On the Edge of the Knife – Are the Streams Ripe Enough to Enhance the Likelihood of Policy Implementation?

Departing from Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) and the idea that streams need to be ripe for the policy to get into the agenda, be legislated and eventually implemented, we propose a model of content analysis of policies at the time of legislative approval to predict the likelihood of implementation. The puzzle is why is there legislative inefficiency? Why are some policies implemented and others never get out of the paper? To answer these questions the author purposes a methodological analysis that contemplates qualitative classification of legislation, parliamentary discussion, government programmes and newspaper articles at the time of legislative approval to find evidence for all the streams in the MSF: Policy design; Problem; Politics; Policy Entrepreneurs and Window of Opportunity. From the classification of content evidence, a checklist is built to enable quantification of the relative ripeness of each stream. The quantification comes from evaluating how challenging in administrative terms is the policy, how well defined is the problem, how favourable is the politics stream, including the national mood, how strong are the entrepreneurs and how wide open is the window. The quantification of these items, allows to compute a formula for balance, that was derived from the simulations developed by Zahariadis (2007) and further updated by the author’s simulations. The formula catches the need for a healthy balance between all the streams for a policy to have a higher possibility of implementation. When the balance has not been achieved during legislation approval, the policy will probably not be implemented, and some lessons of failure will be learned for future legislative effort. The model allows to identify the weak points, and, in the presence of active entrepreneurs, faults are due to be corrected and the policy increases the chance of implementation in a second round. The empirical case used to access the validity of the model was the policy process of Education Public-Private Partnerships (ePPPs) in England and Portugal which had some similar legislative efforts though very different outcomes at the implementation level. Content analysis of multi-sourced documents from 1980 to 2015 allowed the identification three strands of ePPPs on both countries, with several policies attempts (16 legislative moments were analysed) within different political context. The model shows a good capability of predicting the implementation success of each policy and uncovers the differences that led to distinct results. These empirical cases highlight the importance of persistent policy entrepreneurs in moulding the speech and in adapting the policy for acceptability both in terms of policy design, problem matching and ideological acceptability. National Mood is also a relevant variable for implementation as when the actors involved, and / or the people affected, are not fully in line with the proposal the policy is due to fail. Still, within the politics stream, a softer opposition is more relevant than government ideology. Beyond its academic value, this tool can be interesting for policy actors to access the chances of implementation at the time of policy approval and prepare the balances for increasing policy success.