Policy Processes in Authoritarian Settings

Although there is a flourishing body of literature on policy processes (Weible and Sabatier, 2017), its focus remains on democracies in Europe and the United States of America (Jones et al., 2016; Kuhlmann & van der Heijden, 2018; Williamson & Magaloni, 2020). English-language studies that apply the main theories of the policy process (Weible and Sabatier, 2017) to nondemocracies remain limited in number and scope. Yet, it is pivotal to better understand policy processes around the world, not just in democracies. A large share of the world population lives in authoritarian regimes. Moreover, in our globalized world, domestic issues can easily travel to other parts of the world. COVID-19 is just one example of this. In response to this research gap, an emerging body of research has started to adjust and apply theories of the policy process to authoritarian institutional contexts. For example, Chan and Zhao (2015) apply the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) to regional government spending in China; Schlaufer et al. (2021) use the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine urban policymaking in Russia; Li and Weible (2021) apply the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to China; and Van den Dool (forthcoming) adjusts and applies the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) to China. However, a key question is whether existing policy process theories are sufficiently capable to explain policy processes in authoritarian settings given that their underlying assumptions are clearly rooted in a liberal democratic context. For example, the ACF is implicitly built on a pluralistic concept of political power (Sievers & Jones, 2020), while the NPF assumes that narratives used in policy debates impact policy outputs (Shanahan et al., 2017), and the MSF includes structural elements that clearly relate to democracy, such as the election of policy makers and party politics. Workshop Aims The aim of this workshop is threefold. First, it aims to systematically explore the applicability of existing theories of the policy process (Weible and Sabatier, 2017) to authoritarian regimes. Second, it aims to identify the specificities of policy processes and potential factors of policy change in authoritarian systems that go beyond existing theories of the policy process. Thirdly, it aims to start building an inclusive and coherent research community for scholars working on policy process theories in authoritarian settings, which would allow scholars who work on different theories and different countries to engage in comparative studies which would help us identify key characteristics of authoritarian policy processes. In addition to contributing to a better understanding of policy processes in authoritarian settings, the inherent comparative nature of this workshop furthermore contributes to theory development of existing policy process theories. With this focus on theory development, the workshop’s results are relevant not only for research on policy processes in authoritarian contexts but will also contribute to generate generalizable knowledge across contexts.