analyses to other policy sectors, which Duque (<span>2021</span>) exemplifies by his application to higher education policy. Another concerns the application to other political systems. Here, also, Duque (<span>2021</span>) and Davidian (<span>2021</span>) have made the case for a fruitful transferability of the PAF to authoritarian regimes like Chile, Colombia, and Brazil. These contributions turn attention to the institutions relevant to programmatic action, something which Hornung (<span>2021</span>) also looks further into. Future research should therefore place more emphasis on how political and sectoral institutions impact programmatic action. This also concerns the type of programmatic groups that one is likely to find in different systems, as Faure (<span>2020</span>) shows for warfare policy.</p><p>Apart from these research agendas concretely addressed by the contributions in this issue, the core concepts of the PAF are open to further refinement. Especially the notion of programmatic groups as social groups in the understanding of social psychology would profit from a further cross-fertilization of policy process research and psychological research. This encompasses among others the following research questions: In what way do group dynamics impact programmatic action and the change of programmatic groups and policy programs? How do social group memberships and programmatic group membership in particular affect policy actors and individual preferences and behavior? To what extent do programmatic group characteristics play out in inter-group relations? How can the concept of programmatic action be combined with other theoretical perspectives, such as policy instruments (Brunn, <span>2020</span>)?</p><p>What should also be addressed and reflected on in further studies is the relation between programmatic action and the public. Partly, this has been done with regard to discourse analyses through which programmatic actors can be identified via shared discourse elements in the media. But programmatic actors may also instrumentalize and use the public to push for their policy program and to provide a favorable environment to foster programmatic action.</p>\",\"PeriodicalId\":52190,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"European Policy Analysis\",\"volume\":\"7 S1\",\"pages\":\"6-13\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":2.7000,\"publicationDate\":\"2021-02-24\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1110\",\"citationCount\":\"4\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"European Policy Analysis\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/epa2.1110\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q1\",\"JCRName\":\"POLITICAL SCIENCE\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"European Policy Analysis","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/epa2.1110","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4

摘要

将这些方法结合起来,形成了一个统一的研究协议,该协议经过有意的标准化,以使方案行动研究的结果在不同背景下具有可比性。图4显示了这种双重方案行动方法,一种是从位置和社会学分析开始的精英社会学方法,另一种是受到政策研究的启发,重点是网络形式的话语和关系分析。因此,任务1和任务2都可以分别作为起点,从另一个开始,最后以任务3结束。即使没有完全应用,该研究方案的部分内容也很可能被用来收集关于方案行动存在的独立证据。传记分析(Hassentufel,2012)和话语分析(Bandelow&amp;Hornung,2019)已经做到了这一点。为研究纲领性行动而建立的方法确实适合于调查世界其他地区的纲领性行动,而不仅仅是欧洲和“西方”民主国家,这一问题的另外两个贡献证明了这一观点。这部分遵循了精英社会学对方案行动的方法,部分遵循了政策研究的方法。杜克(2021)将前一种观点应用于智利和哥伦比亚的高等教育政策。在比较质量保证政策时,他提出了一个问题,即尽管两国使用了类似的政策工具,但在政策计划通过后,确保高等教育质量的方法却大不相同。分层和路径依赖的制度视角的整合证实了同样从访谈中提取的发现,即虽然一个方案小组能够将其政策制度化,但另一个方案团体却受到工具性分层的影响,削弱了其政策计划的原始理念。Davidian(2021)在研究巴西的卫生政策时,以精英社会学的方式将PAF同样应用于社会保护政策。人们发现,巴西的卫生政策改革基本上是由卫生工作者决定的,卫生工作者是一群来自医疗行业和医疗保健专业人员的行动者。她追踪了这一群体作为一个纲领性群体的影响,展示了威权政权下的纲领性行为者首先需要留在大学,他们如何在体制转型和权力下放的背景下占据核心地位。因此,该贡献概述了PAF如何在制度变革时期加强对稳定的解释。Faure(2020)在PAF的背景下分析了法国的战争政策,增强了法国国防政策的原始应用领域。福雷分别称之为保管人和紧缩主义者的两个竞争团体主张进口外部或进一步使用国家战斗机。主权公共行动计划的胜利可以用决策层面更紧密的人际关系和一个更大的计划集团来解释,该集团也涉及工业参与者。因此,这一贡献受到了最初的观点的强烈启发,即方案团体是在一个部门为权力而斗争的竞争精英团体。Hornung(2021)更明确地补充了计划行动和政策研究机构,调查了法国和德国在金融危机后导致政策计划成败的制度特征。她发现,长期政策计划稳定性的一个关键解释是机构本身的稳定性。然而,政策计划的持久性,在其周期性模式的顶端(Bandelow&amp;Hornung,2020),似乎也取决于政策计划在多大程度上适合政策部门的现有体制结构。如果它与制度相矛盾,那么政策计划很有可能只会不够制度化,最终导致其终结。本期发表的关于PAF的文章显示,许多问题有待进一步研究。其中一个问题涉及将PAF分析扩展到其他政策部门,杜克(2021)在高等教育政策中的应用就是例证。另一个问题是适用于其他政治制度。在这里,杜克(2021)和大卫安(2021)也提出了将PAF富有成效地移交给智利、哥伦比亚和巴西等独裁政权的理由。这些贡献将注意力转向了与方案行动相关的机构,Hornung(2021)也对此进行了进一步研究。因此,未来的研究应更加重视政治和部门机构如何影响方案行动。正如Faure(2020)在战争政策中所展示的那样,这也涉及到在不同系统中可能发现的程序组类型。 除了这一问题中的贡献具体涉及的这些研究议程外,PAF的核心概念还有待进一步完善。特别是在理解社会心理学时,将程序群体视为社会群体的概念将有助于政策过程研究和心理学研究的进一步交叉。这包括以下研究问题:群体动力学以何种方式影响计划行动以及计划群体和政策计划的变化?社会团体成员资格和计划团体成员资格如何影响政策参与者以及个人偏好和行为?程序性群体特征在多大程度上体现在群体间关系中?如何将方案行动的概念与其他理论观点相结合,如政策工具(Brunn,2020)?在进一步的研究中,还应该处理和反思方案行动与公众之间的关系。在一定程度上,这是在话语分析方面完成的,通过话语分析,可以通过媒体中的共享话语元素来识别节目参与者。但方案行动者也可以利用公众推动他们的政策方案,并为促进方案行动提供有利的环境。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。

Informal social groups and policy programs: A Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) on policymaking

Informal social groups and policy programs: A Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) on policymaking

It was summer 2016 when the research group of the later funded project on “Programmatic Action in Times of Austerity” (ProAcTA) first met in the south of France. Six months later, it had worked out a project proposal that was granted by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under the grant numbers ANR-17-FRAL-0008–01 and DFG BA 1912/3-1. This is where the story of the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) formally begins, although it bases on a variety of previous work on the programmatic approach. Telling this story and presenting the final project results is the core theme of this introductory contribution on “Informal Social Groups and Policy Programs: A Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) on Policymaking.”

Even before the meeting in 2016, the core research group around the programmatic approach, consisting majorly of (in alphabetical order) William Genieys, Patrick Hassenteufel, and Marc Smyrl, postulated the idea that biographical homogeneity may build the basis for cooperation between policy actors and shape public policy over a longer period of time. This idea dates back to the beginning of the 2000s and is rooted in the observation of sectoral elites emerging in France from the grounds of homogenous education and resources (Genieys, 2005; Genieys & Hassenteufel, 2001). Defending the budget and authority in their policy sector, the elite actors have been denoted as custodians of state (Genieys, 2010), struggling with their counterparts, designated as austerians (derived from austerity), over financial and regulative resources. In doing so, they coalesced around a definable policy program, which led the researchers to name the theoretical perspective “programmatic approach” (Genieys & Hassenteufel, 2012).

Building on these bases, the programmatic approach has been extended further and applied to a variety of policy sectors and countries (Darviche et al., 2013). In two more research projects by the French research group (MIRE and OPERA), the programmatic approach sheds light on elite trajectories and their influence on policymaking in France and the United States. Hence, programmatic actors have been found primarily in health policy, from within the state shaping the transformation of health care in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK (Genieys & Smyrl, 2008b; Hassenteufel et al., 2010).

Originally sticking to the idea of programmatic elites and the idea of sectoral competition between elite actors that eventually leads to policy change, Hornung and Bandelow (2020) published the first version of the “Programmatic Action Framework.” As Figure 1 shows, the framework included a variety of elite sociological considerations on the transformation of programmatic actors into programmatic elites, the methodological tools to identify these actors, and a struggle between elites as the major explanation for policy change and sectoral strength of an elite group. Thereby, it keeps the terminology of elites and “austerians” as counterparts to custodians of state, as depicting a conflict between spending ministries and the Ministry of Finance as the ministry seeking to implement austerity measures (Genieys & Smyrl, 2008b, p. 78). It did not yet include testable hypotheses on the success of elites and programs, apart from the implicit postulations that the elements that would identify collective action of a programmatic elite would also be drivers of their success the more present they are.

Although empirical research on the phenomenon of programmatic elites lives on and has been recently applied to Turkish foreign policy (Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm, 2020), the PAF has been further developed by the integration of social psychological insights of the Social Identity Approach (SIA) (Haslam, 2001; Hogg & Reid, 2006; Hornsey, 2008; Light, 2015) and the respective relevance of social group memberships and group dynamics. In this view, the programmatic groups that actors form are informal social groups whose identity influences the preferences and behaviors of actors populating the policy process (Hornung et al., 2019). While the key argument remains the same—programmatic groups form on the basis of biographical ties and use policy programs as means to career-related and ideological ends—the assumptions and hypotheses are slightly modified to further clarify the theoretical argument and distinguish PAF from existing theories of the policy process. The PAF thereby is also suitable to add to the combination of theory and empirics in public administration research, which has been criticized as lacking in contemporary research (Peters & Pierre, 2017).

A first, central modification has been carried out with regard to the inclusion of the SIA approach, as a psychological model of the individual underlying all further theorizing on actor strategies, preferences, and behavior. With the programmatic approach assuming policy change to be the result of competing programmatic elites that are shaped by their common biographical trajectories, there is a clear combination bureaucratic objective to enhance authority and careers with the biographical social identity of policy actors, or what Thorne (2017) terms professional identity.

Figure 2 visualizes this version of the PAF. It assumes that policy professionals with their respective social identities coexist. At the some point in time, some policy professionals will be bound together by their homogeneous career trajectories and experiences, although they each occupy different positions and hold different resources. Mostly, they are in a somewhat medium position in their respective organization, be it civil service, politics, or sectoral associations. When they meet and collaborate at some occasion, and when this collaboration is repeated and intensified, the actors will become programmatic actors and develop a joint policy program. At this point, the policy program takes over the role as defining element of the social identity of this programmatic group and thus shapes a programmatic identity. In this perspective of PAF, programmatic groups either pursue policy change or policy stability, depending on whether they are already dominant or still emerging. Who wins in the struggle for influential positions and authority is decided by several program-related and actor-related characteristics. These factors of success include actors’ resources, alliances, institutionalization, and the program's coherence, flexibility, and narrative.

However, this picture of PAF implicitly assumes that an emerging programmatic group always faces a dominant programmatic group with whom it competes over authority. It also does not explicitly include the term programmatic group, but only programmatic actors and policy professionals, which are defined in the original programmatic approach as those directly involved in public policymaking (Genieys & Smyrl, 2008a, p. 29) and an established term in policy process research to describe those that are employed rather than elected to positions in which they can directly influence policymaking (Svallfors, 2016). Up to then, however, PAF applications were still confusing in who exactly would or even could be members of programmatic groups. It remained open whether members would only be policy professionals and for the most part bureaucrats, or whether they would also include other policy actors (such as elected partisan professionals). The question here is, also, whether this matters to the key argument of PAF, namely that actors that are directly concerned with the policymaking process—in one way or the other—always seek to increase their authority and advance their careers and use biographical ties and programmatic content to achieve these goals. In other words, studies on ministerial careers in France also indicate that there are many ways to the top, which are less dependent on personal characteristics—apart from ambition—but personal relations that are established through various channels (Dogan, 1979, p. 1 + 16). Furthermore, the question of how institutional opportunities and constraints would further or hinder programmatic action was insufficiently addressed in this PAF version. This critique fostered an update of the PAF, which is presented by Bandelow et al. (2021) in this issue.

The contributions by Bandelow et al. (2021) and Hassenteufel and Genieys (2021) in this issue present the twin pillars of the current state of research on programmatic action, both theoretically and empirically. The first explicitly sets out the theoretical assumptions upon which the model and the hypotheses of the PAF are built. Supposing that policy actors are motivated by and seeking increased authority in a policy sector, their behavior is to follow the strategies that are likely to help them achieve this goal. Further assuming that increased authority is the result of a successfully promoted policy idea and collaboration with other actors, the notion of programmatic groups describes exactly the coming together of policy actors around policy programs to foster their careers. The policy program then becomes the guiding normative principle for programmatic actors, not out of an ideological but a strategic interest. Building on these assumptions, the PAF presents a theoretical model of policy change described in detail in the contribution by Bandelow et al. (2021) and formulates hypotheses on the formation of programmatic groups, and their personal and programmatic success (Figure 3):

Proceeding from the theoretical foundations, Hassenteufel and Genieys (2021) emphasize how to empirically assess programmatic action. They outline the methodological duality in the study of programmatic action that rests on two different but by far not incompatible approaches, that of elite sociology and policy research. Combining these methodologies leads to a unified research protocol that is intentionally standardized to allow for comparability of findings in programmatic action research across contexts. Figure 4 visualizes this dual approach to programmatic action, one elite sociological starting from positional and sociological analyses, and one rather inspired by policy research, with a focus on discourse and relational analyses in the form of networks. Both task 1 and task 2 can therefore be taken as starting points, respectively, proceeding with the other and finally ending with task 3. Even if not applied in full, parts of this research protocol may well be used to gather stand-alone evidence on the existence of programmatic action. This has been done with regard to the biographical analysis (Hassenteufel, 2012) and discourse analysis (Bandelow & Hornung, 2019).

That the methods established to research programmatic action are indeed suitable to investigate programmatic action also in other parts of the world, beyond Europe and “Western” democracies, is demonstrated by two more contributions in this issue. These follow partly the elite sociological approach to programmatic action and partly that of policy research. Duque (2021) applies the former perspective to higher education policies in Chile and Colombia. Comparing quality assurance policies, he poses the question why despite similar policy instruments used in the two countries, the approaches to assure quality in higher education differed substantially after the adoption of the policy program. An integration of institutional perspectives of layering and path dependence corroborates the finding extracted also from interviews that while one programmatic group was able to institutionalize its policies, the other suffered from instrumental layering that weakened the original ideas of its policy program.

Studying health policy in Brazil, Davidian (2021) equally applies the PAF in an elite sociological way to the policies of social protection. Brazilian health policy reforms have been found to be essentially shaped by the sanitaristas, a group of actors from medical professions and healthcare professionals. Tracing the influence of this group as a programmatic group, she shows how the programmatic actors under the authoritarian regime first needed to stay at the universities, and they managed to occupy central positions in the context of institutional transformation and decentralization. Thereby, the contribution outlines how the PAF may enhance the explanations of stability in times of institutional change.

Enhancing the original field of application of French defense policy, Faure (2020) analyzes French warfare policy against the backdrop of the PAF. Two competing groups whom Faure denotes as custodians and austerians, respectively, advocated the import of external or further use of national fighter jets. The victory of the sovereigntist public action program can be explained by closer interpersonal ties at the level of decision making and a larger termed programmatic clique that also involves industrial actors. Thereby, the contribution is strongly inspired by the original view on programmatic groups as competing elite groups that are struggling over authority in a sector.

Adding more explicitly to the institutions of programmatic action and policy research, Hornung (2021) investigates the institutional characteristics in France and Germany that have led to the success or failure of policy programs beyond the financial crisis. She finds that a crucial explanation for long-term policy program stability in the stability of institutions themselves. However, the durability of policy programs, at the top of their cyclical pattern (Bandelow & Hornung, 2020), seems to also depend on the extent to which the policy program fits the existing institutional structures of a policy sector. If it contradicts the institutions, chances are high that the policy program will only insufficiently be institutionalized, which will eventually seal its end.

The published contributions on the PAF in this issue show numerous tying knots for further studies. One concerns the extension of PAF analyses to other policy sectors, which Duque (2021) exemplifies by his application to higher education policy. Another concerns the application to other political systems. Here, also, Duque (2021) and Davidian (2021) have made the case for a fruitful transferability of the PAF to authoritarian regimes like Chile, Colombia, and Brazil. These contributions turn attention to the institutions relevant to programmatic action, something which Hornung (2021) also looks further into. Future research should therefore place more emphasis on how political and sectoral institutions impact programmatic action. This also concerns the type of programmatic groups that one is likely to find in different systems, as Faure (2020) shows for warfare policy.

Apart from these research agendas concretely addressed by the contributions in this issue, the core concepts of the PAF are open to further refinement. Especially the notion of programmatic groups as social groups in the understanding of social psychology would profit from a further cross-fertilization of policy process research and psychological research. This encompasses among others the following research questions: In what way do group dynamics impact programmatic action and the change of programmatic groups and policy programs? How do social group memberships and programmatic group membership in particular affect policy actors and individual preferences and behavior? To what extent do programmatic group characteristics play out in inter-group relations? How can the concept of programmatic action be combined with other theoretical perspectives, such as policy instruments (Brunn, 2020)?

What should also be addressed and reflected on in further studies is the relation between programmatic action and the public. Partly, this has been done with regard to discourse analyses through which programmatic actors can be identified via shared discourse elements in the media. But programmatic actors may also instrumentalize and use the public to push for their policy program and to provide a favorable environment to foster programmatic action.

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来源期刊
European Policy Analysis
European Policy Analysis Social Sciences-Public Administration
CiteScore
9.70
自引率
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