Giliberto Capano- Professor
- Professor at University of Bologna
Giliberto Capano
- Professor
- Professor at University of Bologna
About
176
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Introduction
Giliberto Capano is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Bologna. He has been member of the Executive Committee of the International Political Science Association (2009-2014) and the co-founder of the of the International Public Policy Association. Actually he is member of the Executive Committee of the European Consortium of Political Research. He specializes in public plicy, policy design , policy instruments, comparative higher education policy.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
October 2014 - October 2017
Publications
Publications (176)
The goal of this paper is to contribute toward bridging the gap between policy design and implementation by focusing on domains, such as education, healthcare and community services , where policy implementation is largely left to the autonomous decision of public service providers, which are strategic actors themselves. More specifically, we sugge...
Bringing together the literature on policy design, policy capacity and policy making in multilevel systems, this paper argues that the effectiveness of policy design in federal countries depends, ceteris paribus, on the adequacy of federal and local policy capacities. Consequently, for policy design to be effective, federal policy capacity is assum...
The fifth edition of “Theories of the Policy Process” represents
a further step in consolidating these theories.
However, four of them—Advocacy Coalition Framework,
Multiple Streams Framework, Narrative Policy Framework,
and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory—exhibit a few
limitations in light of the characteristics of implementation
and policy instrume...
Theories of the policy process understand the dynamics of policymaking as the result of the interaction of structural and agency variables. While these theories tend to conceptualize structural variables in a careful manner, agency (i.e. the actions of individual agents, like policy entrepreneurs, policy leaders, policy brokers, and policy experts)...
Despite the growing interest in the policy work and analytical capacities of bureaucracies, these dimensions have not been treated as central to characterizing and understanding the role of senior civil servants in policymaking, which is usually conceptualized in terms of their relationship with policymakers or other organizational and societal fac...
There is no doubt that political science has always been characterised by a normative afflatus. Verba was deeply concerned with understanding how democracy works in practice and how it can survive over the course of time. Lasswell constantly argued that political science should focus on problem-solving in order to improve the quality of citizens’ l...
The rapid emergence and integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in higher education present both challenges and opportunities. There is a critical need to consolidate empirical evidence, existing practices, assessments, and normative discussions to reflect on the recent advancement and inform adaptation in higher education policie...
The study of scientific advisory committees (SACs) is a recurrent topic of research in public policy and public administration. Scholars are increasingly interested in analyzing the scientization of policy advice as well as the role played by knowledge-based policymaking processes. Despite recent developments in the field, SACs studies continue to...
La capacité d’analyse des politiques est une source essentielle de bonne gouvernance. Bien que les décideurs puissent acquérir cette capacité de différentes manières, il est clair que les ressources internes en termes de capacité analytique est stratégique pour faciliter l’élaboration des politiques. Ces ressources peuvent se concentrer dans des ty...
Policy design studies typically focus on broad policy goals and the types of tools that governments use to realize them. There is however limited scholarly understanding of how these goals and tools are operationalized "on-the-ground. " In this paper, we apply Capano and Howlett's 2024 Framework on the Micro-Dimensions of Policy Design to understan...
Three aspects of policy success-programme implementation, policy solution feasibility and political legitimacy and support-need to be at the front of mind when policies are formulated. Many uncertainties endemic to policy-making surround these issues and present considerable public management challenges. Many of these problems, however, are linked...
The current body of multidisciplinary literature on crisis management still has some unresolved problems. This paper focuses on the following four "controversial issues" in dealing with crises: the usefulness of emergency plans; early signal detection; decision-making amid high uncertainty ; and the centralization/decentralization dilemma. The pape...
Studying how public administrations proactively search for
information from interest groups provides a new perspective
for a better understanding of how bureaucratic policymaking
works and how civil servants interact with interest groups.
Building on data collected through an online survey submitted
to approximately 700 high-level public servants i...
Policy networks can propose solutions (policy communities , and epistemic communities), defend specific instruments (instrument constituencies), and program-matically prioritize change or stability (programmatic groups). This paper focuses on two specific networks that have been present in 30 years of administrative reform in Italy, and it empirica...
Policy studies have addressed many issues on the topic of policy change, generally following the ideas about policy composition set out by Hall and others. These typically view 'significant' policy change as related to alterations in the macro elements of policies, namely policy paradigms and governance preferences. These studies have also examined...
Policy advice has been the subject of ongoing research in the policy sciences as it raises fundamental issues about what constitutes policy knowledge, expertise, and their effects on policymaking. This introduction reviews the existing literature on the subject and introduces the themes motivating the articles in the issue. It highlights the need t...
Policy advice has been the subject of ongoing research in the policy sciences as it raises fundamental issues about what constitutes policy knowledge, expertise, and their effects on policymaking. This introduction reviews the existing literature on the subject and introduces the themes motivating the articles in the issue. It highlights the need t...
Policy analytical capacity is a pivotal source of good governance. Although this capacity can be acquired by decision makers in various ways, it is clear that the internal stock of analytical capacity is strategic in terms of supporting policymaking. This stock can be concentrated in specific types of organisational roles (like policy professionals...
The comparative study of health policy has focused mainly on the macro-structural dimensions of health systems and reforms that have sought to change these organizational arrangements. Thus, a great deal of attention has been paid to the multiple models of insurance against sickness risks and various modes of organizing and financing healthcare pro...
There is increasing interest in the role of narratives in policy-making, as evidenced by the consolidation of the Narrative Policy Framework, a theory of the policy process whose overall aim is to explain how policy narratives influence policy outcomes. However, with the focus on only policy narratives, there is a risk of underestimating the relati...
This open access book offers a systematic survey of the attitudes and values of European political scientists. It builds a structural interpretation based on empirical data, as well as offering reflections on the future structure of the discipline. In the middle of a delicate phase of changes marked by the effects of pandemic and the war in Ukraine...
"Public research funding (PRF) should be allocated in one way or in another. This happens through specific policies in which the choice of how to allocate public funding depends on two main components: the underlying ideas, in terms of beliefs regarding goals and how to reach them, and the types of instruments adopted, which are intended to be effe...
p>
A key challenge to real-world policy making is determining how to match policy goals with the means available to implement them. This match is problematic for several reasons, not the least of which is the lack of conceptual clarity surrounding how targets should be set for policy goals and how exactly policy tools should be calibrated to meet...
p>
A key challenge to real-world policy making is determining how to match policy goals with the means available to implement them. This match is problematic for several reasons, not the least of which is the lack of conceptual clarity surrounding how targets should be set for policy goals and how exactly policy tools should be calibrated to meet...
Italy is among the countries that have most heavily been affected by the
COVID-19 pandemic. As a consequence, a debate has arisen in both academic
and non-academic circles as to whether the national governmental
institutions have been able to adequately face the huge epidemiological
challenge. In addition to this, between the second and the third w...
The emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak can be considered a potential driver of changes not only in academic disciplines but also, as most observers underline, in the teaching mission of higher education. This raises the main question of this article, that is, exactly whether and how an external shock such as COVID-19 can impact the comprehensive pr...
ANalisi degli efetti del Covid19 sulla governance universitaria italiana.
The use of knowledge and evidence in policymaking is a recurrent topic of research due to
its scientific and policy relevance. The existing and expansive body of literature has been
scrutinised in various ways to grasp the dimensions of knowledge utilisation in policymaking,
although most of this research has a monosectoral focus and is based on ve...
The mechanistic approach to policy tool research tries to unpack the processes through which instruments reach (or do not reach) their expected goals by shedding light on the set of behav-ioural mechanisms and how the deployment of specific kinds of policy tools activates some compliance responses and not others in policy targets or 'policy takers'...
This book assesses how governance has evolved in six nations – England, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands – between 1970 and 2018. More specifically, it examines how the governance approaches and the sets of policy tools used to govern have altered with respect to four public policy sectors that represent core responsibilities...
This chapter provides the comparative analytics of the complex dynamics of governance shifts, which have emerged from the four empirical chapters. It brings together the comparisons across policy sectors together with the analysis over time and across countries highlighted in the previous chapters. It studies the degree of governance convergence ac...
This chapter provides a comparative overview of the State and political dynamics in each of the six case countries. It has a twofold purpose. First, it introduces the basic institutional and political variables at work in each state, as well as the role of neoliberalism within the State and society. This information will provide an important contex...
This chapter begins by outlining the classic goals of energy policy: energy security, energy efficiency and the mitigation of the environmental impacts of energy production and use. It stresses the importance of neoliberal ideas that provided the impulse for deregulation and privatization efforts in a sector that had previously emphasized state own...
This chapter serves as the introductory chapter of the book, raising questions about how states in Western Democracies have evolved under the impact of neoliberal ideas. It notes how both proponents and other academic observers have viewed the role of neoliberalism and changes in State governance; it stresses the lack of comparative analysis of dif...
This chapter reconstructs the developments of education policies in the six case countries. Over the last three decades, governments have intervened to redesign governance modes in education, through a process in which the same policy tools have been mixed in different ways to give substantially similar results, that is the stronger role of governm...
Reforming governance in higher education has been a kind of mantra that has characterised governmental policies worldwide. Under the pressure of massification, globalisation and socio-economic demands, governments have continuously intervened to redesign the characteristics of the governance arrangements of their higher education systems as well as...
Policies are continually subjected to turbulence and crises. Interest in policy robustness as a fundamental way to deal with what cannot be foreseen is increasing. Thus, there is a flourishing stream of literature suggesting that policies need to be designed to be agile and flexible. However, the associated characteristics remain undeveloped. This...
Intergovernmental Relations between the CentralG overnment and the Regions in Italy during the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic List of abbreviations 3T =T est, trace,t reat DL =D ecree-law DPCM =D ecree of the Prime Minister DPR =D ecree of the President of the Republic IGR =I ntergovernmental relation L. Cost =C onstitutional Law LEA =E ssen...
Effective policy design requires an understanding of policy instrument choices and the range of possibilities for tool deployment present in any design situation. Instrumentation, or the selection of tools in a policy design, is a key factor determining design effectiveness
and policy advisors and decision-makers must be aware of what instrument op...
2021 has been a year marking a turning point in the struggle against the pandemic and a time of economic and social transition in European Member States (MS). Italy has fared quite well in comparison to other MS, both with regard to the efficacy of its vaccination campaign and with regard to the drafting of its National Recovery and Resilience Plan...
This paper offers an analysis of the theoretical and empirical challenges the coronavirus pandemic poses for theories of policy change. Critical events like coronavirus disease are potentially powerful destabilizers that can trigger discontinuity in policy trajectories and thus are an opportunity for accentuating path shifts. In this paper, we argu...
This chapter holds that in Mediterranean countries, the state is considered to play an active interventionist role to compensate for the weaknesses of institutional arrangements or complementarities. As a result, the state is a significant driver of the development of capitalism. The chapter highlights that Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece underw...
This chapter examines governance change in health policy in the six case countries. The analysis intends to reconstruct the healthcare governance methods implemented in these countries and understand how they have evolved over the last 30 years. While each case study nation has faced similar pressures on health governance and has to some extent eac...
This chapter is the concluding chapter of the book. It first assesses the impact of neoliberalism on how States wield policy instruments and govern. The chapter emphasizes the need for nuance in understanding the substantial influence that neoliberalism has played as well as the continued importance of the State steering society. It then reflects o...
Southern European countries have always been a problem in the varieties of capitalism (VoC) framework. In particular, the Old Southern Fours (OSFs), together with France and Turkey, have been characterized by a hybrid type of capitalism. According to Hall and Soskice (2001, 21), “they may constitute another type of capitalism, sometimes described a...
Administrative reform is not something that can be treated as a specific public policy field. It is simply a specific way to create administrative policies. Administrative reform thus is a way to design and implement administrative policies by introducing deliberate efforts to change the actual institutional arrangements, the processes, and the pro...
In the HE sector, two different policy dynamics have simultaneously taken place during
the pandemic. The first dynamics has been characterized by incremental change, mostly of
a routine nature and carried on by internal actors. It has consisted of a series of relatively
minor measures, presented as a response to the health and economic emergency, b...
This paper analyses the characteristics of the Italian policy dynamics in managing the pandemic
during the first year of the outbreak. By assuming that the Covid-19 crisis must be defined as
a creeping crisis, the analytical focus sheds light on how the characteristics of the recurrent
cycles of agenda setting, decision-making and implementation, a...
Effective response to a pandemic depends not only on national dynamics and characteristics but also on the features of a country’s political and administrative decentralization and on the organizational capacities of the health system. As a result, different policy capacities can be present in the same national health system, and this variance allo...
Policy design undertakes to develop effective policies and hence must understand whether and how effective policies can be formulated and implemented. However, very often policy design has failed to focus on the causal chain that represents the actual driver of policy effects and thus misconstrues the potential effectiveness of a policy design. A m...
Italian political science has evolved over time, dealing with various reforms and changes in the structure of academic careers and procedures for recruitment that have characterised the recent decades of the Italian university system. This paper reflects on how these changes have challenged the foundational identity of Italian political science and...
This paper uses a systematic review of the main literature in the field to shed light on different operationalizations of the main classifications of policy instruments. Although the literature offers a large number of instrument taxonomies, many of them act as theoretical guidelines rather than operational concepts that can help to disentangle the...
The lack of cumulative knowledge challenges scientific relevance and the capacity for problem solving. Despite the multiplication of instrument typologies, a shared comparative understanding of what instruments are, how they function and what effect they produce is still lacking. This article assesses the extent to which major policy instrument the...
Three specifi c aspects of governance are critical in understanding the di erences between
governance styles and their impact of policy-making styles: dynamics , strategy and capacity. The notion of governance dynamic s suggests that styles of governance identifi ed in earlier studies may not be stable but rather dynamic. These change over the cour...
Getting the incentives (and disincentives) right in order to ensure proper levels of compliance with government initiatives is a vital assumption of much of the writings on policy design. The assumption, however, overlooks or underestimates other critical factors that affect compliance. This includes policy-makers' behaviour in the social and polit...
For several decades, higher education systems have undergone continuous waves of reform, driven by a combination of concerns about the changing labour needs of the economy, competition within the global-knowledge economy, and nationally competitive positioning strategies to enhance the performance of higher education systems. Yet, despite far-rangi...
For several decades, higher education systems have undergone continuous waves of reform, driven by a combination of concerns about the changing labour needs of the economy, competition within the global-knowledge economy, and nationally competitive positioning strategies to enhance the performance of higher education systems. Yet, despite far-rangi...
For several decades, higher education systems have undergone continuous waves of reform, driven by a combination of concerns about the changing labour needs of the economy, competition within the global-knowledge economy, and nationally competitive positioning strategies to enhance the performance of higher education systems. Yet, despite far-rangi...
For several decades, higher education systems have undergone continuous waves of reform, driven by a combination of concerns about the changing labour needs of the economy, competition within the global-knowledge economy, and nationally competitive positioning strategies to enhance the performance of higher education systems. Yet, despite far-rangi...
Over the past three decades, governments have recurrently intervened in higher education. Over time, significant changes have occurred in inherited national governance modes. These reforms have been assessed in different ways, such as by emphasising the shift to the more supervisory role of the State, or the increasing privatisation and marketisati...
Contents:
1. Introduction
Capano and Howlett
PART 1 – STUDYING PUBLIC POLICY ACTORS & DYNAMICS
2. Public Policy: Definitions & Approaches
Howlett and Cashore
3. Studying Policy Dynamics: Policy Cycles and Regimes
Perl
4. Mapping Policy Agents: policy entrepreneurs, advocacy coalitions, epistemic communities, instrument constituencies
Beland and...
The objective of this collection of essays is to gain insights into the different national-level state responses to COVID-19 around the world and the conditions that shaped them. The pandemic offers a natural experiment wherein the policy problem governments faced was the same but the responses they made were different, creating opportunities for c...
Italy was the first large epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Western world. Since the country has not had any serious experience with this kind of disease in recent decades, its response has been indicative of a first reaction to an (un)known and (un)expected event. At the same time, the Italian experience is an emblematic case of how a lack...
Policy entrepreneurs are considered key actors in public policy. However, there are so many
definitions of what they can do that it is difficult to use this concept in a systematic, analytical
way. Starting with a critique of the tendency to overstretch the concept of the policy entrepreneur,
we propose a more parsimonious conceptualisation by de-p...
Il libro offre gli strumenti più aggiornati per uno studio efficace delle politiche pubbliche In Italia. Nella loro analisi empiricamente fondata, e sulla base di specifici riferimenti teorico-interpretativi, gli autori - tutti qualificati esperti della materia - illustrano le caratteristiche e la portata del policy change (in termini di cambiament...
The policy cycle framework originates from the idea of organizing and ordering the complexity of policymaking. It is a heuristic tool through which different stages of the ongoing and never-ending dynamics of policy processes can be segmented and then analyzed. It was originally proposed by Lasswell (1956), the founder of modern policy analysis and...
Public policy is a specific branch of policy studies,
having as its field of research a specific definition
of the sociopolitical phenomenon intended as policy.
To define public policy, it is necessary to start
from the fact that labels like policy studies, policy
sciences, policy analysis, policy inquiry, and public
policy are often used synonymou...
The definition of concepts and the adoption of specific terms represent the first steps of any scientific undertaking. Defining the phenomenon to be studied in one way rather than in another may radically influence the theoretical perspective through which politics is analyzed. Different definitions correspond to different ways of conducting the Sc...
Policies are made and pursue their goals through policy instruments. Furthermore, policy instruments have become a relevant topic in many policy fields due to their theoretical and empirical relevance. The study of this field dates back to Lowi and others who developed many typologies and theories in classic works by authors such as Hood, Salamon,...
Comparative policy analysis (CPA) is the systematic study of the processes by which policies are made and of their outputs and outcomes. Thus, CPA is one of the ways to study how policies are steered and how societies are governed. The intellectual mission of the CPA, as outlined by Geva-May and Lynn 1998, has given rise, among others, to the analy...
Over the last three decades, governments have recurrently intervened in higher education. Over time, significant changes have occurred in inherited national governance modes. In Europe, these governmental policies have attempted to abandon the inherited Continental governance mode in favour of an "autonomistic" mode because universities have been g...
p> Policy instruments have become a relevant topic in many policy fields due to their theoretical and empirical relevance (overall, policies are made and pursue their goals through policy instruments). But many fundamental issues remain unknown or under-studied with respect to the topic. The current paper examines four clusters of basic issues in t...
p> Policy instruments have become a relevant topic in many policy fields due to their theoretical and empirical relevance (overall, policies are made and pursue their goals through policy instruments). But many fundamental issues remain unknown or under-studied with respect to the topic. The current paper examines four clusters of basic issues in t...
The new design orientation in the policy sciences has placed renewed emphasis on problem-solving and developing effective public policies. In this paper, we contribute to this scholarship by presenting a policy framework on anticipating effective policies. We argue that anticipation – that is, foreseeing the future and preparing for it – must be ce...
YOU CAN READ FOR FREE HERE:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-public-policy/article/do-policy-instruments-matter-governments-choice-of-policy-mix-and-higher-education-performance-in-western-europe
/DE469262F0D9114864DE5CA593525505/share/ef3f43c85386e879ebee1f4d30cbc6ac95739f76
ABSTRACT
Governments pursue their goals by adopting v...
Policy design efforts are hampered by inadequate understanding of how policy tools and actions promote effective policies. The objective of this book is to address this gap in understanding by proposing a causal theory of the linkages between policy actions and policy effects. Adopting a mechanistic perspective, the book identifies the causal proce...
Due to its popularity, the term layering is often used generically, and it risks being transformed into a catch‐all concept. Layering has become synonymous with incremental change, thus making it a synonym for change without any specification in terms of the change and its effects. To make the term more conceptually coherent and empirically useful,...
How best to deal with uncertainty and surprise in policy-making is an issue which has troubled policy studies for some time. Studies of policy uncertainty and policy failure have emphasized the need to create policies able to be improvised upon in the face of an uncertain future, meaning there is a need to design and adopt policies featuring agilit...
Over the last 30 years, governments have continuously adjusted their Higher Education policies to make universities more efficient (achieving more by spending less) and more effective (by increasing the percentage of graduates, by reducing the number of university dropouts and by fo-cusing more on the third mission). At the core of governmental end...
This paper seeks to achieve a better understanding of how and under what conditions current digital communication technologies can become an asset to the design of effective policies. In order to do so, we bridge two strands of reflection that have hitherto developed quite independently – i.e. policy design studies and researches on the use of info...
Faced with growing policy complexity and environmental uncertainty, policymakers are increasingly concerned with ensuring that policy processes retain functionality amidst shock and uncertainty. In this paper, we seek to address the ways in which robustness – or the capability of policies to maintain functionality and effectiveness in policy goal a...
In recent years, an emerging stream of literature has focused on instrument selection as a driving question in policy design and public policy studies. Hence, scholars have devoted increasing attention to the political, institutional and cognitive dimensions that influence decision-makers when choosing a policy instrument based on their preferences...
Governments continuously design and redesign higher education policies, and governmental capacities are the pillars for undertaking these tasks during the formulation stage. This paper considers the assumption that different governmental political and technical capacities shape different spaces for action and thus different types of policy design....
Policy studies has always been interested in analyzing and improving the sets of policy tools adopted by governments to correct policy problems and better understanding and improving processes of policy analysis and policy formulation in order to do so. Past studies have helped clarify the role of historical processes, policy capacities and design...
Despite the relevance of structures and constraints to the outcomes of policy‐making, agency emerges as a key aspect in accounting for policy dynamics. Indeed, agency is a concept that may embrace different components according to their empirical reference and policy context.
In policy studies, different agents are conceptualized to be relevant in...
As a result of domestic pressure or international prescription, many national higher education systems (HESs) in Europe have undergone structural changes over the last thirty years, primarily to enhance the overall performance – defined as students’ access, quality of teaching and excellence in research – of universities. As such, almost all of the...
Resilience and robustness are exciting concepts for policy researchers. Their broad use in other disciplines has motivated social scientists and policy researchers to adopt them in analyses. In the present paper, we review definitions of these concepts and the primary theoretical and empirical challenges presented by resilience and robustness as le...
Over the last thirty years, many national higher education systems (HESs) in Europe have undergone structural changes following domestic pressure or international prescriptions. These changes have mainly been intended to enhance the overall university performance – conceived as students' access, quality of teaching and excellence in research. Almos...
Policy instruments are a fundamental component of public policies. Policy instruments are often a result of mediation within the policy design process, whenever decision makers reshape existing instruments without introducing any real innovation. This results in imitation, layering and ambiguity in tool choice selection, and raises the theoretical...
