PP425      Half Unit
Strategic Policymaking: Economic Analysis, Narrative Development, Political Feasibility, and Implementation

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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This course examines, using primarily an economics lens, the challenges and opportunities for designing and implementing effective policies in developed and developing countries. It explores the obstacles to the implementation of good policy and how to overcome them, relying on theory and evidence mostly from the economics and political economy literatures, relating to evidence-based policy design, to communication, political economy, media, parties, state capacity, and public opinion. The course aims to equip students with the skills and knowledge to critically evaluate policy proposals and outcomes, and to propose solutions for overcoming the obstacles to good policy making.
It proceeds in four sections:

1. Policy: Figuring out the solution. The role of economic theory and evidence in policy design and evaluation. (Tools from Microeconomics.)
2. Political Economy: Identifying a winning coalition. Impact of political institutions, media, parties, and interest groups on policy choices and implementation. (Tools from Political Economy.)
3. Communication: Building a winning coalition. Identify and overcome the cognitive biases and heuristics that limit communication. (Tools from behavioural economics and political science. )
4. Implementation: Making it work. Often, the main barrier to success is the lack of capacity to put it in place. (Tools from organizational economics and development.)

15 hours of seminars and 20 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Students will be expected to produce intermediate deliverables on the project at the end of each of phases 1-3.

There is no set text book for this course but many readings that offer insight into the politics of policy-making, including

• Growth Diagnostic Framework (Hausman, Rodrik and Velasco)
• Rodrik, D. (2008). Second-best institutions. American Economic Review, 98(2), 100-104.
• Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity and poverty (Vol. 4). London: Profile books.
• Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Penguin.
• Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion., Penguin. 2012.
• Ezra Klein.  “Why we are polarized”. Simon and Shuster 2022
• Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press. (2019).
• Garicano, Luis, and Luis Rayo. "Why organizations fail: models and cases." Journal of Economic Literature 54.1 (2016): Read careful section 5.1

Presentation (50%)

Essay (50%)

The course will be assessed through a policy project, developed over the entire duration of the course, that will require working together in a team. This will test the skills required of policy makers in the real world environment of policy formulation.  In particular, the focus is on analysis, communication, argumentation, group/team working and policy design.  This will involve two deliverables:

1. An individual paper written separately by each student, including the literature references motivating the key choices (50% of the grade).
2. A group presentation in week 11 of the class in front of all the rest of the class involving also a Q&A (50% of the grade).