Comparison of Policy Experiments: Practices in Asia

Abstract

Policy experimentation has become a global trend in recent decades. The dynamics of policy experiments in Western countries have been extensively investigated, whereas those in non-Western contexts have not. The latter is theoretically relevant in testing the generalizability of existing theoretical arguments and provides opportunities for developing new theories, and practically relevant given that academic research could provide scientific evidence that facilitates the decision-making of practitioners. This introduction summarizes six articles that examine the practices of policy experiments in Asia and identify multiple patterns of policy experimentation, such as policy laboratories, policy syntheses, and proportionate policy responses. Particularly, evidence drawn from China, India, and Singapore suggests that policy experiments tend to fit the characteristics and scale of the policy problem and the risks or uncertainty of the policy environment.

Keywords:

• policy experiment
• Asia
• comparative policy analysis

Introduction

Policy experimentation refers to governments’ attempts at certain methods or processes to produce novel policy options that could potentially be implemented on a larger scale (Heilmann 2008). Policy experiments are attractive given their possibility to generate valuable information that shapes future policy choices (Callander and Hummel 2014) and facilitate evidence-based policy learning among policymakers (Treisman 2007). In recent decades, policy experimentation has become a global trend (Zhu and Zhao Forthcoming). Notably, the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for their contributions in alleviating global poverty through various policy experiments.

The dynamics of policy experiments in Western countries have been extensively investigated (Campbell 1969; Graham et al. 2013). For instance, the potential effect of the federal system on inducing states to serve as laboratories has been discussed (Shipan and Volden 2012). Both internal determinants (e.g. political, economic, and social characteristics) and external pressures (e.g. economic competition) may affect how governments adopt and implement policy experiments (Berry and Berry 1990). Previous studies have also evaluated the effects of, and drawn lessons from, policy experiments in various policy domains, such as education (Dee 2004), the environment (Stavins 1998), finance (Aiyar et al. 2014), welfare (Boockmann et al. 2015), traffic (Prud’Homme and Bocarejo 2005; Blonigen and Cristea 2015), and migration (Scholten and van Nispen 2015). Policy experimentation is necessary for effective governance of complex and evolutionary social systems (Sanderson 2002).

Nevertheless, knowledge on policy experimentation in non-Western contexts remains limited (Henry et al. 2014). Despite theoretical and empirical achievements based on Western contexts, conducting research on non-Western contexts can help form a deeper understanding of how policy experiment dynamics vary in different administrative systems and policy domains. In practice, faced with unprecedented challenges, such as an aging population, climate change, terrorism, rising social welfare costs, and increased income inequality, governments across Asian countries have experimented with innovative policy solutions.

What factors determine the variation in policy experiment dynamics in different administrative systems and policy domains in Asia? To shed new light on this question, this special issue focuses on the processes within policy experiments widely used in selected countries in Asia and comparatively examines lessons drawn from initiating, designing, implementing, and evaluating these policy experiments.

Contributions to This Special Issue

The articles in this special issue originated as research papers presented at the 16th Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice (JCPA) and International Comparative Policy Analysis Forum (ICPA-Forum) Workshop: “Comparison of Policy Experiments: Practices in the Asia-Pacific Region”, School of Public Policy & Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, March 30–31, 2018. The workshop was also part of the third Asia-Pacific Public Policy Network (AP-PPN) Annual Conference. The Workshop and the special issue was sponsored by the National Funds for Distinguished Young Scientists of China whose principal investigator is Xufeng Zhu.

In this collection, Lee and Ma examine the role of policy laboratories (hereafter labs) in policy experiments and knowledge transfer in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Singapore. Developed and developing countries have increasingly created policy labs to produce innovative policy proposals and promote policy experiments under circumstances of incomplete information and frequent changes. Generally, policy labs work for or within a government organization, function through networks or alliances, and trigger innovations through pilots, prototypes, or simulations. Lee and Ma point out the limited analysis on the similarities and differences of these labs. Hence, they fill this gap by comparing the knowledge creation and transfer across the UK’s Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), Denmark’s Danish MindLab, and Singapore’s The Human Experience Lab (THE Lab). On the basis of a review of archival documents, reports, and semi-structural interviews, Lee and Ma show that all three labs are established as government units and aim to incubate and transfer policy evidence or ideas across administrations. However, these policy labs face varying political pressures and have different motivations for collaborating with institutions, academics, and experts. Lee and Ma argue that political regimes and policy environments may significantly shape the roles of policy labs in producing and transferring policy knowledge. Lee and Ma contribute to literature by offering new evidence on the design, operation, and implications of policy labs in both Europe and Asia.

In their contribution, Guo and Ba differentiate between the phases of “innovate or not” and of “how to innovate” during policy innovation diffusion; in the former, a government decides whether to adopt or reject a new policy, while in the latter it formulates specific details for a new policy. Guo and Ba argue that external diffusional pressures play a predominant role in the “innovate or not” phase because policy experiments in other jurisdictions could more effectively overcome the uncertainty associated with policy innovations. By contrast, the effects of contextual characteristics may increase in the “how to innovate” phase because a government needs to design the innovation on the basis of local demands. Using a dynamic analysis of the case of tax exemption policy for enterprise annuities (1997–2008) in China, Guo and Ba show that social construction, a diffusional pressure, significantly affects the decision of innovation adoption and design. Meanwhile, several jurisdictional characteristics significantly moderate the effects of external diffusional pressures. Guo and Ba contribute to literature by highlighting the differences between “innovate or not” and “how to innovate” phases during policy innovation diffusion and by exploring the varying effects of internal determinants and external diffusional pressures in these two phases.

Zhu and Bai’s contribution explores policy synthesis through regional experimentations as policy experimentation. Specifically, in policy synthesis a higher-level government designs policy instruments by incorporating the experiences of lower-level governments and synthesizes these elements through large-scale policy experiments. Policy synthesis requires extensive regional experimentations to obtain diverse information, institutionalized intergovernmental channels to deliver policy information, and a centralized authority to organize the entire policy experimentation. Through a comparative study of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in three Chinese provinces and a systematic review of the policies adopted by the national government, Zhu and Bai show that the Chinese national government learns the pros and cons of diverse policy instruments from provincial experimentations to create a balanced synthesized policy. The article contributes to the literature by explicitly conceptualizing a novel policy-learning model, policy synthesis, that has been observed in various policy domains and countries.

Nair’s paper conceptualizes the role of proportionate policy responses in a dynamic and uncertain policy context. Adaptive policymaking is more appropriate than the “best” policy under conditions of high complexity and uncertainty. Nair points out that changes in both policy context and response can range from low to high. On this basis, Nair classifies policy experiments and pilots as responses to contextual changes into four types: incremental, coping, transitional, and adaptive. Nair illustrates this conceptual framework by comparing policy pilots for addressing risks and uncertainties in Indian rain-fed agriculture. Empirical comparison of these four types of policy responses under uncertainty shows that each type has advantages and disadvantages. The article contributes to the comparative policy literature by providing insights into how governments respond to different levels of risk and uncertainty. The theoretical and empirical analyses suggest that the proportionality concept deserves more research attention given the practical importance of matching the design of policy experiments with the risks and uncertainties within a certain context.

Similarly, Mei and Wang expects that the development of policy experiments is contingent on the risks or uncertainties in policy environments. Based on a time-series analysis of the policy innovations reported by the most influential official newspaper, the People’s Daily (1980–2003) in China, Mei shows that the central government’s pace of promoting political innovations, which are policy programs that aim to reform the ruling party or the government system, is influenced by socio-economic risks measured by the monthly inflation rate. Specifically, Mei classifies Chinese political innovations into three types according to political sensitivity: liberalization, administrative, and party-strengthening innovations. The People’s Daily reported considerable political innovations when the monthly inflation rate was low and fewer political innovations when the monthly inflation rate was high. However, when the rate passed a certain tipping point, more political innovations reappeared in the People’s Daily. These findings suggest that the policy environment strongly affects the survival of policy innovations. The article contributes to existing literature by exploring the strategic behaviors of the national government during policy innovation in uncertain policy environments. The relationship between political innovations and policy environment deserves more attention in future research.

Meng’s contribution examines the effects of promotion tournaments and labor market tightening on pension generosity through a comparative public policy analysis of the pension system for urban workers in China (1997–2013). Meng raises an important and interesting question: Why does the Chinese government, free from electoral pressures and focusing on economic growth, create a generous pension system that may increase labor costs and harm its export-led economy? Meng points out that economic growth remains the priority in Chinese social policymaking and that the government only uses social policy to serve economic purposes. However, since the early 2000s, the originally oversupplied urban labor market caused by the migration of rural labor forces to urban areas has turned into an increasingly tight labor market due to the exhaustion of rural surplus labor, which increases the bargaining power of Chinese labor. Incentivized by the promotion tournament in China’s hierarchical personnel system, local leaders have to offer increasingly generous pension schemes to help employers retain workers to maintain economic performance. A series of panel data analyses show that, statistically, the labor market tightening and promotion tournaments significantly affect pension generosity across Chinese provinces. The article contributes to existing literature by highlighting the importance of market characteristics and institutionally regulated competition among local governments in shaping welfare politics.

Conclusion and Discussion

Generally, the articles present at least three key contributions to the comparative public policy literature. First, multiple patterns of policy experimentation in Asia are identified, including policy labs, policy synthesis, and proportionate policy responses. These patterns could help in clearer observation and analysis of various policy experiments in this region. Second, this special issue examines the conditions necessary for the smooth implementation of policy experiments, and the roles played by policy actors, such as central and local governments, political parties, interest groups, NGOs, think tanks, and international organizations. This knowledge could effectively help academics and practitioners examine who receives what, when, and how. Third, the main findings suggest that policy experiments should fit the characteristics and scale of the policy problem and the risks or uncertainty of the policy environment, which therefore, have important implications on predicting the success or failure of policy experiments.

Nevertheless, advancing the existing research on policy experiments in Asia remains necessary. First, most of the articles in this special issue focus on the antecedents and consequences of policy experiments within a country, but ignore the possibility of international diffusion of policy experiments across Asian countries. Future research could further explain why several policy experiments are more likely to spread across countries than others. Second, most existing studies focus on explaining successful policy experiments and there is limited research that systematically examines unsuccessful policy experiments. The following questions deserve more attention: How can successful and unsuccessful policy experiments be distinguished? What factors contribute to the failure of policy experiments? Third, the empirical cases in the abovementioned articles are limited to China, Singapore, and India. Future comparative policy research should expand the empirical scope to Japan, Korea, and other Asian countries. Examining policy experiments in wider contexts is theoretically relevant in testing the generalizability of existing theoretical arguments and provides opportunities for developing new theories, and practically relevant given that academic research could provide scientific evidence to facilitate the decisions of policymakers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China National Funds for Distinguished Young Scientists [71625006].

Notes on contributors

Xufeng Zhu

Xufeng Zhu is Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University, China. His research interests encompass policy process, think tanks, and public governance.

Youlang Zhang

Youlang Zhang is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration and Policy at Renmin University of China. His research interests encompass bureaucratic politics, policy process, and collaborative governance.