Soluzioni istituzionali per problemi di policy: la riorganizzazione dei trasporti a Londra e Barcellona

In the present dissertation we try to outline a theoretical understanding of constituent policies and change according to the strategic partisan interests of constituent actors. In the first chapter we define constituent rules as the rules structuring a decision arena and we see the effects of different types of rules on individual payoffs by using a game theoretic analysis. After having clarified how any study of change should start by the analysis of the constituent arena, we generally review institutionalist understandings of how change comes to take place, focusing especially on path dependent models. More specifically, we investigate some characteristics of constituent policies which are useful to understand actors’ preferences in changing rules. By reviewing the capture model in economic regulation we see why electoral maximizing decision makers cannot fully fit constituent change and we argue for an extended model of actors’ preferences in selecting rules. The appreciation of distributive effects of rules and the possibility of political conflicts on change take us to our main hypothesis: actors subject to asymmetric effects of rules will pursue inefficient preferences in the process of change. Then we explore how this can be connected to the specific set of actors in the process and the decision rules used. Two models of reform are then outlined and two cases of reregulation are selected to test the hypothesis: the constitution of Transport for London as an integrated transport agency for the territory of Greater London, and the institution of ATM Autoritat del Transport Metropolitá, an intergovernmental consortium for managing transport in the Barcelona metropolitan region. The case studies include an institutional and transport history of the two cities, focusing on policy problems before the reform: full attention is devoted to the analysis of the constituent process and to the main features of the new institutions. In the conclusions we review our hypotheses, elaborating in particular the difficulty of connecting institutional design and policy efficiency.