Towards Understanding Effective Policy Mixes: Design Attributes, Causal Mechanisms, and Explanatory Variables

Recent research within the policy sciences has outlined a range of “design attributes” of policy mixes that are associated with or engender effectiveness (Bali and Ramesh, 2018; Mukjheree, Coban and Bali, 2021; Capano and Howlett, 2020, Coban and Bali, 2022). These attributes include for example, sufficient degrees of freedom, coherence, consistency, robustness, resilience among others. There is however lack of clarity on specific causal mechanisms through which these impact the effectiveness of policy mixes. Our overarching argument is that this gap encumbers recent theoretical advances in the literature, measurement and empirical studies on policy effectiveness. The paper addresses this gap by a) providing a systematic review of design attributes associated with effective policy mixes; b) identifying specific mechanisms for each of the attributes that impact effectiveness; c) suggest measures on how these attributes can be measured. In doing so, our paper aims to contribute to operationalizing design attributes as explanatory variables in design studies.