As the most popular destination country for migrants and refugees in the EU since the end of World War II (MPI, 2004), Germany has a history of refugee inflows. In this thesis I focus on the different factors that led to asylum policy change in reunified Germany, from liberal since 1945 to restrictive, after the end of the Cold War in 1992, with the 1992 amendment of Article 16 of the German Basic Law. The study of the factors that account for German asylum policy change is important to understand the future of German asylum policy, and potentially provide a model of asylum policy change in other countries. In this study, I analyze German public opinion that seems to have been affected by large migrant inflows and the declining state of the economy. I argue that electoral pressures by the German public contributed to political party platform changes and asylum policy change. I use data from Eurobaromeer surveys, the World Bank, and the Migration Policy Institute to describe the refugee inflows and the state of the German economy, and how these may have contributed to public opinion, as reflected in Eurobarometer survey results. I examine German political party platforms and campaign tactics based on secondary literature, such as scholarly articles and studies, as well as political speeches and statements. I also consider Germany’s membership in the EU as a factor that may have affected the change in German asylum policy. Germany’s membership in the EU may have been used as a form of leverage by the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), to pressure the Social Democratic Party (SPD), to compromise on asylum policy restrictions, as Germany’s constitutional right to asylum impeded the implementation of EU asylum policy provisions. The findings of my research suggest that German public sentiments may have affected Germany’s political party platforms. Evidently, the SPD, aligned its political platform and policy agenda to align with the changes in the German electoral context and gain electoral support. Also, Germany’s position as a founding member of the EU, may have contributed to the compromise on German asylum policy change, because the right to asylum as explained in Article 16 of the constitution, withheld Germany from utilizing the EU’s asylum procedures and policies, until Article 16 was amended in 1992.

In the world of growing diversity, interdependence, and rapid change, making sense of policy evolution, especially in analytical settings, is increasingly challenging, not the least due to the flaws of conventional assumptions or the limits to the availability of evidence. As we consider an alternative worldview embracing the complex and adaptive nature of social reality, we recognize there are further boundaries to what can be known and done about the outcomes in social systems. Yet, this foundation also promises to broaden our horizons with new tools for understanding, comparing, and developing public policy. Inspired by innovation research, this work makes the case for bringing a set of such tools into public policy studies and situates them in an essential theoretical context. Further, through an analysis of social and labour market policy development across two jurisdictions—while reaching to flexicurity as a model and reference—it demonstrates the application of the new approach to the study of welfare state modernization and to policy scholarship more generally. / Dissertation / Candidate in Philosophy

This study seeks to identify and examine issue transformation in public policies, and to understand the relationship between issue transformation and policy change. The focus for this investigation, the information resources management (IRM) policy subsystem, is examined as a 28-year case study, concluding at the end of 2002. Study results are documented textually, and visually in an exploratory, "virtual reality-based" Policy World. This study examines the questions: "In what ways are the core issues underlying public policies transformed over time, and what is the relationship between issue transformation and policy change?" Using the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) for explaining policy change over considerable periods of time, this research identifies and examines the issues over which policy coalitions contend, and seeks to identify issue transformation in the IRM policy subsystem's 28-year history. Augmenting the traditional paper-based dissertation is an exploratory, "virtual reality-based" case study, called "Policy World," that visualizes both the policy subsystem environment and critical elements of the external policy system. Visually depicting the richness, texture, and artifacts of policy activities aids policy learning, and promotes understanding of the dynamic and complex environment of issue transformation and policy change. In confirming issue transformation, this study contributes to the advocacy coalition framework by detailing the initiation and maturation of a policy subsystem. In demonstrating issue transformation's role as facilitating policy continuity through policy change, this study contributes to policy theory. As a chronology of IRM's issue transformation and policy change, this study documents the rise of IT-enabled governance for public administrators and educators. Policy World provides an interactive, experiential learning environment for public administration scholars and practitioners wanting substantive knowledge of both policy theory and Federal IRM policies. Public administration literature notes both the need for and the lack of an information resource management component to public administration education. Information visualization concepts are combined with interactive designs and hosting on the World Wide Web, to provide wide access to Policy World and extend educational opportunities in public policy and information resources management wherever desired. / Ph. D.

In Sweden, public housing companies – Allmännyttan – have traditionally ensured housing access to the general public. While previous studies highlight the significance of rental requirements for housing accessibility, the rationales behind relaxed requirements and their impact on other welfare sectors remain underexplored. This study aims to investigate public housing companies’ reasoning behind their rental requirements and to explore the effects of relaxed requirements on social services and measures to reach greater inclusion. To reach this aim, the study employs interviews with public housing and municipal social service authority respondents and utilises a theoretical framework emphasising institutions, actors, and ideas/ideologies in processes of housing policy change. Findings indicate that the reasoning of public housing companies’ regarding their rental requirements was structured around social responsibility, reasonability, and profitability. The relaxation of income requirements often stemmed from political motivations to enhance social inclusion, though conflicting neoliberal tendencies persist. Respondents from social service authorities reported no significant effects from relaxed requirements, partly due to demarcated responsibilities in relation to structural homelessness. Several measures were highlighted by respondents to reach a more inclusive rental housing market. Taken together, these findings hold important implications for ensuring universal housing access in Sweden.

In 2010 the municipality of Norrköping took a decision to implement a social impact bond. This decision was the starting point for a wave of similar decision around the Swedish municipalities. Södertälje took the decision to implement their social impact bond in early 2013. Even though much of the policy was the same as in Norrköping, it didn’t generate the result expected and already in 2018 it was reconstructed and brought back into the daily business. The purpose of this study is to explain the policy decisions taken, both in connection with the introduction of the policy in 2013 and the transformation done in 2018. The analytic framework used to explain these policy changes is based on the Multiple Streams Theory. The study is based on a qualitative research method with information taken from documents and interviews. These are aimed to help us gathering the empirical material needed, which consist of official control documents from the current municipality and interviews with pertinent people who worked within the policy or who have good knowledge of the phenomenon of social impact bonds. Our main conclusions are that the policy decision to implement the social impact bond, did couple the three streams; problem, political and policy, so this decision was done within an open policy window. However, the decision to reconstruct the social impact bond didn’t couple the streams in the same way and because of that a policy window didn't open.

This study looks at the process of local policy change in environmental policy decisions. It employs a comparative case study research design to analyze the creation of a new recreational water right in Colorado to support whitewater boating. It compared the 12 communities that have applied for the new water right to 6 non-adopter communities. Factors including stakeholder groups, citizens, policy entrepreneurs, mass media, policy knowledge, policy timing, and politicians' motivations are analyzed to determine their role in local policy decisions. This research also considers how policy change in local communities promoted new state laws, and was in turn influenced by them. The dataset includes interviews with 75 Colorado water experts and community decision makers, mass media coverage of the policy process, and legal and legislative documentation of the process. These data were then analyzed within cases and across cases to create a model of community policy change. This research found that three elements were present when a community's policies changed regarding the use of natural resources. First, the community was dependent on the resource, either economically or socially. Second, a policy entrepreneur was present to influence the community's decision makers to enact a new policy regarding natural resource use. These policy entrepreneurs were most often experts in water law or management. Finally, the community had access to accurate information regarding the new policy. The case study analysis found that neither mass media coverage of the issue nor citizen participation influenced policy change. This may have occurred primarily because water rights were viewed as a technical detail to be handled by experts. Citizens usually became engaged in the process only after the decision to file for the water right had been made. Similarly, media coverage of recreational water rights was present in most cases only after the policy decision had been made. This study provides an understanding of the processes that communities go through in deciding to change policies to account for new non-consumptive uses and the factors that influence those decisions. This research is not only relevant to water law in Colorado, but also to environmental policy in general. / Dissertation

This dissertation consists of three essays that apply both economic theory and econometric methods to understand design and dynamics of institutions. In particular, it studies how institutions aggregate information and deal with uncertainty and attempts to derive implications for optimal institution design. Here is a brief summary of the essays. In many economic, political and social situations where the environment changes in a random fashion necessitating costly action we face a choice of both the timing of the action as well as choosing the optimal action. In particular, if the stochastic environment possesses the property that the next environmental change becomes either more or less likely as more time passes since the last change (in other words the hazard rate of environmental change is not constant over time), then the timing of the action takes on special importance. In the first essay, joint with Maxwell B Stinchcombe, we model and solve a dynamic decision problem in a semi-Markov environment. We find that if the arrival times for state changes do not follow a memoryless process, time since the last observed change of state, in addition to the current state, becomes a crucial variable in the decision. We characterize the optimal policy and the optimal timing of executing that policy in the differentiable case by a set of first order conditions of a relatively simple form. They show that both in the case of increasing and decreasing hazard rates, the optimal response may be to wait before executing a policy change. The intuitive explanation of the result has to do with the fact that waiting reveals information about the likelihood of the next change occurring, hence waiting is valuable when actions are costly. This result helps shed new light on the structure of optimal decisions in many interesting problems of institution design, including the fact that constitutions often have built-in delay mechanisms to slow the pace of legislative change. Our model results could be used to characterize optimal timing rules for constitutional amendments. The paper also contributes to generalize the methodology of semi-Markov decision theory by formulating a dynamic programming set-up that looks to solve the timing-of-action problem whereas the existing literature looks to optimize over a much more limited set of policies where the action can only be taken at the instant when the state changes. In the second essay, we extend our research to situations, where the current choice of action influences the future path of the stochastic process, and apply it to the legal framework surrounding environmental issues, particularly to the ‘Precautionary Principle' as applied to climate change legislation. We represent scientific uncertainty about environmental degradation using the concept of 'ambiguity' and show that ambiguity aversion generates a 'precautionary effect'. As a result, justification is provided for the Precautionary Principle that is different from the ones provided by expected utility theory. This essay serves both as an application of the general theoretical results derived in the first essay and also stands alone as an analysis of a substantive question about environmental law. Prediction markets have attracted public attention in recent years for making accurate predictions about election outcomes, product sales, film box office and myriad other variables of interest and many believe that they will soon become a very important decision support system in a wide variety of areas including governance, law and industry. For successful design of these markets, a thorough understanding of the theoretical and empirical foundations of such markets is necessary. But the information aggregation process in these markets is not fully understood yet. There remains a number of open questions. The third essay, joint with Robert Lieli, attempts to analyze the direction and timing of information flow between prices, polls, and media coverage of events traded on prediction markets. Specifically, we examine the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries for presidential nomination. Substantively, we ask the following question: (i) Do prediction market prices have information that is not reflected in viii contemporaneous polls and media stories? (ii) Conversely, do prices react to information that appears to be news for pollsters or is prominently featured by the media? Quantitatively, we construct time series variables that reflect the "pollster's surprise" in each primary election, measured as the difference between actual vote share and vote share predicted by the latest poll before the primary, as well as indices that describe the extent of media coverage received by the candidates. We carry out Granger Causality tests between the day-to-day percentage change in the price of the "Obama wins nomination" security and these information variables. Some key results from our exercise can be summarized as follows. There seems to be mutual (two-way) Granger causality between prediction market prices and the surprise element in the primaries. There is also evidence of one-way Granger causality in the short run from price changes towards media news indices. These results suggest that prediction market prices anticipate at least some of the discrepancy between the actual outcome and the latest round of polls before the election. Nevertheless, prices also seem to be driven partly by election results, suggesting that there is an element of the pollster’s surprise that is genuine news for the market as well. / text

Comment le « Grenelle de l'Environnement », un événement politique dont on ne peut retenir que des discours malléables à première vue, a-t-il pu conduire à l'abandon de plusieurs grands projets autoroutiers étudiés depuis de nombreuses années en France ? Comment cet événement du domaine de l'action publique environnementale et extérieur au secteur routier et autoroutier, auquel ni l'administration ni les parlementaires n'étaient partie-prenante, a-t-il pu être à l'origine d'un changement aussi important dans une politique considérée comme traditionnelle et sectorielle ?Ce travail argumente que l'on peut établir un lien entre la transformation d'une politique publique et la production d'un discours en dehors des frontières de son secteur. Il s'appuie pour cela sur le concept de lignes narratives – à savoir de courts récits porteurs de sens reliant les éléments qui composent les politiques publiques – et développe la notion d'infusion en tant que processus de construction d'un cadre cognitif à partir de nouvelles lignes narratives. Notre cas d'étude montre ainsi que l'infusion des lignes narratives du Grenelle dans le secteur des routes et des autoroutes permet de comprendre le changement constaté. D'un point théorique, la thèse défendue dans le cadre de ce travail consiste à dire que les lignes narratives permettent d'analyser les politiques publiques et d'appréhender la question du changement. D'un côté, les lignes narratives peuvent être saisies comme des variables explicatives du changement d'une politique : elles permettent de comprendre comment le Grenelle, en tant qu'ensemble de discours malléables, a pu produire du changement dans la politique autoroutière avec l'abandon de différents projets. D'un autre côté, elles peuvent aussi être interprétées en tant que variable d'état : l'infusion des lignes narratives produites lors du Grenelle dans la politique autoroutière donne une représentation de la politique et en particulier de ses dynamiques antagonistes entre le niveau central et le local. / How could the French « Grenelle de l'Environnement », a political event that came down to a set of malleable discourses at first sight, have led to the end of several important highway projects that had been studied for long ? How could this event of environmental policies and out of the frontiers of the highway sector, to which neither the administration nor the members of the Parliament participated, be behind such an important change in a policy considered as traditional and sectorial?This work argues that a link can be established between the transformation of a policy and the production of a discourse outside the frontiers of its sector. It is based on the concept of storylines – short narratives that make sense linking each other the elements of policies – and develops the notion of infusion as the process of the construction of a cognitive framework on new storylines. Our case-study shows that the infusion of the storylines of the “Grenelle de l'Environnement” in the highway sector enables to understand the policy change. From a theoretical point of view, this PhD thesis argues that storylines are useful for policy and policy change analysis. On the one hand, storylines can be considered as explanatory variables of policy change : the concept of storyline helps to understand how the Grenelle could have produced some change in the french highway policy with the end of several important projects, while it was only a set of malleable discourses. On the other hand, they can also be interpreted as state variables: the infusion of the storylines of the Grenelle in the highway policy gives a representation of the policy and particularly of its antagonistic dynamics between the national and the local level.

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The Swedish Defence bill of 2015 demonstrated a rapid change in policy objectives, consequently moving away from an expeditionary force and converging into a territorial defence force. Previous research has attributed and explained the quick shift to the geostrategic unbalance that followed after the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. Yet, major policy changes are often years in the making, indicating that there must be additional explanations to the rapid shift. By applying a modified version of John Kingdon’s (2011) Multiple Streams Framework on the case of Sweden changing its security and defence policy, this thesis examines the policy process that preceded the official policy decision. The thesis provides further explanation to why the rapid policy change occurred by utilising qualitative content analysis. The analysis shows that the new policy was adopted due to several factors: one being the attention brought to several problems pertaining to the previous policy, another one was found in the timing between focusing events and the on-going work process of the Swedish defence commission, and lastly, strong actors within the policy field were in favour of a change in policy. The thesis concludes that the presence of several factors within the processes of politics, policy and problems enabled the rapid policy change.