Institutional environments and innovation in digital policy

Abstract

Over the past decade, technological changes have had a strong influence on society and science worldwide. Information and communications technology, big data, and artificial intelligence are only some digital innovations that have been transforming the research and practice of public policy. The impact of such technologies has recently become even more noticeable, for instance, through the prominence of machine learning chatbots. This raises several questions such as how to adapt institutions and regulatory processes to digital transformation, how such innovations can be used to enhance the design and implementation of policies, and how public policy and administration scholars should understand and make use of technologically driven futures. This third jubilee issue of Review of Policy Research (RPR) comprises six original articles which present a range of theoretical and empirical contributions to answering such questions. In the opening article, Kim et al. (2023) address the rising popularity of policy labs and examine to what extent they enhance the understanding and addressing of critical policy problems. To this end, they reviewed over 130 data-based policy labs across the world and their contribution to policy capacity. Most policy innovation labs are located in Europe and North America, initiated by governments or universities, and use various data types with a dominance of administrative data. Following the policy capacity framework by Wu et al. (2018), the authors differentiate between analytical, operational, and political policy capacity at the individual, organizational, and systemic level. The findings show that data-based policy labs enhance analytical and operational policy capacity at different levels but that they have only limited effects on providing political-based policy capacity. The article concludes with a future research agenda and suggestions for strategies to improve political capacity within policy innovation labs. These include promoting individuals' policy acumen as well as strengthening the environment for collaboratively learning about policy processes and political values on the organizational and systemic levels. Torfs et al. (2023) contribute to this issue with an application of the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET, Baumgartner et al., 2009, 2018) to analyze how institutional shifts impact digital policy change. Following an evolutionary perspective, the authors explored two decades of Belgian federal digital policy and its periods of policy stability (equilibrium) and change (punctuation). To this end, they analyze explanatory factors for negative and positive feedback mechanisms and the role of policy entrepreneurs. The methodological approach combines a distributional application of the PET with an explaining-outcome congruence case study, using documents, interviews, data on media coverage, regulation, and budgets. The authors illustrate that digital policy in Belgium is characterized by longer periods of stability and two periods of punctuation. It is shown that institutional shifts did impact Belgian digital policy. However, their explanatory power is limited as they lead to both positive and negative feedback mechanisms. More decisive factors in explaining digital policy (in)stability are attention allocation, policy entrepreneurs, and the political system. Torres and Fowler (2023) contribute to research on policy entrepreneurship with a study on the strategies bureaucrats used to change decision-making processes in the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). More specifically, the authors investigate how individuals drove organizational re-thinking on public participation and initiated the adoption of participatory technology assessment (pTA) within the space agency. The analysis of public documents and interviews reveals three main entrepreneurial strategies that helped shift the status quo and support citizen interaction in program design. The paper shows that the entrepreneurs reached out to and connected audiences across organizations in small-scale meetings where they presented a positive, solution-oriented reinterpretation of the program. In this discourse, they took a mediating position to have control over the narrative and decision-making process. Therefore, policy entrepreneurs, program-related group formation, and framing played an important role in the initiation of policy change within NASA. Di Giulio and Vecchi (2023) present further evidence for the influence of policy entrepreneurs and group formation on policy change with a case study on the public sector digitalization in Italy. After failed attempts to adopt digital technologies in the Italian public sector, the digital transformation agenda launched in 2016 was the first one to effectively induce policy change, despite the political instability at that time. Following theory-building process tracing (Beach & Pedersen, 2013), Di Giulio and Vecchi operationalize mechanisms that may explain this success, with a specific focus on related institutionalization processes. For this, they empirically investigate Italian innovation policymaking from 1993 to 2021. The results show that the Italian government used several strategies to increase organizational capacity and coordination as part of the 2016 digital agenda. This included engaging and appointing new professionals, restructuring the roles of governing bodies, and establishing new governmental agencies for digital transformation. This helped to build a community of policy entrepreneurs accountable for public sector digitalization which further created a bandwagon effect among implementers. Mukherjee et al. (2023) analyze how regulatory actors and processes surrounding digital innovation influence the creation of collectively shared and institutionally supported ideas of technological futures. Building on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015), the authors conducted 33 interviews with regulators of two emerging technologies in the USA, namely the genome editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV). The in-depth interviews were used to understand how involved actors envision technology-driven futures and the social structures that enable them. In both cases, experts related ideas on technologically driven futures to questions on institutional authority, technological novelty, and risk management. However, the CRISPR and CAV stakeholders' narratives also differed along these aspects. For instance, the authors found that interviewees' imagined futures reproduce their respective regulatory environments, including power relations and intraorganizational boundaries. Mukherjee et al. argue that such differences across regulatory sectors, including institutional arrangements, norms, and practices, influence the imaginary formation around technologies and how they shape the future. Zeng et al. (2023) present another study on digitalized administration processes with an analysis of platform governance in China. The authors elaborate on the advantages of platform-based organizational processes and reflect, however, that the concept of Government as a Platform (GaaP) has been less promising. Zeng et al. argue that the platform-enabled government (PEG) concept which aims to accommodate institutional boundaries is better suited to improve collaborative governance than the GaaP with its focus on eliminating boundaries. The authors test the implementation and impact of 123 PEG cases in China across three policy areas, namely, administrative review, law enforcement, and contact tracing. The results support that PEG is an effective form of holistic governance as it enables to integrate functions of multiple departments in one workflow while respecting institutional boundaries. For instance, PEG facilitates cross-boundary exchange while enabling officials to retain intellectual property rights. The study indicates that PEG is supported by decentralized political systems and middle-tier platforms.