Partisan advisers and political policy failure avoidance
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | Jonathan Craft |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12303 |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
Partisan advisers and political policy failure
avoidance
Jonathan Craft
Department of Political Science, School of
Public Policy and Governance, University of
Toronto, Canada
Correspondence
Jonathan Craft, Department of Political
Science, School of Public Policy and
Governance, University of Toronto,
100 St George Street, Toronto, Ontario,
M5S 1A1, Canada
Email: jonathan.craft@utoronto.ca
Empirical examinations of partisan advisers detail significant differ-
ences in their policy work, influence, and their patterns of interac-
tions with other policy actors. This raises important implications
for their potential contributions to policy failure avoidance. Using
recent qualitative data from elite interviews in Canada, this study
finds that advisers’policy work contributes to political policy fail-
ure avoidance as policy is developed. The findings help unpack the
types and nature of policy-based resource exchanges that advisers
undertake, through advisory and non-advisory forms of policy
work, that strengthen political control and manage policy percep-
tions by other actors during policy development.
1|INTRODUCTION
Students of government and public policy have long noted if and how policies secure material or electoral for-
tunes for partisans can influence assessments of success and failure. Important work by Bovens and collea-
gues, and later others, has helped to improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of policy
failure and led to categories that analytically distinguish the ‘programmatic’,‘process’, and ‘political’dimensions
of policy failure (Bovens et al. 2001a; McConnell 2015). Political policy failure has been defined as ‘the way
policies and policy makers become represented and evaluated in the political arena’(Bovens et al. 2001b,
p. 20). Researchers have made an excellent case that the analysis of policy failures and their opposite are not
neutral activities, in particular, in the case of political policy failure, which often involves policy positioning,
and framing and counter-framing by various actors. As Bovens and ’t Hart recently put it ‘“success”and “fail-
ure”are not inherent attributes of policy, but rather labels applied by stakeholders and observers’(Bovens and
’t Hart 2016, p. 654). The argument here is that this approach to political policy failure is too narrow in three
key ways.
First, the emphasis on ex-post evaluation of policies after they have been formally developed is overly restric-
tive. Policy-making is inherently political from start to finish. It involves significant exercises of power, partisan
mutual adjustment, values-based and normative inputs, and the authoritative allocation of scarce resources
(Lindblom 1965; Majone 1989). The political ‘success’or ‘failure’of policy can be as much a matter of how the poli-
tics of policy-making unfold at various conjunctures in the policy process, not only during its ex-post evaluation
(Howlett 2012). Defining policy problems, determining who should be consulted in the development of policy
DOI 10.1111/padm.12303
Public Administration. 2017;95:327–341.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd327
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