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The EGPA Permanent Study Group on Public Policy provides a platform for the study of public policy in the context of public administration. Its main purpose is to develop and strengthen the ties between the fields of public administration/public management and political science/public policy by bringing scholars from these fields together. Given this purpose, special attention is given to implementation theory and research.
At the EGPA-website a mission statement of the Permanent Study Group XIII on Public Policy can be found. After a successful launch in 2010 (Toulouse) and a continued range of workshops held in the successive years, the Study Group will have its seventh meeting at the 2016 EGPA conference in Utrecht. The topic of this year’s call for papers concerns the study of policy performance under consideration of the context of the policy processes involved.
Workshop 2016 theme: Policy performance in context
Policymaking goes on after the policy goals have been decided upon. Even if practitioners are aware of this fact, surprise and even disappointment may follow when the practice of the policy process stays behind the original intentions. The reasons for a perceived gap between intentions and results may be multiple. First, decision-making may entail trade-offs and compromises among a range of values and stakes. Second, a variety of discretionary actors are involved in policy implementation, as legitimately entitled to represent their interests. Third, public functionaries also face situations unforeseen or not intended during policy formation, and beyond direct managerial supervision. Hence, contributing to policy performance goes beyond following the policy-on-paper. Fourth, these factors impact differently on the various societal groups targeted by the policy. Importantly, public policies are embedded in very differing institutional, political, economic and cultural contexts, which affect the extent and ways in which these four sets of factors interact on policy performance. As a result, the effects of policies and instruments may neither be clear-cut nor uniform.
The workshop of the Permanent Study Group on Public Policy to be held at the EGPA 2016 conference explores the causal factors and social mechanisms contributing to policy outputs and outcomes in varying contexts and inter-organizational settings. What theoretical, methodological and research design approaches may explain empirical variation in policy performance, especially when accounting for contextual variety? The workshop invites both experienced and junior researcher to propose theory-based papers with an empirical and (potentially) comparative character that address the relationship between variation in policy outputs and outcomes and contextual variety as explicitly as possible, especially when more
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than a single-case study is involved. The aim is to cover a variety of contexts across political-administrative systems, policy fields and types of street-level bureaucracies.
Procedure
Researchers interested in the workshop theme are kindly invited to submit a short abstract (max. two pages) outlining:
 the title of the paper
 the argument and contents of the paper
 the research methods and empirical material used
 name, affiliation, and contact information of the author(s)
As the conference is scheduled in August 2016, the following deadlines apply:
 Abstracts should be uploaded through the submission website by April 15, 2016.
 Deadline for decision and selection of the accepted abstracts by the co-chairs: May 5, 2016.
 Deadline for submitting the complete papers: July 31, 2016.
Practical information on the EGPA 2016 conference can be found on the conference website http://egpa-conference2016.org/
Harald Sætren
harald.Satren@aorg.uib.no
Department of Administration and Organization Theory/Rokkan Centre, University of Bergen
Christiegt. 17
NO-5007 Bergen
NORWAY
Peter Hupe
hupe@fsw.eur.nl
Dept. of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam
P.O. Box 1738, Mandeville Building, T17-15
3000 DR Rotterdam
THE NETHERLANDS
Eva Thomann
eva.thomann@ipw.uni-heidelberg.de
Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University
Bergheimer Straße 58
69115 Heidelberg
GERMANY