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Explaining accountability for public policies: an fsQCA analysis of health policy in Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2015

Ixchel Pérez Durán  and
Jorge Rodríguez Menés Open the ORCID record for Jorge Rodríguez Menés [Opens in a new window]
Ixchel Pérez Durán*
Affiliation:
Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Barcelona, Spain
Jorge Rodríguez Menés
Affiliation:
Serra Hunter Associate Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
*
*E-mail: iperez@ibei.org
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Abstract

Which conditions foster accountability for health policy implementation in Spain’s 17 regional governments? We analyze five conditions: private management of health services, political salience of health policies, governments’ left ideological position, strong presence of non-statewide parties, and minority governments. We use fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify how necessary and/or sufficient these conditions are (alone or in combination) to foster accountability. We find that there is no single recipe to ‘cook’ accountability. Three conditions appear to be ‘quasi-necessary’ but must be combined with others to foster accountability, thus defining three routes to accountability. The implications of the findings are discussed in light of current debates on the effects of decentralization, left-right ideologies, and privatization, on accountability for public policies.

Keywords

accountabilitypublic policieshealth policy in SpainfsQCA
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 329 - 350
Copyright
© European Consortium for Political Research 2015 

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Footnotes

†

The two authors contributed equally to the article and are listed alphabetically.

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