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EXPLAINING UNINTENDED AND UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES OF POLICY DECISIONS: COMPARING THREE BRITISH GOVERNMENTS, 1959–74
Author(s) -
PERRI
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
public administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.313
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1467-9299
pISSN - 0033-3298
DOI - 10.1111/padm.12081
Subject(s) - unintended consequences , framing (construction) , variety (cybernetics) , vulnerability (computing) , positive economics , sociology , political science , law and economics , economics , law , artificial intelligence , computer science , computer security , structural engineering , engineering
The vulnerability of policymaking to unintended and unanticipated consequences has been documented since Thucydides. Yet we still lack integrated conceptual and explanatory accounts of their variety and aetiology. Adequate consideration of putatively unintended and unanticipated consequences requires evidence about policymakers' prior intentions and anticipations, the factors affecting their cognition, and the forces bearing upon responses to attempted execution of policies. This study uses archival evidence about three post‐war British governments to examine hypotheses derived from neo‐Durkheimian institutional theory. It compares relationships between policymakers' informal social organization and their biases in framing anticipations and intentions in three policy fields. It shows that, contrary to widely made claims about a ‘law’ of unintended consequences, neither unintended nor unexpected consequences are random, but reflect basic patterns in variation and aetiology which the neo‐Durkheimian theory explains well.