The assertion that policies shapes politics, and the argument that institutions, due to their effects, can be treated as policies themselves, have been common claims (Pierson 1993, 2006). This issue has been addressed through historical institutionalism and policy studies. One concept that has helped to systematize various approaches is "policy feedback" (Beland et al 2022).
At the same time, federalization or decentralization of HE has attracted scholarly attention to describe regulatory changes and explain changes in politics, but analyses on the consequences on further policies and higher education systems have been scarce in policy studies.
Exploring the mechanisms and effects of policies has led to the identification of multiple lines of work. For example, "new policies" are seen to expand state capabilities, even creating new bureaucracies and actors (Weir 1988), or contributing to the formation of new interest groups (Skocpol 1992). Sometimes, policies generate blocking effects that make future changes more challenging, promoting essentially incrementalist change strategies or giving decisive importance to political ideas and symbolic legacies (Mahoney & Thelen eds 2015).
Although many of these studies have used multi-level cases or federal countries, the approaches have typically been static. In this paper, we offer a dynamic analysis, exploring the issue in the context of a temporal sequence. We aim to identify differentiated processes after the "transfer" of HE policies from the state level to the regions and trace the causal relationships between events, tracking policies and their instruments over time.
The case we examine is the higher education policy in Spain and the political decentralization process, transferring all competencies to the 17 regional governments, which took place between 1984-1996. This case allows monitoring, from the initial moment, the decisions of each regional government and the policy adoption processes. It involves analyzing the instruments and reconstructing the sequence of processes and their effects.
Data for this analysis come from the HE policy legislation and budgets of the 17 regional Government since the access to the competences to 2020.
Traditionally, explanations of these processes have been approached mainly from the perspective of the political preferences of the new actors (including political parties in Regional governments). However, the fact that all of them started from a single policy allows observing and monitoring the trajectory of continuity and change in policies through different instruments in the entire policy mix. Thus, it allows for testing the argument of preferences and other alternatives.
Working at the level of "public policy" (in a unitary manner) can be too generic and, at the same time, ambiguous, so it is recommended to break down policy into policy instruments.
Our objective in this paper is to describe the evolutionary trajectories of higher education policies developed by the Spanish regions, outline the sequence of processes, and establish a taxonomy of regional policies based on the predominance of the instruments used.
