Architectural Policy Design: How Policy Makers Try to Shape Policy Feedback Effects When Designing Policies - PhD Dissertation

The dissertation investigates how policymakers try to achieve long-term political goals while staying in power. More concretely, the dissertation finds that policymakers can follow two different strategies to achieve long-term political goals: When policymakers aim for "big changes", they focus on how the policy they are about to adopt (e.g. a health care reform like Obamacare) might affect other policies or policy fields (e.g. pension politics). When policymakers aim form "small adaptions" of existing policies (e.g. changes in the level or duration of unemployment benefits), they focus on how the adapted policy itself will develop in the future.