The SUPA project (03/2025-02/2028) is a partnership, and I am leading the team at the Universitat de Barcelona.
Background Public administrations in advanced democracies are increasingly overburdened. Administrative overburdening arises from a continuous increase in the number of rules that require implementation and the relative stagnation in administrative capacities.
This article analyses the role of political parties in policy accumulation. We study this relationship in the area of social policy. Our analysis builds on a large data set covering the size of policy portfolios (policy targets and instruments) in …
Democratic governments produce more policies than they can effectively implement. Yet, this gap between the number of policies requiring implementation and the administrative capacities available to do so is not the same in all democracies but varies …
In Latin America, the legalization of drugs—where it occurred—has been driven mainly by elites, although much attention has been placed on public opinion. Considering that efforts toward legalization have been top-down, analysis should concentrate on …
This article is a first attempt to systematically examine policy design and its impact on policy effectiveness in a comparative perspective. We begin by providing a novel concept and measure of policy design. Our Average Instrument Diversity (AID) …
This article examines why some countries put a price on greenhouse gas emissions while others do not; and why some carbon pricing policies are more ambitious than others. Our study of a global sample of 200 countries by means of event history …
In this article, we analyze dynamics of policy change from the perspective of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). In particular, we investigate how economic crises impact on patterns of policy change in policy areas that vary in terms of their …
PolicyPortfolios is an R package aimed at providing tools for managing, measuring and visualizing policy portfolios. It simplifies the creation of data structures suitable for dealing with policy portfolios, that is, two-dimensional spaces of policy instruments and policy targets.
Why PolicyPortfolios? A policy portfolio is a collection of simple assessments of the presence or absense of state intervention in a specific area (Target) using a concrete state capacity (Instrument).