A growing number of FOI laws have been passed around the world, but their full enactment remains a challenge. To this day, we lack knowledge on the sources and processes leading to bigger transparency institutionalization. More concretely, the specific antecedents and the conditions and dynamics under which transparency may gain institutionalization remain unknown. This article aims to fill an important gap in extant literature by showing empirically the unfolding of institutionalization processes in Spanish municipalities. The Spanish Transparency Law is a particularly interesting case to test policy institutionalization in municipalities. It is a law passed on 2013, which sets new legal requirements but no formal structural imposition. It allows us organically to test municipalities responses to a new legal requirement. To do so, we have done 43 interviews with technicians in-charge of transparency and 13 interviews with provincial entities providing municipal assistance. The municipalities are purposedly selected based on their compliance results from an original sample of 1.031 cases. Our contributions are twofold: first, we show the sources for transparency implementation and how this process diachronically unfolds, identifying the factors and conditions that raise the odds of institutionalization, paving new avenues for further empirical research. More broadly, our article contributes to existing debates on the nature of institutional strength and institutional implementation.

The extent to which the UK Conservative Party has engaged a style of politics identified as populist or illiberal has been the subject of a great deal of debate in recent years, and in particular since the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. This paper asks whether and how the government has used its power to subvert liberal democracy through policy interventions drawn from a ‘playbook’ which encompasses the (legal in letter and spirit), ‘forging’, (legally dubious but admissible) ‘bending’, and (illegal and extra-legal) ‘breaking’ of the institutions which undergird the rule of law (Stanley and Pirro, 2022). The paper seeks to enhance the conceptual clarity of this analysis by categorising these policy ‘tools of illiberalism’ using John’s (2011) tools of government framework. The paper finds considerable evidence that the UK Government under Conservative leadership has sought to undermine liberal democracy, encompassing (non-exhaustively) moves to limit transparency and accountability, placing limitations on fundamental democratic rights such as voting and protest, and openly reneging on the country’s international obligations under law. This amounts to an ‘illiberal agenda’, which has been enabled by a majoritarian political system in combination with flexible constitutional arrangements: however, its ‘success’ has been inhibited by a complex policymaking system, a robust democratic culture, and a vigilant civil society.

This paper studies the conditions related to democratic maturity that determine the presence, quality, use and persistence of policy evaluation. In recent years, the rise of populism, heightened partisanship and the prevalence of post-truth narratives have shaken global democratic orders, contributing to democratic regression (Bauer, 2023; Sedelmeier, 2023; Hodson, 2021). Conversely, efforts aimed at safeguarding democratic norms have been observed (Ananda & Dawson, 2023; Bauer, 2023). Those movements towards either end of the democratic continuum carry significant implications for the quality and use of policy evaluation (Fischer, 2021; Head, 2023).

Several studies have examined the impact of evidence-based policymaking, of which policy evaluation forms one part, on democracy and the resolution of democratic conflicts (Dorren & Wolf, 2023; Schlaufer, 2018) or how it may even contradict democratic foundations (Hindkjaer Madsen, 2024). However, evidence-based policymaking itself and the quality and use of policy evaluation are presumably also a result of democratic maturity. For instance, Bundi and Pattyn (2022) demonstrate that citizens’ perceptions influence their attitudes towards evidence-based policymaking. The consideration of evidence strongly resembles the idea of democratic inquiry and the rational consideration of reasoned arguments in policymaking (Kay, 2011). Nevertheless, existing studies fall short in analysing in a systematic and comparative way how different features of democratic systems determine the quality and use of policy evaluation. Drawing from institutionalist approaches (Peters, 2019) as well as their application to policy evaluation (Stockmann et al., 2020), this paper aims to fill this gap. It does so by analysing the democracy-related and governance-related conditions under which evaluations are carried out and used by government ministries.

The Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) dataset provides a reliable source of indicators (Bazzan et al., 2022; Bandelow & Hornung, 2022) that can be employed employ as an empirical source for answering this question. This dataset allows for the analysis of not only the development of policy evaluations in terms of quality and use, but also the quality of democracy (e.g., media freedom), the executive capacity (e.g., use of expert advice) and the executive accountability (e.g., citizens’ political knowledge) of the examined countries. The SGI encompasses data from 41 OECD and EU member countries over the last 20 years. The application of the method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Ragin, 2014) allows us to outline how the quality and use of policy evaluation differs across countries with varying levels of democratic maturity.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the types of public policy evaluation adopted by national governments in Latin American countries. The central research question is: do the types of evaluation adopted vary according to the area of public policy and the democracy index? To this end, the research analyzed policy evaluation reports from the Ministries of Education and Economy/Finance of the national governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru. The adopted typologies and analytical categories are nature (formative, summative); purpose (instrumental, conceptual, persuasive, meta-analytical, and mixed); content (demand, design, inputs, process, results, mixed); methodological approach (qualitative, quantitative, mixed); responsibility (internal, external, mixed, participatory). Data was collected by consulting the official websites of each Ministry in the seven studied countries and downloading 284 evaluation reports for the period 2013-2024, and the Economist Democracy Index for each country in the period. Documentary analysis is based on a structured analysis protocol and the operational definition of categories. The exploratory findings indicate that evaluations in Education tend to focus more on results (50.9%), with a mixed methodology (63%) and external responsibility (57.57%), while in Finance, process evaluations are slightly more used (26%), with a high prevalence of quantitative methodology (60.5%) and internal responsibility (49.58%). In both areas (Education and Finance), instrumental and formative evaluations predominate. The influence of the democracy index on the type of evaluation adopted was determined, sufficient to reject the hypothesis of independence in 8 of the 10 simulations carried out, and indicate that there is an association between the level of democracy and the type of public policy evaluation adopted in these countries, especially with regard to what to evaluate (content), the methodological choices (method) and who does the evaluation (responsibility).