How and why do policies succeed or fail? A systematic review of the Policy Success Framework.

The question of how and why policies succeed or fail is key for the study of public policy. Over the past decade, the policy success framework proposed by Allan McConnell and colleagues has become a widely used reference for scholars to evaluate policy success and failure. However, there is to date no systematic assessment of the usefulness of the framework to conceptualize and measure policy success and failure, and of what factors explain these outcomes. This paper conducts the first systematic review of the empirical research applying McConnell’s policy success framework since its publication in 2010. The goal of this study is three-fold: first, we identify how scholars conceptualize and operationalize policy success and failure in different policy domains at levels of policy outputs, outcomes, or impacts, along with the procedural, programmatic, and political dimensions. Second, we provide a comprehensive overview of arguments and findings regarding the factors and underlying working mechanisms that explain why policies succeed or fail on different dimensions, at different stages, and in different sectors. Third, we examine the policy success framework against standard criteria for judging the strength of concepts (e.g., familiarity, coherence, differentiation, depth, and utility) in the application in empirical research. The findings provide important insights into the usefulness, limitations, and possible improvements of the policy success framework, the findings it has helped produce so far, and areas for future research.