Immigration policy, e.g., how restrictive are the country’s immigration policies?

1) Choose a policy output or outcome and describe how it can be empirically measured or identified and
2) summarise existing theories and research findings on what causes differences (or variation) in the policy output or policy outcome of interest.’

‘1) Choose a policy output or outcome and describe how it can be empirically measured or identified’

I would suggest allocating a maximum of one third of your term paper to answering this part of the question.

You need not limit yourself to a single policy output or outcome. You are welcome to choose a coherent set of policy outputs or outcomes. Examples:
• Environmental policy outputs and/or outcomes
• Social welfare policy outputs and/or outcomes
• Immigration policy outputs and/or outcomes
• Etc.

Some more specific examples of policy outputs:
• Tax policy outputs, e.g., what is the tax rate?
• Environmental policy, e.g., to what extent is the country an environmental leader or laggard?
• Social welfare policy, e.g., how generous are the country’s social welfare policies (replacement rates)?
• Immigration policy, e.g., how restrictive are the country’s immigration policies?
• Agro-environmental/biodiversity policy, e.g., are there restrictions on hedgerow cutting?
• Energy policy, e.g., has the country adopted a Feed-In Tariff for renewable electricity generation?
There are lots of other examples of policy outputs and outcomes in the week 2 lecture material, and elsewhere in the module.

In discussing measurement or identification, we are interested in how the policy output or outcome (or the set of outputs/outcomes) can be described in a systematic way. How can the concept be operationalised – i.e., how do we know it when we see it? Measurement is about attaching numbers to the concept (in this case a policy output or outcome), while identification is about its presence or absence.
2) summarise existing theories and findings on what causes differences (or variation) in your policy output or policy outcome of interest.

This section is about writing a review of the research literature on what explains differences or variation in the output(s) or outcome(s) of interest.

The module outline is a good place to begin. It provides you with sessions that deal with explanations of policy outputs or outcomes that focus on different sets of factors:
• Institutions
• Ideas
• Interest groups
• International influences, esp. diffusion
• Path dependence
• Political parties
• Ministers
• Civil servants

One approach to this section is to choose a few categories of explanation from the literature on your chosen output(s)/outcome(s), e.g., institutional explanations, idea-based explanations, and interest-based explanations, and to focus on reviewing those categories of explanations.

You don’t need to cover all of these types of explanations, but try to identify a few of them among the readings on your particular output(s)/outcome(s). Which explanations are most relevant will vary depending on the policy output(s)/outcome(s) on which you are focusing.

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