Comparing blunders in Government

Abstract

Much attention has been paid to ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. Some argue, on the one hand, that the UK’s political and administrative system is disproportionately prone to generating disasters, but offer no systematic evidence on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. On the other hand, research on cognitive biases and other failures of collective decision-making has developed highly generic frameworks that are used to assess cases of perceived policy failure. Both of these perspectives rely on post-hoc assessments of failure and intentions, often from those actors involved in the process. This paper develops a comparative perspective on ‘blunders’ in government. It does so by (a) developing theory-driven expectations as to the factors that are said to encourage ‘failure’, and (b) by devising a systematic framework for the assessment of policy processes and outcomes. The paper applies this novel approach to a set of similar ‘failures’ in particular domains (i.e. in public buildings, transport infrastructure, IT projects, benefits/tax systems, and aerospace/defence projects) to assess whether different political-administrative systems are prone to different kinds of ‘blundering’ or whether there are universal patterns in the occurrence of costly and avoidable policy mistakes across policy domains

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Will Jennings: orcid.org/0000-0001-9007-8896

Catalogue record

Export record