Polity configurations and the performance of state intervention in transformative policies: A conceptual framework

The imperatives of addressing grand societal challenges, such as fighting the causes for and implications of climate change, have driven a burgeoning scholarship on policy intervention to facilitate directional change in socio-technical systems. While the role of the state has come into focus - in particular in sustainability transition studies - there is little systematic conceptualization as to what drives and hinders the performance of state intervention in transformative policies. What is particularly missing is the understanding of how the polity of political systems affects the way in which the state facilitates political decision-making and mobilizes societal efforts for transformative change; and how different polities contribute to differences in state performance across Western democracies. This paper is a first systematic attempt to close this gap by conceptualizing the role of polity for state performance in the context of transformational policies. To do so, it first conceptualizes state performance as the introduction, ambition and sustainability of transformational policies, their input and throughput legitimacy and the societal efforts mobilized towards system change. Second, it focuses on two dimensions of polity configuration which, according to political science literature, have proven to be of particular importance for state performance: (i) the form of government in combination with the electoral system, and (ii) unitary versus federalist systems. Based on comprehensive deduction from conceptual and empirical literature in political science as well as governance and transition studies, the paper derives starting assumptions as to how specific manifestations of those polity configurations shape state performance in transformative policies. The resulting series of starting assumptions indicates that different polity configurations across Western democracies shape state performance in transformative policies in distinct ways. This conceptual paper thus provides the basis to inform future empirical studies that are interested in the long-term performance of the state when it comes to driving transformations.