[T]his is not only for this sphere, but in Armenia, in transitional countries, always there is a gap between legal acts and social reality, because you want changes to be taken and you change laws so they can be locomotives for social change. But sometimes social changes, structural, infrastructural, come later, because they cannot just be, they are much more hard to be changed. [âŠ] People are not flexible. They cannot be switched off, getting the new kind. (AP12)
This is the telling insight from an Armenian state representative that formal rule change often does not produce substantive effects. Similarly, analysts have described policy reform in post-Soviet countries as partial (Hellmann 1998), incomplete (Gelâman and Starodubtsev 2016) or short-lived. What are the reasons for such outcomes? Are the combined forces of Soviet heritage and culture dooming political reform to failure? An alternative view sees powerful actors as interested in keeping the status quo in place. Both theses have been discussed using the example of Russiaâs economic reform in the 1990s.1 And both could make sense for the Armenian insight above. To describe and explain the incongruities between policies and substantive outcomes that are so common in the post-Soviet space, but also occur in other places of the world, this book proposes the concept of gaps. Examining policymaking, implementation and policy effects in the fields of criminal justice and social policy in post-Soviet Armenia and Georgia, the book analyzes the causes and varieties of gaps and sheds light on the consequences they produce for governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).2 The resulting arguments have implications for three different research fields: First, they advance institutional theory by counterbalancing the empirical emphasis on advanced capitalist democracies with insights from hybrid regimes, i.e. regimes in the gray area between democracy and authoritarianism. Second, they contribute to NGO research by suggesting a context-sensitive approach to organizational behavior in the policy process. Third, they extend a nascent research agenda on public policy and the day-to-day governance in hybrid regimes.
Limited Portability of Policy Theories: Claims for a New Analytical Perspective
If policies on paper are regularly in discrepancy with substantive outcomes, this has several implications. On the one hand, if the crucial story is told in later stages of the policy process, it means that policy adoption should not be the analytic endpoint. On the other hand, we need to question the worth of policy change. Undoubtedly, the post-Soviet countries as many other countries in the world, are in the process of various reforms. Yet under what conditions do new policies really change political behavior and social practice? Is policy change real change?3 This then becomes a key question.
Prominent models of public policymaking that seek to explain agenda-setting, policy formulation and decision-making have difficulties, to say the least, to describe and explain the various discrepancies between policies on paper and policy outcomes in hybrid regimes. To name but one recent example: Bindman and co-authors (2019) use Kingdonâs multiple streams framework to study the contribution of NGOs to child welfare reform in Russia. The authors find that NGOs do influence policy formulation and legislation but then end by recognizing that âthe policy change at the level of ideas does not necessarily lead to real institutional change.â To reframe: If new policies to improve child welfare are adopted but implementation is uneven, selective or obstructed, then the contribution of NGOs and their ability to act as change agents appears in a different light. Another reason why theories of agenda-setting and policy adoption are not easily applicable to non-democratic regimes and developing countries is the setting of donor-guided reform. With the notion of preferential misfit (Ademmer and Börzel 2013), Europeanization scholars have shown that where reform efforts are financially rewarded by international donors, the fact that issues are on the political agenda or the adoption of policies do not necessarily indicate an interest of policymakers to enforce those policies. In sum, acknowledging the possibility of symbolic support for reform by political elites and symbolic NGO involvement challenges the portability of major models of policymaking that are all derived from experiences of Western democracies (Peters 2015:64).
Since the seminal work by Pressman and Wildavsky (1973), the recognition that also in democracies âthe policy in action frequently deviates from the policy on paperâ (Thomann 2019:4) has encouraged broad scholarly interest for the complex phase of policy implementation in national, supranational and international settings. Migration research is an excellent example for an ongoing implementation turn: A growing body of research centers around discretionary practices of implementing actors in Western consolidated democracies that in many cases give rise to gaps between policy and practice (Eule 2014; Eule et al. 2018; Zampagni 2016). While theorizing on policy implementation is rightly partial and bound to specific scope conditions (Winter 2006), theoretical accounts on policy implementation in non-democratic regimes are scarce. What is more, gaps between formal rules and political outcomes do not only emanate from implementation problems but sometimes also from contextual changes or the behavior of policy addressees. This is why this book proposes a new analytical perspective: one that spans beyond implementation failures and that recognizes the possibility of gaps being functional for policymakers.
Where models of public policy making are of limited utility, can institutional theory help explain gaps between policies on paper and in practice that are so common in non-democratic regimes? I suggest that the writings by historical institutionalists on institutional development and policy effects are a good starting point. At first view, macro level political institutions such as constitutions or electoral rules seem very different from health policy or the regulation of taxes. Yet, there are good reasons to define public policies as institutions. One is that public policies, just as political institutions, âstipulate rules that assign normatively backed rights and responsibilities to actors and provide for their âpublicâ, that is, third party enforcementâ (Streeck and Thelen 2005:12). As Pierson rightly claims, âmost of the politically generated ârules of the gameâ that directly help shape the lives of citizens and organizations in modern societies are, in fact, public policiesâ (2006:115). Public policies are not always plastic and easily removable as critiques might object. Very often, they are consequential in that they âcreate incentives that induce substantial investmentsâ (Pierson 2006:119). The argument here is that new policies often create new players or grant new terrain to existing ones. If these players start investing in the respective policy to maintain or enlarge their terrain, it becomes more and more difficult for policy-makers to leave the chosen path (Falleti 2012; Pierson 1996). Such self-reinforcing effects may eventually give rise to gaps, or in Piersonâs words:
significant divergences between policy preferences and the actual functioning of institutions and policies. (1996:131)
Another insight from institutional theory that is applicable for public policies is that because political rules âinstantiate power, they are contestedâ (Thelen 2009:491). This explains the emergence of what Thelen herself names âgaps between a formal rule and its implementation or longer term effectsâ (ibid.).
This book take these insights into institutional development and policy effects, all based on the experience of advanced capitalist democracies, as a starting point to reconsider the notion of gaps for the study of non-democratic regimesâan empirical context that has long been ignored in the theoretical debate. I argue that gaps in non-democratic regimes are shaped by three factors: the strength of the formal institutional environment, the level of policy capacity in government, and informal institutions. First, policies never function in an institutional vacuum. Attention to the institutional environment in which policies are produced and develop does not only mean to understand which institutions mediate and structure policymaking (Peters 2015; Hall 1986) but also under what conditions and how institutions do their structuring job. Drawing on Levitsky and Murillo (2009), I assume that just as strong institutions shape actor expectations and behavior, so do weak institutions. If institutions (ranging from constitutions and electoral rules to veto points in policy implementation...