Policy Sciences: Policy Analytic Research

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Ever since the emergence of policy sciences as a field of research in the late 1950s, on-going efforts have been invested in its positioning as an independent, distinct branch of social sciences, including the adoption of established social sciences methodologies and research approaches. Even so, in contrast to social sciences research, which aims at understanding social phenomena, promoting change that improves public well-being, justice, and equality, is the fundamental value in the policy sciences. As a scholar, my agenda is to advance policy sciences research that guides public policymaking in meeting its fundamental goals of addressing social problems, achieving sustainable development, enhancing economic growth, and, in general, creating public value. To further unfold the reciprocal relationships between policymaking and social change, my research focuses on the role of outliers in the evolution, formation, and implications of public policy.

Shifting the focus to outliers draws on my fundamental understanding that the common approach within most social sciences research to outliers as undesirable overshadows the invaluable knowledge policy sciences can produce from studying outliers. Commonly defined as observations inconsistent with general patterns in a data set, outliers often exert disproportionate influence in commonly-used statistical estimation techniques and in general do not fit well with hypothesized generalizations. Hence, outliers are often viewed as unlucky realizations of random errors, and they are usually eliminated from data sets. Only rarely are outliers seen as contributing to research, mostly with respect to the development of theories.

Emphasizing the useful knowledge embedded in outliers, the recently introduced Outlier-ism draws on conventional qualitative and quantitative social science methods while providing valuable, often overlooked information for understanding the development, design, and implications of public policies together with David Weimer. More broadly, Outlier-ism suggests adopting a more policy-analytic perspective in policy studies as well as in research relevant to public problems. Introducing Outlier-ism draws on my previous studies, which vary in their subjects and methodology, yet all explore how outliers, i.e., exceptional and non-conventional social phenomena, influence, and are influenced by, policy. Moreover, demonstrating mechanisms, influences, and contributions of outliers to public life in various policy domains, including education, health, and welfare, allowed the development of new conceptual frameworks for policy research, which shift attention to novel, overlooked research paths.

Family capital is a conceptual framework that offers a new perspective on intergenerational mobility by capturing day-to-day family life practices, prioritizing education through nonmaterial resources. Shifting from the well-established notion of intergenerational educational mobility as “inheritance” of educational achievement, family capital emerged from exploring first-generation students as intergenerational breakthroughs. In addition to moving away from the customary deficit approach in the existing research, family capital also calls for a fundamental change in educational policies. Rather than disregarding the family as a unit and targeting individuals – as educational policies often do – the family capital perspective posits that educational policies be designed with the family unit as their target. The concept of family capital, which was published in 2009, sparked the interest of researchers and has already been cited in nearly 400 studies of intergenerational mobility.

Entrepreneurial exit is a conceptual framework that enriches the seminal work of Albert O. Hirschman: “Exit, Voice and Loyalty,” by suggesting that the citizens’ role within the public service sphere is not merely reactive, as often portrayed. Rather, citizens may play a proactive entrepreneurial role. The theory of entrepreneurial exit captures proactive initiation, production, and delivery of services – often specialized and complex – that traditionally was borne by a governmental organization with professional expertise mainly for its own use. More recently, together with two colleagues from CIDE, Mexico, we introduced gaming, as an additional, understudied response pattern to dissatisfaction, within which individuals aim to improve the personal outcome of public service delivery not by starting-up an alternative self-provision of a public service, but rather through exploiting, manipulating, or working around current rules and arrangements. To convey that noncompliant parental involvement in education may trigger reforms in formal public education, parental entrepreneurship was introduced to demonstrate noncompliance with education policy that renegotiates the foundations of the social contract between parents and the government, primarily in relation to professionalism, legitimacy, and authority.

Street-level divergence shifted attention from the well-documented noncompliance motivations and compliance barriers among street-level bureaucrats (e.g., teachers, nurses, social workers), to its understudied implications. Suggesting a more nuanced conceptualization for street-level bureaucrats’ noncompliance with policy, street-level divergence distinguishes patterns of noncompliance and theorizes the conditions under which policy noncompliance among street-level workers contributes to policy change.

Policy Dissonance reflects a generalization of these studies by theorizing a broader role for policy noncompliance in democracy. Rather than the common, well-established normative approach of noncompliance as an implementation problem, policy dissonance sparked the notion that noncompliance may manifest in social innovation that, when it gains broad social acceptance, may trigger a policy change that legitimizes the hitherto noncompliance.

To advance the understanding of noncompliance as an outlier phenomenon that influences policy, two comparative studies with colleagues from the UK and Sweden explored noncompliance with toddlers’ immunization. Suggesting a more dynamic and complex perspective on (non)compliance, we showed that variations in implementation may personalize an official public health service which is strictly structured . Moreover, street-level bureaucrats, as the first tier of government to experience public noncompliance with policy, develop strategies of negotiated compliance, during which policy-as-practiced bends or breaks the rules of policy-as-written. 

My studies of street-level bureaucrats as exercising noncompliance themselves, and as coping with it in service delivery, uncovered the significant influence of street-level management as a blind spot in both policy implementation and in public management scholarship. Street-level management distinguishes chief executive officers of street-level organizations, who are overarchingly in charge of, and accountable for, the direct-delivery of multiple policies to a local target population. Distinguishing street-level management as a distinct category of public management allows for a more nuanced, grounded understanding of what actually happens at the interstices between the formal adoption of policies and their direct-delivery to the local population. As the study of street-level management uncovered a “clientele-agent” perspective as the main lens through which implementation in street-level organizations is exercised, we proposed it as complementing the well-established state-agent and citizen-agent viewpoints on street-level work.

My current projects continue to focus on outliers and their role in the public sphere, with emphasis on the interrelationship between citizens, government, and policy implementation.