Date of Award

5-1-2022

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Public Administration and Policy

Content Description

1 online resource (viii, 210 pages) : illustrations (some color)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Ashley M. Fox

Committee Members

Jennifer Dodge, Lucy Sorensen, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia

Keywords

COVID-19, policy analysis, policy side effects, public policy, unanticipated consequences, unintended consequences, COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-, COVID-19 (Disease), Public health administration, Social problems

Subject Categories

Public Administration | Public Policy

Abstract

How do the consequences of a policy become a source of another social problem? Social science scholars have long recognized the possibility that policies often generate new social problems, unintentionally or even intentionally. However, public policy scholarship has been somewhat slow to translate these insights into systematic research inquiries and accumulate concrete knowledge about this issue. As a result, when confronted with the widespread social and political repercussions of unavoidable but strong policy responses, such as COVID-19 associated lockdowns and vaccine mandates, the policy literature has largely failed to advise on how to anticipate, handle, and overcome the hardships generated by these policies. Even yet, we often overlook how complex and diverse policy consequences are and still lack a proper theoretical lens for systematically unpacking the complexity.This dissertation project aims to open an academic discussion on the problem of policy side effects and lays the theoretical foundation for scientifically investigating it, drawing on the cases of COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. The four dissertation chapters review and synthesize existing theories of unintended consequences, examine how policy consequences are narrated and constructed as social problems through media communication, explain how policy side effects could affect future policy implementation, and discusses the importance of monitoring policy side effects and mitigating strategies against the side effects. The study findings show that policy side effects are wicked problems that are hard to define and involve moral dilemmas. But more importantly, the results tell us that policy side effects can be anticipated, managed, and mitigated through more sophisticated policy design and further research.

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