Politicised Policy Implementation

Politics in Western democracies has become more conflictual in recent decades. Phenomena such as polarization and populism bespeak a widespread tendency towards intensified and more conflictual interactions between political actors. Research on the policy consequences of intensified political conflict does usually not look beyond the political arena. In this article, we argue that the dominant focus on formal policy change is too narrow because it neglects changes in policy implementation, i.e. the day-to-day application of policies by front-line workers. We argue and demonstrate that, even in the absence of formal policy change, intensified political conflict can lead to consequential changes in policy implementation, as front-line workers and their political principals attempt to make policy implementation less scandal-prone and blameworthy. We demonstrate the effect of political conflict on policy implementation in three policy areas in Switzerland that have recently experienced episodes of intensified political conflict: asylum policy, juvenile justice policy and child protection policy. Switzerland constitutes a unique setting for identifying the effect of political polarization on policy implementation. While the three policies are national policies and thus apply to the whole country, Switzerland features two major public and media spaces that are divided by language barriers. This provides us with a quasi-experimental setting, with one public space receiving the treatment (‘intensified political conflict’) and the other space serving as a control group. We measure the treatment variable using data on media coverage and parliamentary debates after focusing events that resonated in only one of the public spaces. Based on time series cross-section analysis and qualitative interviews with front-line workers, we are able to show how intensified political conflict leads to politicized policy implementation (PPI). PPI is a form of implementation that is significantly, if not predominantly, driven by front line workers’ motivation to shield the implementation level from the polarized conflict that is raging at the political level. In the analyzed cases, PPI manifests itself in particular patterns of age-assessments of asylum seekers, harsher sanctions for youth offenders, and more restrictive child protection measures. Our article demonstrates that research must analyze and take into account changes in policy implementation in order to fully capture the spectrum of policy consequences in response to intensified political conflict and populist pressure.