The politics of experimental policymaking

The aim of the Essex Accounting Centre (EAC) research seminar series is to support our world-class research activities in five key areas: accounting and global development; capital Markets, audit, regulation & reporting; publicness and resilience, precarity, exclusion & social justice; and environment, climate change & vulnerability. The seminar series is also expected to promote inter-disciplinary research that links the work of members of the centre with others both within the university and with external institutions.

Policy experimentation has been proposed as a key strategy for coping with increasingly complex policy challenges. Despite considerable academic discussion on public policy experiments, there is a lack of systematic analyses of the political dimensions of policy experimentation.

In this presentation we explore two theoretical angles that help shed light on how political motivations can affect experimental policymaking. First, we theorize on how political timeframes influence experimental policymaking. Drawing on theoretical discussions on experimental policymaking, public policy, electoral politics, and mediatization of politics, we outline expectations about how electoral and problem cycles may influence the timing, design, and learning from policy experiments.

Second, we discuss how policy actors’ perceptions of blame avoidance and credit claiming influence experimental policymaking. We outline expectations about how the mechanisms of blame avoidance and credit claiming can influence policymakers’ attitudes towards experiments and which contextual factors are likely to shape these dynamics. We probe the plausibility of our theoretical expectations using interview data from two different country contexts: Estonia and Finland.