Great Policy Successes

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY NC ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. With so much media and political criticism of their shortcomings and failures, it is easy to overlook the fact that many governments work pretty well much of the time. Great Policy Successes turns the spotlight on instances of public policy that are remarkably successful. It develops a framework for identifying and assessing policy successes, paying attention not just to their programmatic outcomes but also to the quality of the processes by which policies are designed and delivered, the level of support and legitimacy they attain, and the extent to which successful performance endures over time. The bulk of the book is then devoted to 15 detailed case studies of striking policy successes from around the world, including Singapore's public health system, Copenhagen and Melbourne's rise from stilted backwaters to the highly liveable and dynamic urban centres they are today, Brazil's Bolsa Familia poverty relief scheme, the US's GI Bill, and Germany's breakthrough labour market reforms of the 2000s. Each case is set in context, its main actors are introduced, key events and decisions are described, the assessment framework is applied to gauge the nature and level of its success, key contributing factors to success are identified, and potential lessons and future challenges are identified. Purposefully avoiding the kind of heavy theorizing that characterizes many accounts of public policy processes, each case is written in an accessible and narrative style ideally suited for classroom use in conjunction with mainstream textbooks on public policy design, implementation, and evaluation.

Mallory Compton is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University School of Governance, which she joined after obtaining a PhD from Texas A&M University. Her research interests include policy dynamics, social capital, social policy and bureaucratic performance. She has previously published on these topics in journals such as Journal of Politics, Public Administration and Public Management Review.
Paul 't Hart is Professor of Public Administration at Utrecht University and Associate Dean of the Netherlands School of Public Administration (NSOB) in The Hague. He resumed both positions in mid-2011, after spending five years as Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. His research interests include public leadership, success and failure in public policy, public accountability, political-administrative relations, and group dynamics in government. His recent books include The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership (Oxford University Press 2014), Routledge Compendium to Leadership (Routledge 2016), The Leadership Capital Index: A New Perspective on Political Leadership (Oxford University Press 2017). He was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. In 2016, he was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Science Foundation for a 5-year program investigating the nature and preconditions of highly successful public governance