Policy Implementation: Resistance, Interference, and Backlash

While political scientists generally agree that most policies go through a standard cycle of agenda-setting, formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation, formal theories of policy change have typically focused on the early stages of the cycle: agenda-setting, formulation and adoption. Discussions of policy implementation have at times referred loosely to the implementation process as comprised of principal-agent problems or coordination dilemmas, but little headway has been made into developing an analytically consistent theory that might be used to explain the success (or failure) of the policy implementation process. In this paper, we propose a formal theory of policy implementation grounded in behavioral decision-making and analytical social mechanisms. Our argument is that a policy will be implemented successfully when conditions in the implementation episode are such that the social and cognitive mechanisms of resistance, interference and backlash (RIB) are not activated. We draw on a range of empirical research on policy implementation, both case-based and large-n, to illustrate how various conditions within an episode might either: 1) increase the likelihood of non-implementation by setting in motion one or more of the RIB mechanisms that threaten to derail implementation, or conversely, 2) increasing the chances of implementation by working to obviate or diminish the various threats faced during organizational change.