Policies as They Matter to People: The Study of Policy Reception

• In Event: Policy Designs and Target Populations

Abstract

Unlike other stages of the policy process such as agenda setting or implementation, the moment when public policies meet (or miss) the individuals they target is both under-conceptualized and understudied in political science (Michener, Sorelle, et Thurston 2020). It is addressed only selectively or indirectly by implementation studies and the literature on policy feedbacks, while being largely delegated, outside of political science, to the interdisciplinary field of policy evaluation. Because of the democratic stake it represents, this question deserves to be given more central attention by policy analysis.
To this effect, this paper puts forward an original theoretical framework in terms of policy reception, drawing on a diversity of inputs from the sociology of culture (Dayan 1992), legal consciousness studies (Ewick et Silbey 1998), realist evaluation (Pawson 2006), and feminist theory (Naples 1998).
I define policy reception as the processes through which a public policy is appropriated and co-constructed by the individuals it targets, and through which it produces its effects on them (Revillard 2018). Conceived in this way, the study of policy reception has four main characteristics: 1) it situates itself from the point of view of the individuals the policy targets; 2) the points of view and experiences of these individuals needs to be empirically explored; 3) reception combines effects and appropriations of a given intervention; 4) it has objective and subjective dimensions, and pertains both to practices and representations.
After developing the diagnosis of a lack of attention to this question on the part of political science, and formulating some explanatory assumptions, the paper provides a detailed presentation of each of the four dimensions of this framework in their theoretical and methodological implications, connecting them to the previously mentioned theoretical influences, and illustrating them based on the case of the reception of disability policy in France.
The last section of the paper addresses what the study of reception means for policy analysis. Beyond shedding light on a policy’s ultimate consequences, I argue that reception may be analyzed as part of what constitutes a policy. In this radically sociological perspective, what targeted people do with/against/aside a given policy, how they conceive it and what they think of it, should not be considered as an altered or distorted version of what the policy “really” is, but as part of its social reality, as one, possibly important aspect of what the policy is. By focusing on policies as they matter to people, the study of reception thus paves the way for rethinking what public policies are.
Cited references
Dayan, Daniel. 1992. « Les mystères de la réception ». Le Débat, no 71: 141‑57.
Ewick, Patricia, et Susan S Silbey. 1998. The common place of law : stories from everyday life. Language and legal discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Michener, Jamila, Mallory Sorelle, et Chloe Thurston. 2020. « From the Margins to the Center: A Bottom-Up Approach to Welfare State Scholarship ». Perspectives on Politics, 1‑16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759272000359X.
Naples, Nancy A. 1998. « Bringing Everyday Life to Policy Analysis: The Case of White Rural Women Negotiating College and Welfare ». Journal of Poverty 2 (1): 23‑53.
Pawson, Ray. 2006. Evidence-Based Policy: A Realist Perspective. London: Sage.
Revillard, Anne. 2018. « Understanding policy consequences from the perspective of its targeted beneficiaries: The reception of public policy ». Revue Francaise de Science Politique 68 (3): 469‑91.

Author

• Anne Revillard, Sciences Po