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Arenas as institutional sitesfor policymaking: Patternsand effects in comparativeperspectiveArco Timmermans aa Faculty of Public Administration and Public Policy ,University of Twente , P.O. Box 217, Enschede, 7500 AE,The Netherlands E-mail:Published online: 08 Nov 2007.

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H M Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 3:311-337,2001© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in The Netherlands.

Arenas as Institutional Sites for Policymaking:Patterns and Effects in Comparative Perspective

ARCO TIMMERMANS atimmermans@bsk.utwente.nlFaculty of Public Administration and Public Policy, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AEEnschede, The Netherlands

Key words: policy arenas, institutions, comparative analysis, policy change, reproductivetechnologies

Abstract

In comparative approaches to the policy process, policymaking institutions are usually consideredat the level of political systems. Countries, however, may vary not only in systemic institutions butalso in types of policymaking arenas within specific domains. Systematic attention to this variationin policy arenas at both levels may complement existing theories of the policy process that focus onother explanatory variables and may increase the comparative potential of these approaches. Asan explanatory variable, arena variation makes a difference to policy results in that it may increaseor decrease the potential for policy change sought by policy entrepreneurs.

Introduction

Technology has become a major international currency that can influence thequality of life anywhere in the world. There are, however, many reasons whythe practical use of technology and scientific knowledge varies widely betweencountries. Societies differ, economies differ, and governments deal with inter-national scientific developments in different ways in the policies they pursue.Consider, for example, developments in assisted reproductive technology, afield of medical science with fundamental importance to human life. Since the1970s, increasingly sophisticated techniques for medical intervention in humanreproduction were developed—from assisted insemination to the manipulationof genetic material, including cloning, a subject of debate in many countries.But existing intervention techniques and.research on new techniques and theirconsequences are not allowed to the same extent everywhere. In some coun-tries, the autonomy of medical experts is strong, and the market is the mainregulatory mechanism. Other countries have tight state control. Some coun-tries have liberal policies, some have restrictive policies, and some have hardlyany policy in this field at all.

Understanding how public policies come and go remains a major challenge inpolitical science. Medical technologies are one example of scientific knowledge

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and of the expert debates surrounding them that cross national borders. Epis-temic communities are international coalitions of experts in a particular field ofknowledge with relevance to policy problems (Haas, 1989). But wherever thesecommunities exist, policies permitting or prohibiting particular practices or linesof research often are national or, as in federal states, even subnational. Thissituation exists in many fields, even though international or supranational poli-cymaking organizations such as those within the European Union have broughtpolicy convergence.

Comparative analysis can help explain differences in policies between coun-tries. Theories of the policy process, however, do not so often involve an ex-plicitly comparative perspective and usually deal with single countries. Such isthe case, for example, with 27 out of 31 applications of the advocacy coalitionframework reported recently by Sabatier (1998, pp. 100-101). Also, Kingdon's(1984) multiple streams model, the punctuated equilibrium model of policychange of Baumgartner and Jones (1991,1993), and the institutional rationalchoice approach developed by Ostrom and colleagues (1990,1994,1999) offergeneral accounts of policy processes without dealing explicitly with crossna-tional variation.

The aim of the present article is to contribute to the comparative explanationof policymaking. This explanation is particularly interesting in fields where in-ternational events such as economic shocks or scientific breakthroughs havea large potential impact on life and thus attract the attention of national ac-tors advocating or opposing a role for governments on these matters. Why arebreakthroughs in the international scientific environment in afield such as healthimported easily by policymakers in some countries but resisted elsewhere? Thisarticle provides an analytical and comparative framework consisting of institu-tional conditions that may help to answer this question. Institutional variablesare not the only ones that matter, but variation in institutional conditions acrosscountries yield different opportunities for actors involved in policymaking inthese countries.

The institutional conditions I consider are properties of policy arenas. Theconcept of policy arena has long been used exclusively for formal national po-litical institutions (the traditional focus in political science), but I include insightsfrom research on specific policy sectors for which terms such as policy networksand policy subsystems are used. Arenas thus include legislatures, executives,and courts, but also regulatory agencies, semipublic bodies, and specializedcommittees of experts or professionals with decision-making autonomy in aparticular domain—and therefore at some distance from the state. What allthese different types of arenas have in common is that they are institutionalizedrather than ad hoc. As far as I can see, no explicitly comparative approach existsin which types of policymaking arenas at the systemic level and within specificsectors of policy are analyzed. A more systematic attention for variation in policyarenas and their institutional properties may increase the comparative potentialas well as the explanatory power of existing theories of the policy process.

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In this article, variation in policymaking arenas across countries is depictedfirst. I consider the concept of policy arena as it is used in the literature andpresent a distinction between types of policy arenas that subsequently is ap-plied to countries in North America and Europe. Then I move on to consideringtypes of rules of the game within arenas, and discuss the relationship betweenarena and rules within countries. The institutional landscape depicted in this wayis expected to make a difference to policymaking. Policy arenas provide oppor-tunities and constraints for actors seeking to make policy innovations or to killnew initiatives, and how such strategic advantages or disadvantages emergeand unfold in policy is the next point of concern. I formulate expectations onhow institutional conditions are related to the policy process over a longer pe-riod of time. The theoretical points are applied in an extensive illustration basedon findings from an ongoing comparative research project on assisted repro-ductive technology policies in North America and Western Europe.

Arenas as institutional sites for policymaking

Policy problems and solutions are social constructions—they are not simplygiven,objectively but are the result of social processes (Schneider and Ingram,1997). Policymaking as a social construction involves the cognitive and nor-mative beliefs of actors, the resources available to these actors, and coalitionbuilding for support of one particular image of the problem and its possiblesolutions (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993; Sabatier, 1998). In Heclo's (1974)famous phrase, policymaking involves both "puzzling" and "powering." But notall actors with stakes in a particular problem initiate the construction of publicpolicy images and coalition building. This work typically belongs to policy en-trepreneurs and veto players, actors mobilizing groups, and key individuals forsupport or opposition of a policy, a point based on Schattschneider's (1960) pio-neering work and elaborated by authors such as Kingdon (1984), Baumgartnerand Jones (1993), and Tsebelis (1995, 2000). Policy entrepreneurs and vetoplayers can be individual or collective actors from within or outside the politicalinstitutions, such as members of the U.S. House of Representatives, disciplinedpolitical parties, established interest associations, or new social groups suchas the Council for Responsible Genetics.

Policy entrepreneurs and veto players are rational and strategic actors, butthey do not operate in a world of anarchy. Individual and collective action takesplace within the setting of one or more policy arenas. Lasswell (1936) alreadymentioned arenas as loci of interaction about the distribution of values. Morerecently, arenas are described as "situations in which a particular type of actionoccurs" (Ostrom, 1990, p. 54), as loci of "competition and battles over policyissues" (Harrop, 1992), and as "institutional sites" containing lax or tight rulesfor policymaking (Dudley and Richardson, 1998). The most elaborate use of theconcept is made by Baumgartner (1989) and by Baumgartner and Jones in their

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work on agenda setting in the United States (1991,1993). For Baumgartner andJones, "institutional venues" are loci where changes in the public images of pol-icy problems and solutions are made. As Baumgartner and Jones (1993, p. 16)say, "The structure of political institutions offers more or fewer arenas for raisingnew issues or redefining old ones—opportunities to change understandings ofpolitical conflict."

The venues discussed by Baumgartner and Jones include decision-makinginstitutions as well as the media and stock markets. While policy images cer-tainly can be influenced (even dramatically) in the media and in markets, theseare not institutional loci in which images are turned into authoritative policydecisions. For this reason, it is necessary to distinguish between the venuesin which images are influenced and the institutional arenas in which images—whatever their origin—are converted into authoritative policy decisions. Bothare venues to which different kinds of policy entrepreneurs seek access, butactual policymaking takes place in institutional arenas. By institutional, I referto the existence of relatively stable structures and procedures containing con-ditions for access, jurisdictions, and decision making. As Mintrom and Vergari(1996, p. 424) say, "Much can still be learned about how the structure of politi-cal institutions and underlying social norms encourage or hinder the adoptionand spread of innovative ideas." By authoritative policy decisions I mean thatlegal, political, or social sanctions are possible to prevent that decisions areignored. In democracies, arenas and their specific institutional properties area necessary but not a sufficient condition for policies to be made, changed, orblocked. They facilitate attempts by strategically acting policy entrepreneursand counteraction by veto players.

System and subsystem policy arenas

There can be many types of policy arenas, even within countries. This variationincludes constitutional and political arenas, but also arenas more specific topolicy sectors. Sector-specific policy arenas are not only committees in legis-latures such as the American Congress or the parliaments of European coun-tries but also bodies outside the sphere of formal government. Indeed, in manycountries policymaking in a particular sector or domain hardly can be under-stood without considering arenas specific to that policy domain. In a number ofEuropean countries, corporatist and consociational structures for policy havedeep historical roots, and they exist in different policy domains.

A distinction that can be useful is between system arenas and subsystemarenas. Legislatures, executives, presidents, and (constitutional) courts are allformal system arenas. More informal is the government formation arena ex-isting in parliamentary systems. This is an institutionalized locus of policy-making that has become quite significant in countries where governments aremostly or always coalitions, such as Germany and the Netherlands. Anothersystem arena is the electoral arena, which functions as a policymaking arena if

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binding initiatives or referendums are held. The common feature of initiativesand referendums, the government formation arena, courts, legislatures, and ex-ecutives is that their policy scope is broad. System arenas are generic—theyare designed for policymaking in any field.

Subsystem arenas are specific—they have a scope of policymaking that islimited to one particular field. I use the terms policy subsystem and policy fieldinterchangably. Specialized regulatory agencies and courts with jurisdiction inone policy field (labor, social security, health) are examples of formal domain-specific arenas. In countries with a corporatist tradition, extragovernmental andsemipublic policy making bodies exist, as for example the tripartite bodiesfor socioeconomic policy in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Actorsin these arenas are spokespersons from employers' associations, organizedlabor, and government representatives. In other fields such as agriculture, edu-cation, and health, corporatist or consensus-building structures include arenaswith decision-making competencies that are also limited to the policy domain.These arenas are not political and sometimes are not even entirely public (theymay or may not contain government representatives), but the decisions takenwithin them are binding. Scharpf (1997, p. 141) calls institutional settings ofthis type regimes, which are defined as "purposefully created normative frame-works governing negotiations among a formally specified set of actors thathave explicitly undertaken to respect certain interest positions of other parties,to pursue certain substantive goals, and to follow certain procedures in theirfuture interactions." This definition of regimes contains one element that I gen-eralize for all system and subsystem arenas: policy arenas are institutionalizedloci of policymaking. Such arenas have particular rules of access, competen-cies, information exchange, and decision making that may have been designedor may have emerged over time. Arenas created ad hoc and without any rulesstructuring interaction are not considered in the present article. In empirical pro-cesses of policymaking, both system arenas and specific subsystem arenas—ifthese exist—are often involved.

Analyzing policy arena variation across countries

Beyond the distinction between system and subsystem policy arenas, compar-ative analysis of policy arenas in countries requires a broader focus than thatprovided in most categorizations of political systems or in approaches dealingwith corporatist structures or policy networks. A useful contribution is Lijphart'sdistinction between majoritarian democracy and consensus democracy (1984,1999). Lijphart makes this distinction for analyzing political institutions and be-havioral variables of actors at the system level, but the potential use of thedistinction is broader. Though Lijphart does not give clear definitions of majori-tarian and consensus democracy, I see two essential points of difference. First,in consensus democracies, the constitutional design includes more indepen-dent policymaking institutions, and therefore more built-in veto points, than in

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majoritarian democracies. Two, in consensus democracies, these institutionsare more inclusive and oriented to power sharing than in majoritarian countries,benefiting political minorities. In majoritarian democracies, winning and losingin policymaking is much more absolute. In Lijphart's analysis, typical majoritar-ian democracies are the United Kingdom and New Zealand, and examples ofconsensus democracy are Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Decentralization, autonomy, and compartmentalization of arenas

Elaborating the concepts of majoritarian and consensus democracy further interms of policymaking arenas, three dimensions of variation may be distin-guished. First, countries may vary in their degree of decentralization of systemarenas. In many ways, the most rigorous form is federalism, in which systemarenas such as the legislature, executive, and supreme court exist at the na-tional level and in subnational units such as the American states, the GermanLander, and the Swiss Cantons. The second dimension concerns the degreeof autonomy of system arenas. Autonomy of system arenas implies that func-tions and competencies of formally different arenas are separate and that thesearenas are composed differently. In this dimension, the clearest contrast is be-tween the separation of powers in the American system and the fusion of thelegislative and executive arenas in the United Kingdom. Most parliamentarysystems in Europe are located between these two extremes. The third dimen-sion is the degree of compartmentalization of subsystem arenas—the extent towhich specific arenas exist in different policy fields. This dimension representsin part the cultural traditions of the state-society interaction, with three possi-ble locations of countries in this dimension being pluralism, concertation, andcorporatism (Atkinson and Coleman, 1989). In pluralist countries, policy sub-system compartmentalization is weak, whereas in countries with a corporatisttradition, specialized arenas exist in several policy fields. Such is the case, forexample, in the Scandinavian countries and in Germany in the fields of socioe-conomic policy and health, where specialized arenas in the socioeconomic andhealth subsystems are at least as important as the legislature and the execu-tive (Dohler, 1991). Lijphart and Crepaz (1991) find a clear positive associationbetween the degree of corporatism and consensus democracy. Using othervariables, I also assume that such a relationship exists.

Lax and tight arena rules

Decentralization and a high degree of autonomy of system arenas and subsys-tem compartmentalization increase the number of potential venues for actorstrying to influence policymaking. Each of these is a structural feature of con-sensus democracy. In contrast, the typical majoritarian model of democracyconsists of centralized and fused system arenas and a weak compartmental-ization of policy subsystems.

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But the number of policy arenas in a country does not say everything. Even ifthere are multiple arenas, some may be more favorable for policy entrepreneursthan others because the rules of the game within arenas may differ. Borrowingfrom Ostrom and associates (1986,1994) and Bums and Flam (1987), I considerfour types of rules: access rules, competence rules, information rules, and de-cision rules. As Burns and Flam (1987, p. 101) argue, a finite set of rule typesallows institutions to be compared. Here, the point of comparison is the extentto which rules are lax or tight and thus form weak or strong constraints on ac-tors seeking to promote or block policy initiatives. These lax or tight rules maybe formal or informal. Access rules may allow entry to an arena to many ac-tors or, when tight, to a small number of well-specified actors. Rules specifyingconditions for participation in a formal arena such as the legislature can pertainalso to candidacy for office. An example of a tight access rule of a subsystemarena is the requirement of proportional representation in expert commissionson health policy in Germany (Dohler, 1991, p. 277). Competence rules give ju-risdictions and conditions for using resources within arenas. Competence rulespertain directly to the influence potential of actors within an arena with respectto policies in a particular domain. The policy scope of competencies given toactors within a particular arena may be limited to one domain, as in subsys-tem arenas, or be generic, as is the case in arenas such as the legislature, theexecutive, and the supreme court. If functional or constitutional relationshipsexist between arenas, rules of competence may also specify conditions for in-teraction between these arenas, as for example between the legislature andexecutive in parliamentary systems. Information rules entail rights, obligations,or prohibitions regarding the use and exchange of information that actors con-sider to be relevant. Finally, decision rules give procedures for decision making,and these may vary between a lax simple majority rule and unanimity, whichis a much tighter constraint on decision making. Additional decision rules maygive quorum or turnout requirements (as, for example, in referenda), specify therelative weight of actors participating in decision making, or give directions fordistributing payoffs.

The impact of institutional "genetics"

The relationships between the three dimensions of arena variation and the con-tent of rule types are not random. They occur in particular combinations withineach of the two models of democracy, .or more often in proxies of these twomodels. To an extent, the relationship between modern structures and rules ofpolicymaking arenas within countries is based on historical conditions. Moe andCaldwell (1990,1994) assert that national institutions designed by constitutionalengineers carry distinctive "genetic codes" that program "a whole array of sys-tem features" (1994, p. 172). For example, the separation of powers designedby the founding fathers in the United States is seen to have produced a presi-dential system of formalized structures and procedures containing a number of

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institutional veto possibilities. In contrast, the Westminster two-party system ofthe United Kingdom is seen to propel concentration in governance structuresand formal and informal rules favoring the incumbent party.

This claim about the impact of historical arrangements on policymaking in-stitutions is intriguing, but I think that institutional "genetics" includes not onlystructures but also political cultural traditions. This point is particularly impor-tant for a number of European countries, where corporatist and consociational(power-sharing) arrangements existed long before democratic structures of rep-resentation were designed. Modern policy arenas in countries such as theNetherlands, Norway, and Switzerland are built on preexisting principles andnorms for social cleavage management and governance. Of course, arena rulesdepend also on the intrinsic functions of arenas. Legislatures differ widely fromexecutives and bureaucratic organizations, and the development of rules of ac-cess and decision making within these arenas is in part a matter of efficiency.Legislatures, with their multiple members, could hardly function if the decisionrule were to be unanimity, and this is why in all countries legislatures have amajority rule. And because legislatures are in many ways seen as the centralarena of democracy, access rules and information rules are generally more laxthan in executives, courts, or expert committees within policy subsystems.

Nevertheless, political cultural traditions produce variation between countriesin the content of arena rules. All democratic legislatures have a majority rule,but not everywhere does a supermajority rule exist, and legislatures with sucha special tight decision rule may differ in the range of subjects to which therule applies (Tsebelis, 2000). For example, in a divided society such as Belgium,the tightest procedures for legislative decisions apply to policies affecting lin-guistic minorities. They follow from a tradition of cleavage management andaccommodation in which representation and protection of linguistic and politi-cal minorities are prominent. Indeed, this tradition appeared to be so importantthat the country changed from a unitary to a federal state in 1989.

Policy arenas in consensus and majoritarian democracies

The case of Belgium, with its antecedents of accommodation politics, is alsoan example of how structural and procedural properties of policy arenas in con-sensus democracy are related. Consensus democracy, as in Lijphart's model,contains decentralized and autonomous, system arenas, with lax access rulesfor the legislative arena (the electoral law is proportional representation witha low threshold) but relatively tight jurisdictions and rules of information anddecision making for most other arenas. This structure is particularly the case inpolicy subsystem arenas in fields such as labor, education, and health. But thecountry closest to the complete consensus model is Switzerland. While in manyEuropean countries, including Belgium, the de facto separation of the legisla-ture and the executive has weakened because political coalition governance

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implied party and coalition discipline across these arenas, Switzerland still hasa relatively autonomous legislature and executive (the party composition of theexecutive is fixed, the principle of Konkordanz) (Linder, 1994). Though Switzer-land has a modest corporatist tradition, the main policy subsystems are com-partmentalized, as for socioeconomic policy, environment, and health. In short,in consensus democracy, the differentiation of arenas and the often tight ruleswithin them limit the maneuvering space for actors such as policy entrepreneurs;proposals need to accommodate multiple actors with relatively broad institu-tional capacities to influence policymaking, and as a consequence, ensuingpolicies are often multiactor compromises.

The main two features of majoritarian democracy are a low degree of de-centralization and limited autonomy of system arenas, and the presence ofa pluralist rather than a corporatist culture of interest representation meansthat policy subsystems often are less compartmentalized than in consensusdemocracies. The concept majoritarian stands for the importance of winningin the policy game, which is facilitated by relatively lax rules, particularly de-cision rules, and a strong fusion of the legislative and executive arenas (morethan in most coalition systems). The United Kingdom is the main Europeanexample. Moe and Caldwell (1994, pp. 180-181) and Tsebelis (1995) point tothe strength of control over the government system by the party in office, andScharpf (1997, pp. 203-204) qualifies the United Kingdom as a statist countryfor this reason. Interest groups are consulted, but few specific arenas exist inwhich they have formal codecision power; they are put aside relatively easily bythe majority party (Page, 1985, p. 105; Harrop, 1992). In a study of British roadspolicy, Dudley and Richardson (1998) describe how a consultation arena "with-out rules" allowed access to pressure groups, but policy effects occurred onlywhen the majority party dominating the executive and legislative system arenaswas ready to accept that policy change was needed. Majoritarian democracythus combines the existence of few arenas with relatively lax rules, which allowwinning strategies of policy entrepreneurs once these gain support from theincumbent party.

Most countries have policymaking institutions containing elements of both,but with an emphasis on one type. In the United States and Canada, majoritariandemocracy is moderated by decentralization. Federalism in the United States in-cludes also a separation of powers between system arenas that is stronger thanin other majoritarian systems, including Canada. Further, the electoral arena isrelevant through referendums, particularly in California. These are consensuselements, but the rules within these arenas are majoritarian rather than powersharing (the exception being the supermajority rule for changing the federalConstitution). Likewise, the degree of compartmentalization of policy subsys-tems is lower than in most European countries. In the pluralist American system,policy subsystems are relatively open "issue networks" rather than closed pol-icy communities (Heclo, 1978; Rhodes and Marsh, 1992). These features explainthe "venue shopping" of actors observed by Baumgartner and Jones (1993) in

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their study of agenda setting. In Canada, federalism also yields more arena dif-ferentiation than in the pure majoritarian model, and in Canada's federal arenas,informal rules of consensus have emerged for managing the ethnic cleavage—the troubled coexistence of the English-speaking and French-speaking commu-nities. Further, the provinces show different degrees of compartmentalizationof policy subsystems. Montpetit and Coleman (1999) show that in the domainsof agricultural and environmental policy, specific arenas exist in Ontario but areabsent in Quebec.

Most West European countries are democracies with both consensus andmajoritarian elements. The most common feature of consensus is policy sub-system compartmentalization, though the degree varies between countries. Inthe Scandinavian countries, Germany, and the Netherlands, specific arenas ex-ist in many policy domains. Scholten (1987, p. 22) argues that in countries witha corporatist tradition, issues often are dealt with first in such specific are-nas before they reach the broader system arenas. And in these specializedarenas, policymaking is subjected to a tight regime of access and interactionrules that limit the moving space for participants. As Weaver and Rockman(1993, p. 28) say, in such a context, interest groups may not be well placedto overthrow government decisions that go against their goals, but they havemore institutional possibilities to prevent such decisions from being made inthe first place. Decentralization of system arenas is less frequent; in this di-mension, most countries in Europe are not really consensual. Exceptions areAustria, Germany and, closest to the Swiss model of consensus democracy,Belgium since 1989. Note that in the same dimension, majoritarianism is mod-erated in North America so that the degree of decentralization seems to haverather limited analytical leverage when countries are mapped as more majoritar-ian or more consensual, a point made already by Lijphart (1984). As countrieswith a low degree of system arena decentralization, the Scandinavian coun-tries and the Netherlands differ in the nature of rules. In Scandinavia, andparticularly in Norway and Sweden, no real tradition of accommodation ex-ists at the system level, though the emergence of coalition governments mayinduce the development of informal rules of power sharing. In the Netherlands,system arenas have more typical consensual rules; access to the legislatureis relatively easy, but once in, actors face tight formal and informal rules inpolicymaking.

Figure 1 summarizes the variation in policy arenas between a number of coun-tries. I stress that this mapping is tentative. The matrix structure is chosen forsimplification. The number of arenas includes both system and subsystem are-nas. As noted above, the degree of decentralization is related least to either ofthe two pure types, and I mention this dimension explicitly for analytical nuance.The category of "medium" number of arenas includes both federal countrieswith weak compartmentalization of subsystem arenas (decentralized majoritar-ian democracies) and centralized countries with strong compartmentalization(centralized consensus democracies). These countries, and even more clearly

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ARENAS AS INSTITUTIONAL SITES FOR POLICYMAKING 321

Number of arenas

Small Medium Large

•

Nature of rules

Lax/winning

Tight/power-

sharing

Pure majoritarian(U.K.)

Decentralizedmajoritarian(U.S.A., Canada)

Centralized Pure consensus

consensus (Norway, (Switzerland, Belgium,the Netherlands) Germany)

Figure 1. Policy arena variation across democratic countries. Placing Germany in the "large" cat-egory is the clearest deviation from Lijphart in his analysis. I do this because I focus less excusivelyon electoral and party competition variables. In terms of the three structural dimensions and therule dimension, Germany is much more consensual than in Lijphart's study.

the other countries in figure 1, differ further significantly in the nature of arenarules.

Policy effects of arena variation

I have dealt extensively with arena variation between countries in North Americaand Europe because I expect policymaking structures and rules to be key con-ditions for success of policy entrepreneurs. I stress again that this perspec-tive does not mean that institutions are the single determinant of public policy.Within countries, different coalitions of political parties, public agencies, sci-entific groups, interest organizations, and other collective or individual actorspromoting or opposing policy initiatives may exist. And when comparing coun-tries, we are likely to find differences in the coalitions that ensue—not onlyin their composition but also in the substantive policy beliefs they advocate.Polsby (1984, pp. 159-160) argues that some societies may be more prone topolicy innovation than others because they have cultural beliefs that encouragechange. Though this point is most relevant when comparing Western societiesto developing societies, also in Western countries the tenor of beliefs is unlikelyto be similar everywhere. Differing beliefs advocated by different sets of actorscontribute to variation in policies, as for example the response of national orsubnational actors to international events such as an economic shock or thebirth of Louise Brown in 1978, the first baby conceived in vitro. Proposals forpolicy innovation triggered by such events may be permissive or restrictive—the incorporation of in vitro fertilization in public health subsidization programs,

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or a total ban on use of any technology for assisted reproduction. By policyinnovation, I refer to a new policy or a change in policy consisting of whatHall (1993) calls a policy paradigm—one or more basic goals and the underly-ing cognitive and normative rationales for these goals. Sabatier (1998, p. 118)refers to this as the policy core of a policy program. If decisions are madeonly about the properties of policy instruments and about operational matters(leaving the policy paradigm fully intact), this is not considered to be policyinnovation.1

But the properties of policy arenas are important, because they can accel-erate or slow down policymaking. They facilitate or limit proposals made bypolicy entrepreneurs such as medical professionals, the Catholic Church, or theQuebec Association of Feminists. In one type of democracy, policy is quite sta-ble over time and changes are slow and predictable; but institutions in anothercountry allow for much more erratic processes, resulting in what Baumgartnerand Jones (1993) call policy punctuations. Policy innovations, particularly largeinnovations, can be, as Polsby (1984, pp. 150-159) calls it, acute or incubated.2

It is difficult to state objectively what is fast or slow policymaking and acuteor incubated innovation. The time frame for analyzing and comparing policy-making and changes in policy should be at least two decades. By comparingpolicymaking across countries over a longer period, it is possible to speak aboutall this in relative terms.

Potential for policy innovation in majoritarian democracies

In his veto player theory, Tsebelis (1995, 2000) predicts that an increase in thenumber of institutional sites for policymaking enlarges opportunities for vetoingpolicy proposals. A similar prediction is made by institutionalists such as Im-mergut (1992), Steinmo et al. (1993), Weaver and Rockman (1993), and Levy andSpiller (1994). These authors all argue that the existence of many system arenasdelays policymaking and policy change, a prediction made for the United Statesand Switzerland. Rapid policy innovation is predicted for the United Kingdom,where few institutional venues for veto exist. Tsebelis puts much emphasis onthe presence or absence of special thresholds for change, such as the two-thirds majority rule for amendments of the American Constitution. This is animportant institutional feature for fundamental matters, but it is less relevant formost policies in the United States. Compared with Switzerland, the scope ofconstraining arena rules within system arenas, and certainly within subsystemarenas wherever these exist, is much more limited in the United States. Indeed,Baumgartner and Jones (1993) argue that American policy is not as stable asoften thought. They say, "Federalism, separation of powers and jurisdictionaloverlaps are opportunities for change as much as they are inhibitors of change"(1993, p. 240).3 The presence of multiple venues for policymaking in which juris-dictions are relatively fluid and other rules are lax is seen to reduce the control

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over time by one single policy elite. I follow this line of argument as it appliesto a longer time period. I expect that in decentralized majoritarian democraciessuch as the United States and Canada, incremental policymaking prevails, butat irregular intervals policy punctuations occur.4 Such major policy shifts arenot frequent, but they are extremely important.

To illustrate the above points, Baumgartner and Jones (1993) find that poli-cies on civil nuclear power, urban policy, child abuse, and other subjects havechanged in a punctuated, shocklike way over a period of about two decades.During this period, policymaking was mostly incremental, and the policy mo-nopolies consisting of specific beliefs shared by the dominant coalition of ac-tors were protected by arrangements created for this purpose. But once thepolicy image began to decline, the arrangements made for sustaining the pol-icy monopoly appeared not to be durable. This dependence on one particularpolicy illustrates that the structures designed in the policy subsystem were notautonomous. Other empirical evidence can be found in Dohler's (1991) analy-sis of health policymaking. This author (1991, pp. 283-285) observes about theUnited States that in the 1980s the Reagan administration was able to includethe health system in a broader deregulation and privatization program partlybecause the health policy subsystem was both institutionally and ideologicallyweak and heterogenous. Similarly, Weir (1992) observes that proposals for em-ployment policy innovation had multiple sources but also that the fragmentedinstitutional structures made it difficult to assemble sufficient political authority.

The centralized type of majoritarian democracy present in the United Kingdomalso facilitates large policy innovations. Favorable institutional conditions existfor policy entrepreneurs to attract majority support in the few and fused systemarenas in which rules of the game are generally lax (but within which the gov-ernment party discipline is strict, unless a matter is exempted explicitly fromdisciplined voting), with relatively limited risks of binding veto elsewhere. In-terest group leaders and other policy entrepreneurs first need to have supportfrom the incumbent party, but once inside, policy proposals can be processedrelatively quickly through the government machinery. The electoral arena con-tains no rules for vetoing policy proposals, but it is extremely important forthe prolongation or the abrupt end of one party's control of the political are-nas. This institutional setting facilitates large policy shifts and also relativelyfrequent ones. I expect that in a centralized majoritarian democracy such asthe United Kingdom, the potential for major policy innovations over a period oftwo decades is higher than anywhere else. I expect that policy punctuationsare most frequent in this type of democracy.

Illustrations are provided, for example, by Dudley and Richardson, who findthat lax institutional rules enable policy entrepreneurs to expand issues (1998,p. 936). Rules in arenas for consultation are lax; there social groups influencedthe image of British roads policy, and the declining societal support for policycontinuation led to changes made relatively quickly by the incumbent party inthe legislative and executive arenas. Hall (1993) discusses the case of economic

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policy, in which a policy paradigm shift from Keynesianism to monetarism oc-curred in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party took office.The alternation in party control of the legislative and executive arenas was cru-cial to this policy shift, which was more abrupt than anywhere else in Europe.Hall argues further that policies with weaker policy paradigms are even moresusceptible to change, and institutional conditions in the United Kingdom re-inforce this claim. Dealing with health policy, Dohler (1991, p. 282) reports thatinstitutional centralization, including the organization of the National Health Ser-vice, greatly enhanced policy reforms initiated by the British government in the1980s.

Thus, both for "pure" and for decentralized majoritarian democracies, I expectthat the model of punctuated equilibrium—stability interrupted by large sh i f t s -applies well to policymaking. The potential for policy innovations consisting ofnewly designed or redesigned policy paradigms is high, though in decentralizedmajoritarian democracies these take more time to occur because there are moresystem arenas in which support needs to be built. When they occur, policyinnovations are made in system arenas, either at central level or at a subnationallevel to which policymaking authority is attributed.

Potential for policy innovation in consensus democracies

I expect policymaking and the potential for policy innovation to be differentin consensus democracies. The essential point is that as the number of are-nas and the emphasis on power sharing and tight arena rules increase, policyentrepreneurs face more institutional hurdles in getting their preferred policiesadopted. For one thing, coalitions supporting policy proposals often need tobe larger, and even the meaning of winning—wherever the decision rules al-low this—is limited often by rules of proportional distribution of policy payoffs.Moreover, the presence of institutionalized arenas in different policy subsys-tems means that policymaking can be, and often is, transferred from generalsystem arenas to policy field-specific arenas in which the rules of consensusand compromise are often even more tight. This shift takes place in part be-cause of the functional properties of subsystem arenas: policies ensue from jointdecisions reached by small numbers of actors, and this situation mandates con-sensus building. Multiactor consensus and compromise in policymaking underconditions of tight rules will imply often that ensuing policies are closer to thestatus quo than under less constrained conditions. Put differently, in countrieswith institutionalized subsystem arenas, path dependency in policymaking isfelt more strongly. In consensus democracies, a policy equilibrium is thus likelyto be more institutionally fixed and less easily disrupted. Weaver and Rockman(1993, p. 448) say that European countries with coalition governments are strongin cleavage management but weak in producing policy innovations and in set-ting policy priorities. The dense web of structures and rules may even lead to

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inertia in policymaking, something that has been observed, for example, abouta number of policy issues and fields in the Netherlands (Bovens and 't Hart,forthcoming).

My expectation is thus that in consensus democracies, incremental policy-making is interrupted less by policy innovations containing a shift in the pol-icy paradigm than in both types of majoritarian democracies. Further, I expectthat in "pure" (decentralized) consensus democracies such as Switzerland andBelgium, incremental policy steps are less in one particular direction than whenconsensus structures are more centralized, as in the Netherlands, because pureconsensus democracies include more (decentralized) system arenas wherepolicies can be vetoed. In both types of consensus democracy, however, sub-system arenas are important for the genesis of policy content. Wherever policiesare finally adopted (they may need formal ratification in a system arena suchas the legislature)—and possibly vetoed later on—they often are prefigured insubsystem arenas.

Empirical support for these expectations can be found, for example, in Dohler(1991), who concludes about Germany that constant reform blockades in the1970s and 1980s made health policy in this country much more stable than inthe United Kingdom and the United States (1991, p. 284). This stability impliedalso a continued autonomy for subsystem arenas, where binding policy de-cisions were and still are made in multilateral negotiations. Immergut's (1992)comparative study of health policymaking demonstrates how the shifting ofrelevant issues from one arena to the other seriously prolonged the policymak-ing process and affected the substantive results. The author's description ofthe Swedish case is interesting, because it shows how reform proposals intro-ducing compulsory health insurance were negotiated in Royal Commissions assubsystem arenas, but with only halfhearted support from the Swedish MedicalAssociation and the Employers' Association, which advocated private healthcare provisions and opposed compulsory insurance. This lack of consensusexisted also within system arenas, where only incremental policy changes wereendorsed throughout the 1940s and 1950s. But when the Social Democratsgained control of both the executive and legislative arena in the late 1960s,the "socialization" of health care was adopted quickly (1992, p. 81). This majorhealth reform thus took place when one party was in control of the executiveand legislative arenas in the system, but this change was possible—in a senseincubated—only after years of piecemeal policy changes initiated and preparedin subsystem arenas. In the same study, Switzerland was found to have expe-rienced many policy reform attempts that stumbled and eventually failed in theelectoral arena through referendums. This failure not only occurred in a sys-tem arena but was preceded by an intense process of compromising withinthe health policy subsystem arenas (these were attempts to make the reform"referendum proof," as Immergut calls it). Tight decision rules also played apart. Reform proposals first were watered down in subsystem arenas wherenorms of consensus and unanimity applied, and subsequently were vetoed in

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the electoral arena through a referendum for which a minority of the voters wassufficient (the lax decision rules for veto underscore the significance of broadconsensus in the Swiss system).

Comparing policymaking on assisted reproductive technologies

A more extended illustration of the ways in which differences in arenas betweencountries bear on policymaking and innovation potential over time is based onthe first findings from an ongoing research project comparing the design ofpolicies on assisted reproductive technologies in North American and Europeancountries.5

• The issue: medical and political intervention in human reproduction

The scientific achievement of the birth of the first test tube baby in the UnitedKingdom in 1978 encouraged medical researchers and practitioners in manyWestern countries to adopt and augment in vitro fertilization techniques. Sincethen, different techniques for medical intervention in human reproduction havebeen developed, ranging from artificial insemination by donor to much moresophisticated techniques for embryo research (such as prenatal diagnosis andcloning using embryo cells). These scientific developments pertaining directlyto human life engendered euphoria but also fear among those with a specialinterest in assisted human reproduction, the broader public, and elected politi-cians. In the early 1980s, the use of in vitro fertilization in medical practiceexpanded rapidly. This induced actors with personal, social, commercial, orelectoral stakes to place the issue on the political agenda. Intentions, however,diverged widely: patient groups advocated more access and subsidies for treat-ment, coalitions of actors with heavy moral concerns demanded prohibitions,and groups of medical scientists and practitioners, often in defense, arguedagainst restrictive government regulation. In many countries, medical associa-tions have considerable self-regulatory power. For them, the question was howmuch this power would be limited by government policies.

The mobilization of support for or against policy initiatives happened in allcountries where pros and cons of assisted reproductive technologies becamea public and political issue. But the ways in which the underlying problem of in-fertility was framed, and the images of possible policies dealing with the emerg-ing technologies, differed widely. The issue, or set of issues, is a position issuelike abortion and euthanasia, on which compromises are notoriously difficult toreach because normative beliefs are often irreconcilable. Moreover, scientificuncertainties continue to exist, a point stressed by at least part of the researchcommunity. Assisted human reproduction involves technical questions, ethi-cal values, and fundamental rights, in some countries, reproductive technolo-gies were linked strategically to biotechnology, which for one group of actors

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entailed positive prospects for improving the quality of life, whereas other ac-tors drew up scenarios of genetic manipulation beyond control. Sometimes, theissue was defined narrowly as a technical problem to be dealt with exclusivelyby medical professionals, while groups with moral or social considerations at-tempted to expand the issue. Policy entrepreneurs seeking issue expansioneither were aiming at restrictive regulation and prohibitions or advocated per-missive policies allowing access for those typically excluded in the traditionalfamily model.

The general types of social actors involved once the issue reached the politi-cal agenda do not seem to be very different between countries. More diverse arethe dominant beliefs of these types of actors, the way actors are organized, andthe strategies used by actors or coalitions in trying to influence policymaking.In the United Kingdom, for example, medical scientists and practitioners wereunited in one strong association called Progress, which carefully constructeda positive image of embryo research and pressed the government to acknowl-edge its blessings (Mulkay, 1997). In Canada, women's associations attemptedto place in vitro fertilization on the federal political agenda, arguing that provin-cial regulators defined the issue too narrowly as mainly a medical problem. Inthat country, the federal Health Department took up the issue with fervor andgot close to claiming a monopoly in policy formation (Montpetit, 2000). In theNetherlands, medical professionals were much less united and less engaged inpressure politics, leaving matters to be discussed in formal forums for healthpolicy issues (Kirejczyk, 1996; Timmermans, 2001). In Switzerland, a popularinitiative calling for regulation to protect the country against anything like "hu-man breeding" was organized by a popular magazine and subsequently setthe federal policymaking machinery in motion (Rothmayr, Serdult, and Varone,£000).

Policies on assisted reproductive technology in four democracies

Initial findings from a cross-national comparison show that these four coun-tries also differ widely in the policies that were adopted, or that failed to beadopted, since the early 1980s. Differences in actor beliefs that became dom-inant in policymaking contribute to this policy variation, as do actor strategiesthrough which particular beliefs could prevail over others. But the strategies ofactors were conditioned by the institutional properties of policy arenas. Here, Irelate cross-national variation in arenas to policymaking on assisted reproduc-tive technologies, and make a number of predictions. At this point, I make nopredictions on the substantive content of policies in a country as being eitherpermissive or restrictive, or on the way this relates to the beliefs of actors. I con-sider policies in the form of legislation, which at some point was attempted in allcountries at the central (in Canada and Switzerland, the federal) level. My firstprediction is that in the "pure" majoritarian democracy of the United Kingdom,policies on assisted reproductive technologies occurred earlier after agenda

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setting, and that these policies were more truly innovations than in Canada, theNetherlands, and Switzerland. In Canada, a decentralized majoritarian democ-racy, policy innovation is also expected, but it takes more time because morearenas for veto exist. In the Dutch centralized consensus democracy, regula-tion of assisted reproductive technologies is predicted to be more constantlyincremental, and to take longer to be decided, than in the United Kingdom andCanada. Finally, Switzerland is, as a typical consensus democracy, expected tobe slow in policy production, and changes in regulation or other types of policyare expected go less in one particular direction than in the Netherlands. Thisis because the Swiss system contains more arenas than anywhere else wherepolicies can be reversed.

In all countries, medical associations employed some degree of self-regulation regarding in vitro fertilization and other emerging technologies be-fore any government policies were adopted or even formulated. In the UnitedKingdom (1985) and in Switzerland (1981,1985,1990), self-regulation was donemost fastiduously, but far more as a self-restraint in Switzerland than in theUnited Kingdom. In Switzerland, the rather restrictive standards of the SwissAcademy of Medical Sciences were set at the federal level, while health policyis in large part a subnational responsibility. The first proposals for governmentregulation in Switzerland were made in the cantons. Similarly, in Canada thefirst proposals arose in the four most populated Canadian provinces, where theissue was salient. In both federal countries, policymaking became a multilevelprocess, involving central and noncentral system arenas and, particularly inSwitzerland, arenas within the health policy subsystem.

Another similarity between the four countries is that, despite the rather diverseinstitutional trajectories the issues would follow, in all cases an expert commis-sion was consulted formally when the matter had reached the national politicalagenda. This outcome illustrates a point made by Schneider and Ingram (1997),namely, that issues involving technological uncertainties and political risks areoften transferred at least temporarily from political arenas to arenas where ex-pert authority prevails. Such a transfer took place according to institutionalizedand formal procedures in the Netherlands and Switzerland and in a more adhoc fashion in the United Kingdom and Canada (but this did not mean it hadless impact). Particularly in the Netherlands, the Health Council is an importantsubsystem arena in which assisted reproduction was addressed not once butseveral times over a period of 15 years. In the other countries, consultationof expert commissions was more limited in time. The expertise from medicalprofessionals, as contained both in systems of self-regulation and in advisoryreports, fed many policy proposals in all four countries.

United Kingdom. The shortest route from self-regulation through expert ad-vice to substantive national policy was followed in the United Kingdom, wherein 1990 the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act was adopted. This wasthe world's first comprehensive but also permissive legislation on reproductive

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technology, including embryo research. The bill was approved two years afterthe Conservative government had proposed it and six years after the WarnockCommission had presented its expert report in 1984. Much of the substantivecontents of this Act was taken from the Warnock report, which was endorsedby a broad community of medical professionals and, due to constant pressurefrom this community, by the Conservative government. But the bill also wasbased on a shift in beliefs about the purposes of regulation itself: from alloca-tive fairness, which underlay the existing Abortion Act, to allocative efficiency, inwhich the market is much more prominent, and which was the leading thoughtin Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party (Pfeffer, 2000, p. 266). Once in thelegislative arena, the government deferred or evaded discussion of alternativebills with a more restrictive content by exploiting the rules available to the gov-ernment for setting the agenda in the House of Commons (Kirejczyk, 2000).In early 2001, a next-policy innovation was adopted by the legislature, whichat this time was dominated by the Labour government. In addition to the tech-niques already permitted, human cloning for medical research was made legallypossible.

Canada. The Canadian experience tells a different story.6 As stated earlier,the first policy proposals were made within provinces, of which Quebec wasthe first to adopt legislation in 1991; three other provincies followed. By andlarge, the position of the provincial medical associations as well as the provin-cial governments was that the federal government could consider a change ofthe criminal law to prevent misuse, but that more detailed regulation and licens-ing should remain outside the scope of the federal legislator. For the medicalprofessionals, provincial regulation was already an intervention in their sys-tem of self-regulation. Nonetheless, the issue was put on the federal politicalagenda, following pressure from a coalition of social groups dissatisfied withprovincial regulation and the underlying definition of the problem. In the early1990s, the Conservative federal government led by Brian Mulroney started toconsider policy options, for which the report of the Royal Commission on NewReproductive Technologies, known as the Baird Commission, was an importantbasis of expertise. The Baird report contained a rather worried view and recom-mended federal regulation containing a number of unambiguous restrictions.The medical associations qualified this conclusion as "unjustifyably alarming"and exercised pressure on the federal government not to adopt these recom-mendations.

The incumbent Conservative party sensed the public and political contro-versy, not only regarding the substance of policy but also regarding the am-biguity that existed over federal jurisdictions in this field. In cases of unclearjurisdiction, negotiations between the federal and the provincial governmentare required in Canada, and if the federal government fails to negotiate it ex-poses itself to judicial review. More aloof from these political risks, the HealthDepartment proceeded in the preparation of a restrictive bill with the apparent

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idea that the majority party would push legislation through the federal arenas.This bill was introduced in the legislature in 1996. But organized interests, notonly doctors but increasingly also "consumers" of the technologies, had easyaccess to the legislative arena and exercised continuous pressure, leading toan increasingly negative image of the bill. Further, the likely prospect of vetofacilitated by the Canadian rules of federalism (in 1988, the law on abortionwas declared unconstitutional by the federal Supreme Court) induced the Con-servative government to let the bill die on the order paper. At the cutoff pointof this account, January 2001, no federal legislation has yet been adopted.Clearly, national policy innovation in the field of assisted reproductive technolo-gies has appeared to be more difficult in Canada than in the United Kingdom,and decentralization of policy arenas is one factor contributing to an explana-tion of this situation. The outcome is as was expected, though the difference innational policy production—including incremental policy decisions—betweenthese countries over a similar period of time is larger than expected.

The Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the institutionally fixed position of theHealth Council as a formal subsystem arena between experts and policymak-ers has, in many ways, suppressed public debate and political conflict.7 Thedifferent occasions on which the Health Council was considering assisted re-production (reports were released in 1984, 1986, 1989,1993, and 1997) wereused by the successive coalition governments to delay legislation. The latentpolitical controversy among the many different parties in the legislature wasa deterrent, and another reason why the government coalitions in office sincethe early 1980s were reluctant to draft legislation may have been the relativebriefness of self-regulatory arrangements made by medical associations. Thissituation was seen less as a vacuum to be filled in promptly by the nationallegislator and more as a lack of a basis for regulation provided by the medicalsector itself. In 1989, for example, the responsible minister still argued in favorof norms of self-regulation to be developed jointly by medical associations andthe Department of Health (Kirejczyk, 2000). Hence the Health Council, contain-ing spokespersons from medical associations, was given a central role in the1980s.

The diffusion of in vitro fertilization among practitioners and the questions sur-rounding embryo research, however, required political attention, also becausepatient groups began to demand that in vitro fertilization be incorporated intothe public health insurance program. In reaction, different policy proposals witha limited scope were introduced in the executive and legislative arena. The mostsignificant was an executive order of the Minister of Health, published in 1989,in which medical practice was in large part codified, but with a number of re-strictions that had been urged by a majority in the legislature. Beyond thesedecisions, the government initiated preparation of several bills, each dealingwith separate aspects of human reproduction. This approach may have spreadthe political risks of the legislative enterprise, but it also made the discussion

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rather complex and fuzzy. This complexity was reinforced by the increasing roleof another institutionalized subsystem arena, the Public Health Insurance Coun-cil (Ziekenfondsraad), which considered the conditions for public subsidizationof treatments (Kirejczyk, 1996). The several specific bills that were introducedin the legislature foundered, were withdrawn, and were replaced by new bills. InJanuary 2001, the debate in the legislature on the new proposed legislation wasstill to begin. Within the system arenas of both the executive and the legislatureand in the Health Council as a subsystem arena, the emphasis on proportionalinterest representation and the rules of consensus contributed strongly to theprotracted nature of decision making and the limited scope of policies thatwere proposed and adopted. The incremental nature of policymaking and theabsence of real policy innovations over time in the Netherlands conform toexpectations.

Switzerland. Finally, what policy results ensued from the consensus institu-tions in Switzerland?8 The system contains multiple arenas for bottom-up policyinitiatives, and many such initiatives were proposed and then approved or ve-toed. Regulation was formulated or attempted simultaneously in three spheres:within the medical profession, in some of the cantons, and at the federal level.Federal jurisdictions in this field are less ambiguous than in Canada. A federalcompetency is, for example, to address civil law issues involved in assistedreproduction (for example, on the marital status of couples applying for treat-ment). In comparison with the restrictive standards of the Swiss Academy ofMedical Sciences, a number of cantons adopted very restrictive regulation in1988 and 1991. The dominant beliefs underlying this regulation stressed thedangers of experimentation.

With this regulation in place, actors with continuing moral or social concernsincreasingly sought access to federal policy arenas. Groups of doctors andpatients opposing the tight restrictions of the laws in the cantons appealedto the federal Supreme Court, with the result that two cantonal laws were de-clared unconstitutional in 1989. Further, reacting to a popular initiative alreadylaunched in 1985, the government proposed a Constitutional amendment. Achange of the Constitution—incremental rather than drastic—was necessarybefore ordinary federal legislation on assisted reproductive technologies couldbe enforced. The bill was introduced after consultation with an expert commis-sion in which members of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences producingthe standards also participated. Discussions in the legislature were protractedbut resulted in majority support. In 1992, the Constitutional amendment wasapproved in a national referendum. But social groups disatisfied with this pol-icy launched another popular initiative, prohibiting assisted insemination bydonor and in vitro fertilization. Again, the federal executive drafted a bill as acounterproposal, which was approved in 1998 and came into force after theinitiative was defeated in early 2000. This legislation contained a number of in-cremental policy changes further restricting techniques and research, but left

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out the radical elements of the initiative. Yet the overall result is that governmentregulation of assisted reproductive technologies in Switzerland is considerablymore restrictive than in the other countries. One reason for this outcome maybe that the beliefs of the actors were more conservative than elsewhere. Butthe Swiss case also illustrates the significance of multiple arenas, which led tomore compromised and sometimes even vetoed policies, as well as prolongedpolicymaking. Though the difference in policy production between Switzerlandand the Netherlands (where much less determination on this issue existed) islarger than expected, the case contains evidence for the prediction that pol-icy changes are less in one direction in Switzerland. In the late 1980s, federalpolicy—in part following from the 1989 Supreme Court decision—moved in adirection that was less restrictive than policies in the cantons. But in the 1990s,federal policy became more restrictive.

This brief comparative analysis of human reproduction policy is an illustrationrather than a rigorous test of theory, but it contains empirical support for thepredictions made on the policy effects of variation in arenas between four typesof democracies. The clearest support exists for expectations on the overall pro-cess of policymaking overtime, in that policymaking becomes more protractedas institutional complexity in policy arenas increases. But variation between thefour countries in policy innovation does not appear to be quite as expected. Forthis reason, the empirical findings do not simply add to the existing evidencefor the theoretical claim of Tebelis (1999) and historical institutionalists such asImmergut (1992) and Steinmo et al. (1993) that more veto points always meangreater policy stability. Switzerland, as a typical consensus democracy, wasmore productive in policymaking than the federal government of Canada, eventhough policy changes over time in Switzerland were incremental rather thantruly innovative.

But this contradiction of what I expected is not as large as it may seem.The difference in the findings between Switzerland and Canada is possible toaccount for in terms of institutional properties. In Canada, the government con-trolling the federal executive and legislative arenas weighed the benefits of abill that was controversial against the prospect of electoral punishment, andchose to let the bill die on the order paper. This outcome was possible becausethe rules of the game in the legislature allowed the government to do this, andalso because—in contrast to Switzerland—protagonists of federal legislationhad no other institutional venues (no popular initiative). Thus after experiencingpressure from social groups, the government was able to act strategically anddefer policy decisions. In contrast, in Switzerland, single political actors havemuch less institutional leeway for behavior on the basis of such strategic cal-culations. In Switzerland, the tighter rules of policy subsystems also conditionpolicy results. On several occasions, the Swiss federal executive not only wasforced to come up with a bill but also needed to accommodate claims for re-strictive content in order to avert a referendum in which the bill could be turneddown by the voters.

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Further, differences in policy innovation between the countries may also in-crease as a function of time. In all four countries, policy initiatives concerningassisted reproductive technologies began to emerge in the mid-1980s, and inthe case of Canada even later. Given the moves of the federal governmentin Canada, a turn of the tide in public opinion (and thus a turn in electoralchances) may accelerate national policymaking more than in Switzerland or theNetherlands.

Conclusion

My intention in this article has been to map out an institutional framework forcomparative analysis that can be used to explain policy variation across demo-cratic countries. Beliefs and strategies of actors with stakes in public policiesare not employed in a Hobbesian state of nature but are channeled throughinstitutionalized policymaking arenas. These arenas yield opportunities for pol-icy entrepreneurs but also for actors trying to veto initiatives. I have focusedon two levels where policymaking arenas may exist: the political system level(which may be decentralized, as in federal states) and, within this broader sys-tem context, specific policy subsystems. By considering institutionalized policyarenas at the system level as well as within policy subsystems, I move beyondthe traditional focus in comparative politics on formal macroinstitutions. Andthis broader focus on arena variation across countries also complements ex-isting theories of the policy process by making the comparative element moreexplicit. The kind of institutional approach presented here involves not only amapping of arenas as structures but also an analysis of rules of the game withinarenas. Building on Lijphart's work on majoritarian and consensus democracy,four types of democracies are distinguished, each containing particular prop-erties of arenas.

The crucial theoretical link in this approach is between the four types ofdemocracies and policymaking in each of these types. Policymaking is ex-pected to be slower, and policy innovation to be less frequent, as differentiationin arenas within a country increases and rules within these arenas becometighter. Majoritarian democracies, with few arenas and mostly lax rules, areseen to facilitate rapid policymaking, with a high potential for abrupt policy in-novation in a period of two decades or more. In consensus democracies, wheremultiple arenas exist in which rules are often tight, policymaking is protracted,and policies are likely to change more incrementally over time—and in "pure"consensus democracies, in different substantive directions as well (for example,from less to more restrictive, or vice versa).

Findings from an ongoing research project on policies dealing with assistedreproductive technologies in Western countries show empirical support forthese predictions, though the relationship between arena differentiationand policy production over time is not always straightforward. Obviously, the

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empirical basis is still limited, and more country studies need to be considered,as is done in the broader comparative project. But another point to appreciateis that, within institutional contexts that differ, actor strategies are important.This point is illustrated by the moves of the federal government of Canada in thelate 1990s, by the ventures of the Progress coalition putting the British govern-ment under pressure, by actors with quite different beliefs organizing popularinitiatives in Switzerland, and by the systematic attempts of Dutch actors withpolitical responsibility to evade open debates and transfer issues to an arenacontaining experts. Actor strategies are important not only because they setin motion policymaking within arenas but also because over longer periods oftime, they may seek to transform rules in order to create more favorable con-ditions (Weimer, 1992). This possibility is particularly important for relativelynew fields of policy or issues, in which, for example, jurisdictions may be stillambiguous or where existing and institutionalized policy arenas appear to beinert. By taking these points into account, it is possible to avoid the criticismthat comparative institutional analysis is a static approach to policymaking.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank David Weimer, two anonymous referees, andthe members of the Comparative Policy Design Project for useful sugges-tions. In particular, thanks to Eric Montpetit, Christine Rothmayr, Uwe Serdult,and Frederic Varone for providing access to country reports on Canada andSwitzerland.

Notes

1. Note that a policy redesign may be an innovation, but a new design of a policy on a subject orin a field with no preexisting policies is almost always an innovation, in an entirely new policy,some "paradigm" is nearly always incorporated—even if sometimes in rather ambiguous terms.

2. Polsby's distinction between acute and incubated change follows from a descriptive study ofcases of policy initiation in the United States (Polsby, 1984). No clear causal linkages are pre-sented, however.

3. One reason why these predictions about the United States diverge may be a difference in timehorizons. Since it deals more with constitutional political cycles as constraints on policy change,the time perspective used by Tsebelis and the other authors is relatively short.

4. I should note that the concept of policy punctuation overlaps with both of Polsby's types ofpolicy innovation (acute and incubated). Both these types occur as interruptions of the normalmode of incremental policymaking. Incubated innovations occur after a gradual erosion of anexisting policy, which is precisely what Baumgartner and Jones mean by punctuation. Acuteinnovations are shocklike too, but the magnitude is much more limited—they involve less oftena policy paradigm shift.

5. This comparative policy design project involves scholars from North America and Europe. See,for example, Goggin et al. (2000).

6. This account is based on a much more detailed country report by Montpetit (2000).7. This account is based on Timmermans (2001), unless cited otherwise.8. Information on the Swiss case derives from Rothmayr, Serdult, and Varone (2000).

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Dr. Arco Timmermans (Ph.D. from European University Institute, Florence, 1996), is assistantprofessor of public policy at the Faculty of Public Administration and Public Policy, University ofTwente, The Netherlands. His main research interests are conditions for success and failure in thedesign of public policies and institutions, the impact of institutions on policymaking, and coalitionpolitics. He is currently involved in a comparative project on assisted reproduction technologypolicymaking in North America and Europe and in a comparative project on governance in coalitionsystems in Europe. His publications include "Design in Context: Applying Institutional Analysis toSocial Designing" in H. Wagenaar (ed.), Government Institutions: Effects, Changes, and NormativeFoundations, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000; with Rudy B. Andeweg) "The Netherlands: Rulesand Mores in Delegation and Accountability Relationships" in Wolfgang C. Müller, Kaare Strom,and Torbjorn Bergman (eds.), Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies, OxfordUniversity Press (forthcoming 2001); and High politics in The Low Countries, Ashgate (forthcoming2002).

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