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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]

Understanding mass public support for health systems and welfare polices is required in order to safeguard the legitimacy of democratic governance of the welfare state. If policies to meet dissatisfaction go unnoticed, the whole idea of responsive democracy is in vain. This paper focuses on the 2005 Swedish health care waiting‐time guarantee, which resulted in drastically lower hospital waiting times in Västra Götaland County. Exploring questions of significant theoretical relevance in the literature about policy feedback effects, the paper investigates if the decrease in waiting times affected hospital service satisfaction and if this effect was moderated by policy proximity and visibility. Data from the West Sweden SOM survey are utilized, measuring hospital service satisfaction from 2004 to 2009. To disentangle the role of policy proximity, two indicators are used—user status and subjective health status. Furthermore, policy visibility is measured by an individual's level of political interest. The results show that the decrease in waiting times resulted in a substantial increase in hospital service satisfaction. However, the increase was not more pronounced among groups with higher proximity and visibility. On the contrary, results indicate that the increase in hospital service satisfaction was stronger among those already in good health. [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]

This paper aims at explaining the difference in e-participation (or online public participation) across countries using a conceptual model that is quantitatively analyzed using panel data. The model is based on the theories of policy feedback and socio-technical approach in the participation literature and explores the mediating and moderating role of technology on institutions. The technology variable is measured along four dimensions of information and communication technology (ICT), namely, infrastructure, affordability, skills, and usage. The institutions variable is measured along the two dimensions of political and regulatory environment and political rights and civil liberties. The study is significant as it quantitatively analyzes a complex longitudinal relationship between institutions, technology, and e-participation and finds support for institutions' role as antecedents to technology. Findings inform that ICT skills play a mediating role while ICT infrastructure and usage act as moderator for institutions' impact on e-participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many different approaches to automated content analysis. This paper focuses on dictionaries and supervised learning; in addition to comparing the effectiveness of the two, we argue for the advantages of using them in combination. We do so in a research area in which we have an independent objective referent: government spending. With an eye toward capturing the accuracy of media coverage on public policy, we apply both hierarchical dictionary counts and supervised learning to measure mass media coverage of change in US defense spending. Both approaches appear to do well at capturing a media "policy signal" in the area, which provides an important test of convergent validity. While the results highlight the value of both dictionary and machine learning methods used independently, they also illustrate ways in which the two can be used in combination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case of the USA Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), this paper contributes to theorizing regarding the factors that affect feedback dynamics of a disruptive technology. Focusing on design elements of the RFS and governance features related to its implementation, it demonstrates the resulting feedback effects on first-generation conventional biofuels and second-generation advanced biofuels. In terms of policy design, the analyses highlight the significance of the calibration of policy instruments and the incorporation of multiple policy goals into a single policy instrument. In terms of implementation procedures, the analyses affirm the significance to feedback dynamics of the regulatory capacity and discretionary authority of administrative agents as well as the influence of interest group coalitions in rulemaking. In the case of second-generation advanced biofuels, the case study also reveals the limits of policy-induced feedback in the presence of regulatory uncertainty and unfavorable financial conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on policy dynamics has long argued for a better conceptualization and measurement of the dependent variable ("policy"), but this fundamental point has often been neglected in the policy feedback literature. In this paper, we explore how far disaggregating policy into different elements (policy instruments, objectives, and settings) addresses this gap. We do so by examining the world's largest market-based climate policy instrument—emissions trading in the European Union—and reveal a number of valuable new insights. First, even if positive policy feedback locks in a policy instrument, actor contestation does not disappear, but narrows down to the more detailed level of policy settings. Second, feedback may operate differently at each policy level: the policy instrument and its settings may strengthen at the same time as support for broader objectives weakens. Finally, positive feedback may simultaneously strengthen opposing actors' support for multiple policy elements, leading to a form of "policy stability by stalemate." These findings highlight the need for a new, interdisciplinary phase of policy feedback research that more fully disaggregates the dependent variable across a wider range of policy areas and policy instrument types. Policy scientists are well equipped to contribute to and benefit from such a debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policies are the products of political conflict, constituted by mixes of diverse tools and instruments intended to achieve multiple goals that may change over time and not always be internally consistent or coherent. Recent studies dealing with policy robustness and resilience have theorized about the temporal development of mixes of policy instruments and the need to ensure consistency and coherence over time, yet they have generally failed to develop these insights into lessons for policymakers and practitioners. Drawing on evidence from the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the USA, this paper examines the relationship between policy mixes and policy resilience or the ability of a policy to withstand challenges to its elements and to remain effective over time, even when deliberate efforts are made to alter, adapt, or repeal all or part of its original content or intention. Although the ACA is at an early stage in its history, it provides many lessons about how, and how not, to design complex policy mixes that can survive determined political opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a large body of literature devoted to how "policies create politics" and how feedback effects from existing policy legacies shape potential reforms in a particular area. Although much of this literature focuses on self‐reinforcing feedback effects that increase support for existing policies over time, Kent Weaver and his colleagues have recently drawn our attention to self‐undermining effects that can gradually weaken support for such policies. The following contribution explores both self‐reinforcing and self‐undermining policy feedback in relationship to the Affordable Care Act, the most important health‐care reform enacted in the United States since the mid‐1960s. More specifically, the paper draws on the concept of policy feedback to reflect on the political fate of the ACA since its adoption in 2010. We argue that, due in part to its sheer complexity and fragmentation, the ACA generates both self‐reinforcing and self‐undermining feedback effects that, depending of the aspect of the legislation at hand, can either facilitate or impede conservative retrenchment and restructuring. Simultaneously, through a discussion of partisan effects that shape Republican behavior in Congress, we acknowledge the limits of policy feedback in the explanation of policy stability and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The average citizen often does not experience government policy directly, but learns about it from the mass media. The nature of media coverage of public policy is thus of real importance, for both public opinion and policy itself. It nevertheless is the case that scholars of public policy and political communication have invested rather little time in developing methods to track public policy coverage in media content. The lack of attention is all the more striking in an era in which media coverage is readily available in digital form. This paper offers a proposal for tracking coverage of the actual direction of policy change in mass media. It begins with some methodological considerations, and then draws on an expository case—defense spending in the United States—to assess the effectiveness of our automated content‐analytic methods. Results speak to the quantity and quality in media coverage of policy issues, and the potential role of mass media—to both inform and mislead—in modern representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: If successfully implemented and enduring, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) stands to expand health insurance access in absolute terms, reduce inter-group disparities in that access, and reduce exposure to the financial vulnerabilities illness entails. Its durability—meaning both avoidance of outright retrenchment and fidelity to its policy aims—is thus of scholarly interest. Past literature suggests that social constructions of a policy’s beneficiaries may impact durability.Questions: This paper first describes media portrayals of ACA beneficiaries with an eye toward answering three descriptive questions: (1) Do portrayals depict beneficiaries as economically heterogeneous? (2) Do portrayals focus attention on groups that have acquired new political relevance due to the ACA, such as young adults? (3) What themes that have served as messages about beneficiary “deservingness” in past social policy are most frequent in ACA beneficiary portrayals? The paper then assesses how the portrayal patterns that these questions uncover may work both for and against the ACA’s durability, finding reasons for confidence as well as caution.Methods: Using manual and automated methods, this paper analyzes newspaper text from August 2013 through January 2014 to trace portrayals of two ACA “target populations” before and during the new law’s first open-enrollment period: those newly eligible for Medicaid, and those eligible for subsidies to assist in the purchase of private health insurance under the ACA. This paper also studies newspaper text portrayals of two groups informally crafted by the ACA in this timeframe: those gaining health insurance and those losing it.Results: The text data uncover the following answers to the three descriptive questions for the timeframe studied: (1) Portrayals may underplay beneficiaries’ economic heterogeneity. (2) Portrayals pay little attention to young adults. (3) Portrayals emphasize themes of workforce participation, economic self-sufficiency, and insider status. Health status, age, gender, and race/ethnicity appear to receive little attention.Implications and Conclusions: Existing literature suggests that these portrayal patterns may both support and limit ACA durability. In favor of durability is that ACA beneficiaries are depicted in terms that have been associated with deservingness in past American social policy—particularly being cast as workers and insiders. Yet, the results also give three reasons for caution. First, ACA insurance-losers are also portrayed as deserving. Second, it is unclear how the portrayal patterns found may impact the durability of the ACA’s efforts to cut insurance disparities by age, health status, and especially race/ethnicity. Third, portrayals’ strong casting of beneficiaries as workers, and limited attention to beneficiaries’ economic heterogeneity and to young adults, may do little to help cultivate beneficiary political engagement around the ACA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In advanced industrial democracies, evidence suggests a positive relationship between inclusive public policy, collective behavior, and political participation. Yet Africa, which generally exhibits high levels of collective behavior, often has exclusionary policies and variable rates of political participation. Using Afrobarometer data and qualitative case analysis in Zambia, this paper argues that the links between collective behavior and political participation differ in African countries due to lower government capacity and weaker structures of accountability linking politicians to policy outcomes. Employing a policy feedback framework, it demonstrates that the policy context in which collective behavior emerges determines the extent to which it influences political participation. Specifically, low levels of service provision generate higher levels of collective behavior, indicating that communities organize in response to need. The extent to which this collective behavior results in political participation, however, depends in part on citizens' political efficacy. [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]

Over the last two decades, there has been a remarkable transformation of the demography and political economy of East and Southeast Asia, thus raising pensions as an important policy issue. In addressing the pension needs of those outside formal sector employment, Taiwan was the regional forerunner regarding social pension provision. However, the immense political popularity of these schemes waned and from the mid-2000s onwards the government began to substitute them with a contributory system for the socially disadvantaged. This paper analyses the political dynamics of social pensions in Taiwan, from expansion of coverage through to gradual dismantlement. The politics surrounding these benefits has received scant attention in international scholarship, with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank Institute, in particular, having focused most of their attention on policy design issues. The contention here is that a specific configuration of political factors featured prominently in Taiwan, thus providing an explanation for the evolution of its pension policy. Also, these political dimensions can shed light on how this type of pension could evolve in other East and Southeast Asian countries, which is pertinent given that many have increasingly ageing populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy feedback is a widely used concept, but many who use it only focus on the positive and/or unintentional feedback effects of certain types of policy. The literature as a whole is therefore poorly equipped to make sense of the negative policy feedbacks that often appear in more regulatory areas such as climate change, where target groups are put under pressure to shoulder concentrated costs. Advocates of the 'new' policy design have an opportunity to address this gap by exploring how policy makers approach the design of policies that intentionally generate positive policy feedbacks and/or are resilient to negative ones. This paper contributes to that effort by identifying the conditions under which specific instrument designs are likely to have opportunity enhancing and/or constraining effects. It relates these expectations to a design situation where positive feedback seemed unlikely, and hence, the challenge of designing locked-in policies was correspondingly greater. It concludes by drawing on the findings of this exploratory case to investigate what the 'new' policy design can do better to explicate the temporal aspects of design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the structure of social policy institutions shape the level of public support for the welfare state? The policy feedback literature predicts that highly inclusive welfare institutions generate larger bases of public support by shifting the focus away from redistribution and toward common market insecurities felt across classes, while more selective strategies erode support by highlighting the conflicts of interest imbedded in clearly redistributive social programs. This paper expands on existing research by adopting a disaggregated approach to measuring both welfare state structure and public support, uncovering important cross-program variations in public attitudes and welfare state design masked by traditional measures of universality and public support. This project applies this method to public opinion data in 17 advanced capitalist democracies across three policy areas: healthcare, pensions, and unemployment. The findings offer evidence of policy feedback effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]