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Sub-federal units in federal systems increasingly participate in international trade policy-making, a domain that historically represents an exclusive jurisdiction of the federal level. A first strand of research emphasised exogenous factors, most notably the changing scope and depth of trade agreements and social contestation, to explain this trend. This study, by contrast, contributes to more recent efforts that focus on endogenous factors to elucidate variation in terms of how and with what implications sub-federal units have entrenched themselves in trade policy governance. The paper makes two contributions. First, it introduces a new theoretical argument suggesting that ideational and institutional feedback effects can explain variation in sub-federal trade policy-making. Second, the paper tests this framework by using two contrasting cases of federalism: Canada and Germany. The study shows that in Canada intergovernmental institutions facilitating sub-federal participation in trade policy-making had to be created through layering, while in Germany existing institutions were activated through conversion. Although both patterns of institutional change have empowered sub-federal units, they differ in terms of their robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two interrelated questions: Do social protection policies generate feedback effects on state‐citizen relations? If so, how do such policies change the perception and interaction of both citizens and the state? The paper is based on an in‐depth mixed methods study on Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty cash transfer programme (LEAP) conducted in two implementation districts. I find emergent positive resource and interpretive/policy learning effects on state‐citizen perceptions and interactions. This is evidenced in increased state presence in service provision and changing citizen recognition of the state as a legitimate provider of their welfare, with these impacts being higher among beneficiaries with previously limited access to or negative perception about the state. Notwithstanding, these effects may be limited, unsustainable or undermined partly due to the way in which LEAP is promoted and delivered as a clientelist resource. The paper highlights the ideational and relational impact of social protection by arguing that when implemented well, social policies can generate political feedback effects beyond their poverty reduction and human development impacts by fostering policy learning opportunities for reconfiguring the perceptions of and interactions between the state and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to current and future climate change demands urgent, transformative adaptation, yet in many policy systems inaction continues to prevail. This paper examines apparent resistance to policy change and the persistence of business-as-usual through a 'lock-in perspective', which means that attention is paid to how reinforcing mechanisms drive stabilisation and resistance in policy systems. Offering a fresh synthesis of known lock-in mechanisms in the literature, this paper explores the role of those mechanisms in two empirical cases of coastal adaptation: England (U.K.) and Schleswig-Holstein (Germany). While several known lock-mechanisms are observable, some are newly identified in this adaptation context. We offer a critical reflection on the added value of the lock-in perspective for understanding policy stability. In turn, the identification of self- and mutually reinforcing mechanisms provides a much-needed foundation for targeted policy interventions and efforts to 'unlock' climate adaptation pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gender gap in voting for far-right parties is significant in many European countries. While most studies focus on how men and women differ in their nationalist and populist attitudes, it is unknown how the socio-economic and political promotion of women is associated with the gender gap in far-right political orientation. The following paper compares the effect of four different spheres of gender equality on this gender gap. By estimating multilevel logit models for more than 25 European countries and testing the mechanism via a socially conservative attitude toward gendered division of work, I find that the visible field of representation in particular—measured by the share of women in parliament and women on boards—is associated with a gender gap in far-right orientation. This paper contributes to the literature in two important ways: first, it combines policy feedback with cultural backlash theory, enlarging the scope of both theories; second, it demonstrates the importance of gender equality policies for the study of the far-right gender gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can the enforcement of policies in the past influence a society's future adoption of information communication technologies (ICTs)? In this paper, we tackle this question by exploring how past e‐governance policies influence citizens' willingness to use the health QR code, which is a COVID‐19 tracing app widely used in China's pandemic control. Past policies regarding smart‐city development in China involve two aspects: the construction of electronic infrastructure and the applications of specific technologies. Empirical analysis based on a nationwide dataset in China suggests that past policies exhibit persuasive effects and influence citizens' acceptance of the health QR code. Specifically, e‐governance applications in cities significantly enhance citizens' acceptance through the demonstration of their usefulness. However, the construction of e‐governance infrastructure per se does not have the same impact on citizens' acceptance. By connecting citizens' acceptance of new technology with past e‐governance policies, the study illustrates a nuanced policy feedback mechanism through which past policies can substantially reshape public opinion by policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the resource-constrained embedded systems, the designing of efficient deep neural networks is a challenging process, due to diversity in the artificial intelligence applications. The quantization in deep neural networks superiorly diminishes the storage and computational time by reducing the bit-width of networks encoding. In order to highlight the problem of accuracy loss, the quantization levels are automatically discovered using Policy Feedback-based Reinforcement Learning Method (PF-RELEQ). In this paper, the Proximal Policy Optimization with Policy Feedback (PPO-PF) technique is proposed to determine the best design decisions by choosing the optimum hyper-parameters. In order to enhance the sensitivity of the value function to the change of policy and to improve the accuracy of value estimation at the early learning stage, a policy update method is devised based on the clipped discount factor. In addition, specifically the loss functions of policy satisfy the unbiased estimation of the trust region. The proposed PF-RELEQ effectively balances quality and speed compared to other deep learning methods like ResNet-1202, ResNet-32, ResNet-110, GoogLeNet and AlexNet. The experimental analysis showed that PF-RELEQ achieved 20% computational work-load reduction compared to the existing deep learning methods on ImageNet, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and tomato leaf disease datasets and achieved approximately 2% of improvisation in the validation accuracy. Additionally, the PF-RELEQ needs only 0.55 Graphics Processing Unit on an NVIDIA GTX-1080Ti to develop DNNs that delivers better accuracy improvement with fewer cycle counts for image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of policy feedback have produced an increasingly nuanced understanding of when, why, and how public policies generate—or fail to generate—political effects that entrench the policies themselves and provide benefits to their proponents. Left open, however, is the question of whether policies can paradoxically generate political benefits for those who opposed them. This paper extends the study of policy feedback by exploring the mechanisms through and conditions under which organized groups can counterintuitively use policy losses to build power moving forward. It then demonstrates how post‐loss power building operates by exploring the National Rifle Association's historical use of gun policy losses to reinforce a shared identity among its supporters, which it later uses to spur collective action on behalf of gun rights. The analysis shows how policy outcomes can interact with the identity‐building efforts of organized groups in ways that enable those groups to use losses to their long‐term advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do policy feedback effects occur? A growing number of rigorous empirical studies provide evidence that new policies can, indeed, stimulate new politics, such as increased political participation among citizens, but greater understanding is needed of the underlying mechanisms and long‐term policy feedback effects. This paper puts forth a dynamic theory of the mechanisms through which policy experiences may influence political participation, focusing particularly on political efficacy. We use five waves of panel data collected over 8 years to investigate the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), controlling for pre‐existing ideology and socio‐economic and demographic factors. We analyze the impact of resource and interpretive effects and disentangle direct and indirect effects. We find that the ACA has elevated Americans' political efficacy and political participation with large and enduring effects, and we show the pathways through which this has occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research on contentious politics focuses on the origins and dynamics of contention or the impact of contention on policy change. Although some studies have delved into the state reactions to contention, relatively little is known about the outcome or effectiveness of state responses, especially in non-democratic settings. This paper attempts to fill this gap and to uncover the policy feedback effect in non-democratic settings by studying the Chinese state's repression of violent incidents targeted at healthcare personnel and facilities (yinao). I argue that without comprehensive healthcare reforms to tackle the root causes of yinao, state repression of yinao generates unintended adverse outcomes, causing the doctor–patient relationship to deteriorate. Using the difference-in-differences method with China Family Panel Studies data for 2014 and 2016, I find that the criminalization of yinao diminishes public trust in doctors and confidence in hospitals' competence and instead increases public concerns about the healthcare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010 the UK government has undertaken extensive spending cuts which have manifested in significant reductions in welfare, local authority and justice system spending. The cuts have been linked with rising poverty, food bank use and serious health issues. Such extreme cuts are likely to affect how citizens view and interact with government. This paper argues that the theories of civic voluntarism, grievance and policy feedback in combination explain why austerity has provoked relatively little political participation in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policymakers have increasingly voiced an ambition to combine the transition to a climate-neutral society with a "green" domestic industrial agenda. In recent years, innovation systems scholars have advanced the understanding of the evolution of industries around renewable energy technologies as well as the role of policy feedback (and indeed politics) surrounding the development of domestic green industrial development policies. To take a step towards combining these literature streams, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of policy mixes and policy feedback in the emergence of domestic green industries. This is achieved in the empirical case of biofuels in Sweden, and the findings show that policy feedback dynamics created difficulties in aligning the national policy mix with the technology and industrial developments in the country. The resulting political uncertainty predominantly hampered the scaling up of domestic production capacity, while R&D and import of biofuels instead could grow strong. Based on this empirical case, a process model is developed to explain the role of policy feedback in the development of domestic industries, thus demonstrating how the growth of domestic industries is driven by the interplay of policy effects and various feedback processes. The findings suggest that future research into the role of policies in "green" domestic industry growth should devote more attention to the dynamics driving the co-evolution of policy, technology and industry structures. • Policy Feedbacks influence the co-evolution of policy mix, technology and industry structure. • Policy feedback dynamics within innovation systems influence local industry growth. • Evolution of industrial policy affects local "green" industry growth. • Policy mix influences growth of "green" industry actors, while relative lack of actors to mobilize and produce feedbacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]