Cross-Sectoral Comparison of Croatian Policy-Making

This paper falls with the approach of cross-sectoral comparative public policies, that is still quite neglected in the policy research. Comparing across several sectors within the same country provides a fruitful basis for refining theoretical propositions and for developing empirical policy theory. This is especially important for the policy research in Eastern European countries, as they greatly differ in historical development and current context of policy-making from US and other western countries whose practice dominantly inspires policy theory. To somewise contribute to the goal of developing empirical policy theory, this paper poses following research question. What policy theories best explain the empirical practice of policy-making in Croatia? For that purpose, the paper firstly focuses on detecting main features of Croatian policy-making. It will compare the sample of 12 Croatian public policies, divided across six different policy areas (Compston, ed, 2004): defense and foreign affairs (foreign policy), law and order (migration policy), economic policies (employment, fiscal and regional policy), sectoral policies (agriculture, environment and transportation policy), social policies (education, family and health policy), and other policies (culture policy). Sources for the data gathering will be published policy studies that describe the policy-making process in the last three decades, since Croatian independence, within selected sectors. Whole material will be coded by the rules of qualitative content analysis (Schreier, 2012), processed by NVivo. The coding scheme of the features of policy-making will be developed inductively, with the least possible influence of the policy theory, and then systematically applied onto the whole material. So, the coding scheme will provide a detailed list of the main features of policy-making in Croatia. Then coded material will provide a precise description of each feature of Croatian policy-making. Afterwards the analysis will try to cluster similar, connected and overlapping features into groups or types of policy-making. Groups of policy-making features will be cross-listed with mentioned policy areas to explore if specific types of policy-making could be linked to specific set of sectors. In the interpretation of the findings the paper will try to determine what theoretical discourses on public policy could be connected to some of the features or to some of the types of Croatian policy-making. Policy literature will be scanned to determine policy frameworks that best help in explaining what policy studies of Croatian sectors stress out as commonly present in different processes of policy-making.