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The COVID-19 pandemic and crisis rapidly changed the public and policymaking agendas for governments worldwide. COVID-19 highlighted failures and problems associated with public health preparedness, economic vulnerability, emergency response protocols, and sector-specific issues in healthcare, education, and beyond. This increased attention to COVID-19 – and pandemic response broadly – led to significant emergency policy action by governors and public health agencies across U.S. states. We ask whether this uptick in attention resulted in meaningful policy change. This paper constitutes a modest first effort to assess the extent to which the increase in agenda attention resulted in substantive changes to subnational public health institutions, thereby allowing them to better respond to the next pandemic. We specifically focus on U.S. state legislative policymaking because state governments retain the primary constitutional authority for responding to public health crises like COVID-19. Our analysis includes all legislation enacted by state legislatures in 2020 and 2021, building on prior work that examined emergency orders issued in 2020 across states. We aspire not only to track important changes in policy but also to spotlight potentially fruitful research initiatives that spring from our findings.

This paper builds on the burgeoning literature of emotion analyses in the policy process by examining how emotions are used and portrayed in locating a contentious renewable transmission line in Southern California, US. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) as the theoretical guide, this paper finds evidence that actors experience similar emotions about beliefs to those within their coalition and dissimilar emotions about beliefs to actors in rival coalitions. This trend holds for diffuse (positive/negative) and most, but not all, discrete (e.g. anger, dismay, affinity) emotions expressions. Negative emotions also tend to define coalitions more strongly while positive emotions have varied patterns. The conclusion lays out future research directions to further our understanding of emotions and beliefs in policy and politics.

Agencification – the process of creating autonomous agencies from central government units – is intended as a means of achieving political decentralization in the post-communist transitional context. However, the present article argues that, in the case of Georgia's debt enforcement, agencification has become a means of developing a market (economic decentralization). Georgian debt enforcement has changed from being in-house, within the Ministry of Justice, to being the joint responsibility of a public agency (National Bureau of Enforcement; NBE) and private debt enforcement officers. The article reconstructs the reform process by drawing on documents and interview material from various stakeholders in the debt enforcement system. By describing and analyzing the development from 2008 to 2019, we show how the process has resulted in shifting roles for NBE and in various set-ups of debt enforcement. Theoretically, we stress the interplay between mechanisms for institutional change and argue that, while change may be tangible on a superficial level, this serves stability in a commitment to a pro-market agenda. Through the present analysis, we contribute to the agencification literature by showing how the creation of an agency shapes the resultant administrative set-up.

Although John Kingdon's multiple streams (MSF) framework is utilized to explain public policy processes in the US and western countries, little empirical evidence exists of its applicability in Africa. This paper addresses this gap by interrogating agenda setting processes that combat corruption in devolved systems of government in Kenya through the lens of this framework. The paper is the result of an empirical study that involved 126 interviews and two focus group discussions involving nine key stakeholders from the counties of Kiambu and Nairobi City, which are two devolved systems of government in Kenya. The paper examines how the state, business, and civil society are intertwined within the anticorruption agenda setting processes of these two counties. The results illuminate the complex relationships between these actors as they switch roles from being facilitators (enablers) of anticorruption agendas to accomplices of corruption (through convergence of mutual interests) and demonstrate the extent to which MSF theory may be considered appropriate in the analysis of such policymaking processes. The authors present several pathways that MSF's problem, policy, and political streams may converge to create policy windows to combat corruption, and calls for further studies in this area.