Éric Montpetit

A Policy Network Explanation of Biotechnology Policy Differences between the United States and Canada

Canada has a more restrictive biotechnology policy than the United States. Adopting a similar-cases-research-design, this article shows that policy networks explain this difference. The overlapping nature and the boundary between the multiple networks relevant to biotechnology in each country are distinct. In the United States, two policy networks deal with biotechnology. One primarily handles agricultural plants, while the other deals with food; key state actors overlap. In contrast, networks in Canada are separated between those dealing with regulation with two overlapping networks assessing environmental and health risks, and a network to manage biotechnology promotion. Promotion and regulation thus constitute a network boundary in Canada, but not in the United States, where networks deal with these two issues simultaneously. American networks have promoted beliefs favourable to more permissive regulatory preferences than the Canadian environmental and health risk assessment networks and American biotechnology policies are therefore even more permissive than those of Canada.

Institutional vulnerability to social constructions - Federalism, target populations, and policy designs for assisted reproductive technology in six democracies

This article contributes to efforts to integrate power-based, institutionalist, and constructivist perspectives on policy making. Using an analysis of policy designs for assisted reproductive technology, the authors argue that jurisdictional federations are more vulnerable to social constructions based on widely held perceptions of social groups than functional federations and, to a lesser extent, unitary states. In fact, policy makers in jurisdictional federations tend to rely on communicative discourses aimed at convincing a wide public, whereas those in functional federations need coordinative discourses to obtain the support of actors who play key roles in decision making. Where coordinative discourses prevail over communicative discourses, policy makers will more likely target advantaged groups with restrictive policies.

Culture and the Democratization of Risk Management The Widening Biotechnology Gap Between Canada and France

This article considers culture in the explanation of the gap between North America and Europe in the area of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Thanks to a comparison of Canada and France, the article distinguishes between two cultures of GMO risk management: the culture of managerial rationality (Canada) and the culture of integration (France). The first culture provides proponents of scientific neutrality the tools to preserve itself from external criticisms. In contrast, the second culture creates a proper environment for its contestation from within. When the democratization of science became an issue in the 1990s, the culture of integration transformed itself significantly, allowing debates within risk management processes. This change contributed to the gap between Europe and North America over GMOs.

Can policy actors learn from academic scientists

Results from an embedded survey experiment administered to practitioners who advise landowners on decontamination practices are analyzed. These professionals play a key role in the area of soil decontamination, an issue that science has made particularly tractable and which calls for new technologies and policy approaches. Powerful interests, however, work against the rapid deployment of these new technologies and approaches. Our survey experiment, designed to overcome major difficulties in the study of policy learning, shows that exposure to new scientific knowledge can positively influence the attitude of practitioners to new technologies, independently of other confounding forces. This finding suggests that learning from science provides a potential pathway toward increased use of environmentally beneficial soil decontamination methods. The results contribute to research on the politics of environmental protection, as well the literature on policy learning.

Does Holding Beliefs with Conviction Prevent Policy Actors from Adopting a Compromising Attitude

Much of the political science literature argues that commitment to beliefs renders the attitudes of policy actors inflexible. Belief commitment encourages alliances among actors who think alike and creates a distance with those whose beliefs differ. As it cuts the flow of information between disagreeing actors, belief commitment constrains the attitudes of actors to consistency across a variety of objects and over time, preventing policy compromises. This article examines the possibility that different beliefs have different effects on attitude. Specifically, it hypothesizes that actors holding purposive beliefs have more consistent attitudes than actors holding material beliefs. Thanks to a survey of North American and European biotechnology policy actors, conducted twice between 2006 and 2008, it is shown that a strong commitment to purposive beliefs encourages attitude consistency across objects and over time, while equal commitment to material beliefs enables more attitude flexibility. Implications for democracy and policy-making compromises are discussed.

Policy learning, motivated scepticism, and the politics of shale gas development in British Columbia and Quebec

Abstract What is policy learning and how do we know when we observe it? This article develops an original way of operationalizing policy learning at the individual and subsystem level. First, it juxtaposes four types of opinion change at the individual level – opinion shifting; opinion softening; position-taking and opinion hardening. This last change, we argue is indicative of motivated scepticism, a non-learning process that we borrow from public opinion studies. Second, we identify factors associated with opinion change and argue that some of them indicate policy learning, while others point to motivated scepticism. Lastly, we examine learning and motivated scepticism against patterns of opinion convergence (the expected outcome of learning) and polarization (the expected outcome of motivated scepticism) at the subsystem level. We illustrate the use of this approach to study policy learning with the case of shale gas development in two Canadian provinces, British Columbia and Quebec. While, we find clear signs of individual learning and motivated scepticism in both provinces, we find that policy learning is more prevalent in Quebec than in British Columbia at the subsystem level.

Advocacy Coalitions, the Media, and Hydraulic Fracturing in the Canadian Provinces of British Columbia and Quebec

This chapter compares the politics of hydraulic fracturing in Quebec and British Columbia (BC), two provinces that best exemplify the east–west Canadian divide over shale gas development. While both provinces began authorizing hydraulically fractured wells between 2005 and 2007, BC has consistently supported the shale gas industry ever since, while Quebec abruptly adopted a moratorium in 2011. This chapter traces BC’s policy continuity to the stable coalition politics that endured throughout the period, while Quebec’s policy shift occurred in a period of coalition instability, during which government distanced itself from industry. This sudden change in coalition politics in Quebec coincides with a burst of negative media attention to shale gas development, which illustrates the role that the media can play in policy subsystems.

Has Simeon's Vision Prevailed among Canadian Policy Scholars?

Concerned by the proliferation of idiosyncratic prescriptive case studies in the nascent subfield of policy studies, Richard Simeon, in his seminal 1976 article, asked scholars to produce more comparative policy research that aimed at explaining general events and contributing to theory building. The extent to which Simeons vision materialized remains debated. With a view to informing this debate, we conducted a systematic content analysis of the articles published in five major generalist public policy journals from 1980 to 2015. The analysis reveals that Canadian policy scholars took a comparative turn, publishing more territorial, sector and time comparisons than in the past. We also found evidence that theoretical knowledge accumulation is more important today for Canadian authors than it was when Simeon wrote his article.

Beyond the Usual Suspects: New Research Themes in Comparative Public Policy

Abstract The principal paradox of comparative public policy has remained over the years: there is no clear and broadly shared definition of the field. This article engages with the debate about what comparative public policy is from a distinctive perspective. Drawing from a systematic analysis of published research articles that maps out the usual comparative suspects, it reflects on what comparative public policy does and does not do in terms of comparative scope and country range, and the extent to which the limitations in the comparative scope matter for cumulative knowledge, theory building and the consolidation of the field. The article discusses different strategies to address the challenge of extending the range of comparative analysis.