Towards a policy process theory for authoritarian contexts

A key research gap in research on policy process theories is its predominant focus on democracies in the Global North. To illustrate, in a review of the multiple streams framework, Jones et al. (2016) found that almost 80 percent of the countries studied in existing literature are democracies in Europe or North America. In a review of the punctuated equilibrium theory, Kuhlmann & van der Heijden (2018) find few English-language journal articles that do not focus on Europe, USA, or Australia. Scholars have pointed out the need to study countries other than those in the Global North. Herweg et al. (2018) stress the need to apply the multiple streams framework to nondemocratic settings. Kuhlmann & van der Heijden (2018) advocate for more PET studies that examine countries other than North America and Europe. Recently, researchers have indeed started to apply the frameworks in authoritarian contexts (e.g., Babayan et al., 2021; Chan & Zhao, 2016; Li & Weible, 2021; Schlaufer et al., 2021). Most have concluded that the frameworks can be used to explain policy processes in authoritarian settings, and some propose minor adaptations for the frameworks’ applications in authoritarian settings. However, most policy process theories are built on implicit assumptions that are rooted in a liberal democratic context. The ACF, is implicitly built on a pluralistic concept of political power (Sievers & Jones, 2020). The NPF assumes that narratives used in policy debates impact policy outputs (Shanahan et al., 2017). However, do policy debates in authoritarian contexts really impact policy outputs? And while some of the MSF’s explicit assumptions, such as ambiguity or problematic policy preferences (Herweg et al., 2017), may make sense also in authoritarian contexts, other MSF assumptions and concepts may not. For example, is the independence between political and policy streams really given in a context without the separation of powers? How to deal with those aspects of the MSF’s structural elements that clearly relate to democracy, e.g., election of policy makers or party politics? This raises the question of whether the existing policy process theories do include the most important elements to explain policy processes in authoritarian systems. Their capacity to explain policy change in authoritarian political systems might be limited. Instead, it may be useful to take a step back to identify overarching factors that influence public policy – such as interests, institutions, ideas, and information (Weiss, 1995) and examine their operation in authoritarian systems. This article first of all draws on research on authoritarianism to identify key characteristics of authoritarian contexts relevant to policy process theories and to identify potential driving forces of policy change. Second, we review applications of the most important theories of the policy process in authoritarian regimes to determine the main differences between applications in democratic and non-democratic regimes. This review aims to highlight blind spots of existing policy process theories in authoritarian regimes. Third, we propose first steps towards a new policy process framework to explain policy change in authoritarian countries.