Responsabile scientifico: Giliberto CAPANO
This project has two specific, fundamental aims: the first is descriptive, while the second is explanatory.
From a descriptive point of view, we aim at presenting the first map of those individual and organizational analytical capacities that actually characterize the Italian government (i.e. all principal ministries and the most important central bodies) and the governments of Italy's Regions (19 Regions plus the autonomous provinces of Bolzano and Trento). In doing so, we draw inspiration from a recent work on policy capacities in Canadian governments: thus, we aim at proposing an innovative web survey to be submitted to hundreds of national and regional civil servants. This ambitious, in-depth survey will produce a groundbreaking dataset that can then be used to observe the actual stock of governmental analytical capacities.
From an explanatory point of view, we aim at explaining the relationship between policy analysis capacity (based on the characteristics of the PASs and on the individual and organizational analytical capacities of governments) on the one hand, and the quality of policy design on the other, in four policy fields over the last 25 years: administrative reform, education, health and labour. Our main hypothesis is that governments' political capacity (meaning their capacity to impose the content of policies and steer the policy-making) does not by itself account for the quality of policy design (in terms of innovation, coherence and evidence-based content). Thus, the characteristics of the policy analysis capacityavailable in a specific policy field are used to explain why certain governments have been able to design 'good' policies, whereas others have not.