From a crisis perception to (partial) coupling attempts: Entrepreneurial overseers of the administrative state

The aim of this paper is to understand the opportune conditions for policy entrepreneurship when the overseers of the administrative state identify a crisis that either demands for more action to ensure the rights of citizens or less intervention to protect the citizens from overreaches. I analyse this question by studying how the Finnish and Swedish overseers of the administrative state, namely the Members of the Parliament and legal overseers, entrepreneurially utilize the information from legal oversight in their efforts to (partially) couple the streams for a policy change. The legal overseers are independent watchdogs tasked to oversee the legality of actions by and to promote the constitutional rights in the administrative state. The paper takes as its starting point an observation from earlier Multiple Streams Framework research that external shocks, symbolic crisis events or creeping crises can focus both the policy-making and the oversight efforts. Therefore, I comparatively study whether crises lead to (partial) coupling efforts in which the legal oversight case work is cited and, if so, does the type of a crisis matter. In the context of my case studies, the external shocks include the migration crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. The symbolic crisis events are understood as high-attention case work (e.g., scandals in elderly care) whereas creeping crises are understood, for instance, as alarming numbers of complaints received by the legal overseers. The paper further comparatively studies the types of (partial) coupling efforts in which the legal oversight information is utilized. In the literature, the crises in general are expected to lead to consequential coupling efforts, that is, policymakers searching for alternatives to solve a crisis. However, there are also opportunities for doctrinal coupling as, for instance, changes in political stream may motivate the MPs to frame the findings from legal oversight as a crisis to justify their preferred solution or to react opportunistically to the external shocks. In this analysis, additional factors such as opposition-government dynamics and ideological positions are also included. I use qualitative and quantitative content analyses to study the parliamentary proceedings (debates, written questions, and initiatives), and statements from the legal overseers. The parliamentary materials are utilized to identify the (partial) coupling efforts initiated by MPs whereas the statements from the legal overseers are used to identify the initiations by the legal overseers. From these materials I search for mentions of legal oversight (case work) and discern the type of coupling effort as well as identify the potential crises.