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Although existing studies on experimental policymaking have acknowledged the importance of the political setting in which policy experiments take place, we lack systematic knowledge on how various political dimensions affect experimental policymaking. In this article, we address a specific gap in the existing understanding of the politics of experimentation: how political timeframes influence experimental policymaking. Drawing on theoretical discussions on experimental policymaking, public policy, electoral politics, and mediatization of politics, we outline expectations about how electoral and problem cycles may influence the timing, design, and learning from policy experiments. We argue electoral timeframes are likely to discourage politicians from undertaking large-scale policy experiments and if politicians decide to launch experiments, they prefer shorter designs. The electoral cycle may lead politicians to draw too hasty conclusions or ignore the experiment’s results altogether. We expect problem cycles to shorten politicians’ time horizons further as there is pressure to solve problems quickly. We probe the plausibility of our theoretical expectations using interview data from two different country contexts: Estonia and Finland.

Mahaffey unearths lost reactors on far-flung islands and finds trees that were exposed to active fission -- which then changed gender or bloomed in the dead of winter. He explains why we have nuclear submarines but not nuclear aircraft and why cold fusion does not -- and cannot -- exist. And who knew that radiation-counting was once a fashionable trend? Though parts of our nuclear history might seem like fiction -- such as when cowboys got their hands on a reactor -- Mahaffey's prose holds the reader in thrall of the energy of scientific curiosity and ingenuity that may hold the key to solving our energy crisis -- or even send us to Mars.

For decades now, scholars have grappled with questions about how knowledge producers can enhance the influence of their knowledge on users and improve policy making. However, little attention has been paid to how policy experiments, a flexible and ex ante method of policy appraisal, obtain influence over political decision-making. To address this gap, an exploratory framework has been developed that facilitates systematic analysis of multiple experiments, allowing hypotheses to be tested regarding how an experiment’s institutional design can influence the views of political decision-makers. Cash’s categories of effectiveness are used to describe an experiment’s conceptual influence; being how credible, salient, and legitimate decision-makers perceive an experiment to be. The hypotheses are tested using 14 experiment cases found relevant to climate adaptation in the Netherlands, with complete survey responses from over 70 respondents. The results show that although, in general, the experiments had medium to high influence on decision-makers, institutional design does have a noticeable impact. Organisers should make choices carefully when designing an experiment, particularly in order to maintain relevance during an experiment’s implementation and to build community acceptance. Suggestions for future research include a comparison of experiment effects with the effects of non-experimental forms of appraisal, such as piloting or ex ante impact assessment.

During public health crises such as pandemics, governments must rapidly adopt and implement wide-reaching policies and programs (“public policy interventions”). A key takeaway from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was that although numerous randomized controlled trials (RCTs) focussed on drugs and vaccines, few policy experiments were conducted to evaluate effects of public policy interventions across various sectors on viral transmission and other consequences. Moreover, many quasi-experimental studies were of spurious quality, thus proving unhelpful for informing public policy. The pandemic highlighted the need to continuously develop competence, capacity and a robust legal–ethical foundation for impact evaluations well before crises occur. It raised a crucial question: how can governments in non-crisis times develop capabilities to generate evidence on the effects of public policy interventions, thus enabling a rapid and effective research response during public health crises? We conducted a mapping to explore how government agencies in Norway use RCTs and quasi-experimental methods to strengthen the evidence base for public policy interventions and to identify barriers and facilitators to their use. Contributing to the study were 10 government agencies across sectors such as development assistance, education, health, social welfare, statistics and taxation. Many of these agencies have conducted or commissioned RCTs or quasi-experimental studies in the past 5 years, with evaluations ranging from 1 or 2 to more than 15 per agency. The measures evaluated included organizational, educational and financial interventions and interventions for oversight and sanctions. Some agencies have internal capabilities for designing and conducting evaluations, while others commissioned such studies to universities and other research institutions. Agencies reported examples where enhanced communication among implementers, researchers, ministries and political leaders facilitated impact evaluations, and these lessons offer opportunities for cross-sector knowledge-sharing to help strengthen rigorous evaluations of public policy interventions. Despite their potential, various government agencies report that randomized and quasi-experimental studies face legal, ethical, political and practical barriers that affect their use. For instance, the urgency of politicians to implement policies at scale has led to the discontinuation of trials and hindered learning from their effects. The surveyed agencies stressed the importance of legislation providing clear guidelines on when differential treatment can be justified and when informed consent requirements can be waived, as well as faster and clearer processes for managing privacy concerns related to data access. Crucially, greater political acceptance for systematically and gradually implementing reforms, including using randomization, could strengthen evidence-informed public policy, enhancing the scaling-up of effective interventions and deprioritizing ineffective ones.

Multiple welfare states are re-emphasising the need for street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) discretion to stimulate responsive service provision. However, little is known about how SLBs with diverse backgrounds in inter-departmental settings deliberate what it means to use discretion well when different rules, eligibility criteria, and interpretations apply to a client. We address this gap by investigating the stories that participants of a Dutch policy experiment told each other to justify which clients should be granted a flexible interpretation of entitlement categories amid scarcity. We found that ‘caretakers’ used the ‘victim of circumstances’ and ‘good citizen’ plot-type to convince ‘service providers’ that the use of discretion was the right thing to do, whereas the latter used the ‘not needy enough’ or ‘the irresponsible citizen’ plot-type for contestation. Our analysis shows that storytelling helped SLBs to make sense of and bring cohesion to complex situations. Moreover, the analysis shows how stories can have a strong emotional appeal and create a sense of urgency to act collectively, yet can also create divisions and opposition among SLBs. As such, storytelling influences how SLBs think and feel about the client, themselves, and each other, and influences how discretion is used at the front-line of public policy.

Background Previous research has shown that the use of dental care services has a significant socioeconomic gradient. Lower income groups tend to use dental care services less, and they often have poorer dental health than higher income groups. The purpose of this study is to evaluate how an increase in income affects the use of dental care services among a low-income population. Methods The study examines the causal effect of increasing cash transfers on the use of dental care services by utilizing unique register-based data from a randomized field experiment conducted in Finland in 2017–2018. The Finnish basic income experiment introduced an exogenous increase in the income of persons who previously received basic unemployment benefits. Register-based data on the study population’s use of public and private dental care services were collected both for the treatment group ( N  = 2,000) and the control group ( N  = 173,222) of the experiment over a five-year period 2015–2019: two years before, two years during, and one year after the experiment. The experiment’s average treatment effect on the use of dental care services was estimated with OLS regressions. Results The Finnish basic income experiment had no detectable effect on the overall use of dental care services. However, it decreased the probability of visiting public dental care (-2.7% points, -4.7%, p  =.017) and increased the average amount of out-of-pocket spending on private care (12.1 euros, 29.8%, p  =.032). The results suggest that, even in a country with a universal public dental care coverage, changes in cash transfers do affect the dental care patterns of low-income populations.

Background In 2016–17, the government of British Columbia (BC) enacted a mandatory policy outlining Active Play Standards (AP Standards) alongside a capacity building initiative (Appetite to Play) focused on implementing policies and practices to support physical activity in childcare centres. We aimed to identify factors at the provider and organizational levels as well as attributes of the Standards hypothesized to influence implementation (i.e., changes in policies and practices). Methods We conducted surveys before (2016–2017) and after (2018–2019) enforcement of the AP Standards among 146 group childcare centres across BC. The 2018–19 surveys measured theoretically based constructs associated with implementation of policies and practices (9 childcare- and 8 provider- level characteristics as well as 4 attributes of the licensing standards). Characteristics that were associated in simple regression models were entered in multivariable regression models to identify factors associated with policy and practice changes related to fundamental movement skills (FMS), screen time, total amount of active play (AP) and total amount of outdoor AP from baseline to follow-up. Results In multivariable analyses, higher staff capacity (OR = 2.1, 95% 1.2, 3.7) and perceived flexibility of the standards (OR: 3.3, 95% 1.5, 7.1) were associated with higher odds of a policy change related to FMS. Higher staff commitment to the AP standards was associated with a higher odds of policy changes related to screen time (OR = 1.6, 95% CI: 1.1, 2.4) and amount of AP (OR: 1.5, 95% 1.0, 2.3). Higher institutionalization of PA policies was associated with a higher odds of policy changes related to the amount of AP (OR: 5.4, 95% CI: 1.5, 20). Higher self-efficacy was associated with a higher odds of policy changes related to outdoor AP (OR = 2.9, 95% 1.1, 7.8). Appetite to Play training was a positively associated with practice changes related to FMS (β = 0.5, 95% CI: 0.1, 0.9). Conclusions A hierarchy of theoretically defined factors influenced childcare providers’ implementation of the AP Standards in BC. Future research should test the feasibility of modifying these factors to improve the implementation of PA policy and practice interventions in this setting.

The use of experimentation by practitioners and resource managers as a policy instrument for effective policy design under complex and dynamic conditions has been well-acknowledged both in theory and practice. For issues such as water resource management, policy experimentation, especially pilot projects, can play an important role in exploring alternate courses of action when faced with long-term uncertainty. While the political aspects of experimentation design and outcomes have been alluded to by several policy scholars, there is lack of empirical evidence that explores their interplay with other factors that may also be critical for scaling up of policy experiments. This paper examines experiences with scaling up of different types of water policy experiments through a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of fifteen pilot initiatives in multiple sectors. Presence of political support is found to be necessary for scaling up in 97 % of the cases studied, followed closely by the need for synergies with ongoing policies and programmes. When in combination with effective pilot planning and strong monitoring and evaluation, both these factors create a sufficient condition for successful scaling up in nearly 60 % of the cases studied.

Learning from policy experimentation is a promising way to approach the “wicked problem” of climate adaptation, which is characterised by knowledge gaps and contested understandings of future risk. However, although the role of learning in shaping public policy is well understood, and experiments are expected to facilitate learning, little is known about how experiments produce learning, what types of learning, and how they can be designed to enhance learning effects. Using quantitative research methods, we explore how design choices influence the learning experiences of 173 participants in 18 policy experiments conducted in the Netherlands between 1997 and 2016. The experiments are divided into three “ideal types” that are expected to produce different levels and types of learning. The findings show that policy experiments produce cognitive and relational learning effects, but less normative learning, and experiment design influenced three of six measured dimensions of learning, especially the cognitive learning dimensions. This reveals a trade-off between designing for knowledge development and designing for normative or relational changes; choices that experiment designers should make in the context of their adaptation problem. Our findings also show the role leadership plays in building trust.