Reforms that Stick: The Politics of Preservation

Abstract

To not only legislate for but to credibly sustain reforms is a central challenge facing reforming governments around the world. Well-thought out, well-intentioned, and otherwise well-designed reforms can fail or fall short as contexts change, new actors emerge, or political priorities transform. Prior studies of policy reform have driven home the point that in the world of politics, there are few guarantees and nothing is a sure thing. How is it, then, that some major reforms come to endure politically, while others dwindle and disappear? Bringing together insights from policy studies, policy feedback, and government performance, this study employs a multimethod approach examining the causes and contents of education and environmental reform endurance in parliamentary democracies over time. Reforms that Stick introduces and interrogates the twin imperatives of reform preservation and adaptation in an unstable, contingent, and politically contested world, resulting in a nuanced understanding of the processes and conditions contributing to a reform’s endurance. This study reveals that there are different ways that reforms can endure and different ways they can fail to endure. Of the reforms that I examine, the extent to which they proved viable varied at different points in time. Some reforms initially appeared to gain traction in implementation, only to dwindle and lose their focus or strength over time. Other reforms evolved more incrementally and became more strongly institutionalised with the passage of time. Durable reforms preserve and reinforce their high-level ambitions and narratives amid the inevitable vagaries of politics. In practice, this could mean the removal, addition, or adjustment of policy instruments, their recalibration, or the further concretisation of programme-level objectives. To understand endurance, it is important to consider the seemingly innocuous but potentially transformative adjustments of a reform’s architecture that occur over time.