Integrating core concepts from the institutional analysis and development framework for the systematic analysis of policy designs: An illustration from the US National Organic Program regulation
| Author | Saba N Siddiki,David P Carter,Christopher M Weible,Xavier Basurto |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629815603494 |
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
| Published date | 01 January 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2016, Vol.28(1) 159–185
ÓThe Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629815603494
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Integrating core concepts
from the institutional analysis
and development framework
for the systematic analysis of
policy designs: An illustration
from the US National
Organic Program regulation
David P Carter and Christopher M Weible
School of Public Affairs, Universityof Colorado Denver, USA
Saba N Siddiki
School of Public and EnvironmentalAffairs, Indiana University-Purdue University
Indianapolis, USA
Xavier Basurto
Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, USA
Abstract
Public policies are structured by policy designs that communicate the key elements, linkages, and
underlying logic through which policy objectives are to be realized. This paper operationalizes
and integrates core concepts from the institutional analysis and development framework, includ-
ing the institutional grammar, the rule typology, action situations, and levels of decision making, to
provide a systematic approach for analyzing policy designs. The approach is illustrated through an
application to the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program regula-
tion, which outlines an unusual semi-voluntary regulatory program that relies on independent
Corresponding author:
Christopher M Weible,School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver, 1380 Lawrence Street,Suite
500, Denver, CO 80238, USA.
Email: Chris.Weible@ucdenver.edu
third-party organizations for Program administration. The conclusion identifies opportunities and
a research agenda for the institutional analysis of policy designs.
Keywords
Implementation; institutional analysis and development framework;organic farming; policy analy-
sis; policy design
1. Introduction
Every written public policy has a policy design, defined as the policy’s textual con-
tent. This textual content communicates key elements, such as policy agents, tar-
gets, and incentives and sanctions that link together and structure the underlying
logic through which policy objectives are to be realized (Schneider and Ingram,
1988). Policy designs both reflect the politics of policy formulation and provide
instructions for implementation. Integral to the operation and performance of a
government, policy designs offer an opportunity for understanding, and perhaps
improving, how a society governs.
1
A tradition among political science and policy scholars seeks to identify the
interaction between policy designs and the political environments that generate
them, successes and failures in policy implementation, and the politics that are sti-
mulated by the adoption of different policy designs (Hood, 1983; Linder and
Peters, 1989; Lowi, 1972; Mazmanian and Sabatier, 1981; Pierson, 2000; Salamon,
2002; Schneider and Ingram, 1997). Among the more productive attempts to con-
ceptualize policy designs are simplification strategies that sort policies within typol-
ogies according to their textual content (e.g.Lowi, 1964, 1972). Current proponents
of the typology approach categorize policies as various governance ‘tool’ or ‘instru-
ment’ types, compared across dimensions such as the coerciveness and directness
generally associated with a specificdesign category (Salamon, 2002).
Other approaches to the analysis of policy design seek within-type design com-
parisons based on one or more dimensions, such as stringency (Lester et al., 1983;
Meier, 1987; Rinquist, 1994). For example, Koski (2007) assesses various environ-
mental regulatory policy designs by the scope of activities they pertain to, regula-
tory stringency, and the level of prescription a design exhibits toward policy agents
and targets. Although typology and within-type policy design methods serve as
effective approaches for the categorization and comparison of policy designs, both
are limited in their ability to account for and conceptualize policy designs that are
communicated through hundreds or thousands of directives made up of numerous
words, sentences, and phrases. The advantage of simplification that these
approaches offer undermines their ability to provide, as described by Schneider
and Ingram (1988: 67), ‘a more systematic analysis of the structural logic’
embedded within policy design.
This paper offers a systematic approach to analyzing the elements, linkages, and
underlying logic of policy designs. The approach integrates and applies multiple
concepts from the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, includ-
ing the institutional grammar, the rule typology, action situations, and levels of
160 Journal of Theoretical Politics 28(1)
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