Comparative Politics

SUPA: Sustaining Public Administrations in Modern Democracies

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 discrepancy between the rules up for implementation and the administrative resources available results in suboptimal policy outcomes, low-quality public services, and inconsistent implementation practices.
Do parties matter for policy accumulation? An analysis of social policy portfolios in 22 countries
This article analyses the role of political parties in policy accumulation. We study this relationship in the area of social policy. …
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Do parties matter for policy accumulation? An analysis of social policy portfolios in 22 countries
Bureaucratic Quality and the Gap between Implementation Burden and Administrative Capacities
Democratic governments produce more policies than they can effectively implement. Yet, this gap between the number of policies …
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Bureaucratic Quality and the Gap between Implementation Burden and Administrative Capacities
Drug Legalization, Elite Support, and Government Effectiveness in Latin America
In Latin America, the legalization of drugs—where it occurred—has been driven mainly by elites, although much attention has been placed …
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Drug Legalization, Elite Support, and Government Effectiveness in Latin America
Studying Policy Design Quality in Comparative Perspective
This article is a first attempt to systematically examine policy design and its impact on policy effectiveness in a comparative …
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Studying Policy Design Quality in Comparative Perspective
Who Puts a Price on Carbon, Why and How? A Global Empirical Analysis of Carbon Pricing Policies
This article examines why some countries put a price on greenhouse gas emissions while others do not; and why some carbon pricing …
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System Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory
In this article, we analyze dynamics of policy change from the perspective of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). In particular, we …
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System Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory
Resources for PolicyPortfolios

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. It allows to generates measures of their characteristics and facilitates its visualization.

Mar 11, 2019 1 min read
Using PolicyPortfolios

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). How specific or general the area is, is up to the researcher. How broad or restricted is the collection of assessments is also up to the researcher (Adam, Knill, and Fernandez-i-Marı́n 2017). Using policy portfolios as objects of analysis allows political science to standardize comparitive policy analysis by providing a common ground of policy intervention, and represents a first step of comparing state intervention in different fields of public life.

Mar 11, 2019 11 min read
Fonts d'informació i indicadors per estudis internacionals
Book to be used as a teaching resource for an introductory course on data sources and indicators for international relations and …
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Fonts d'informació i indicadors per estudis internacionals