Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview VI. Public Policy Analysis Development Author(s) Tatiana-Camelia Dogaru (Cruceanu) National School of Political Studies and Public Administration Bucharest Romania Title Linking Policy Capacity and Policy Convergence in Comparative Studies File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Tatiana-Camelia Dogaru (Cruceanu) Abstract In the context of comparative studies and policy convergence, policy capacity is crucial for more practical aspects of policy analysis. Although the European administrative space is sometimes thought as a tool which supports policy convergence, it can provide a framework for discussing policy capacity. Nowadays, it is known that there is an extensive scholarly literature acknowledged the problematic nature of policy capacity in the modern states, and also a contradictory debate, based on the one hand on the preference for a minimal role of state, and on the other hand on the reaffirmation of the state and convergence of the public policy. However, the increasing complexity of many contemporary policy problems coupled with rising expectations of the public present unprecedented challenges to the capacity of governments to make and implement effective policies. Thus, both practitioners and scholars raised the question on government capabilities for policymaking in turbulent times. There is a considerable number of works which offer definitions of capacity, broadly or in narrow sense, but in the same time, there are many disagreements about the detailed conceptual and definitional aspects of the subject. The subject become even controversial when in discussion come the indicators to measure it in the context of policy convergence issue. In this paper, I start from the rational choice analysis buildings blocks of policy capacity for discussing the interdependent relationship between policy capacity and policy convergence. To this aim, I analysis the policy capacity and introduce democracy as a new criteria for modelling the indicators for measuring the policy capacity. Thus, after a brief introduction is made a short literature review underlying the latest results related to policy capacity and convergence assessment. The methodological part consists in the presentation of several indicators used in measuring the policy capacity. The end of this work is represented by an attempt to build a composite indicator for policy capacity.
