Release Date
Geography
Language of Resource
Full Text Available
Open Access / OK to Reproduce
Peer Reviewed
Objective
In 2000, the Portuguese minority socialist government decriminalised the possession and consumption of drugs. This law made Portugal unique in having a formal system that directs the person using drugs to a panel under the purview of the Ministry of Health, as opposed to the Ministry of Justice, and hence constitutes an ‘Original Innovation’. In this article, we ask under which conditions such kinds of reforms are introduced and successfully implemented
Findings/Key points
We argue that successful policy innovation in democracies will only occur and persist when six institutional and individual ‘stars’ are aligned: attention, motivation to innovate, a new solution, political strategies, quality and legitimacy of the decision-making process, and guarantees for full implementation. We then apply this framework to the Portuguese drug policy case through theory-testing/process-tracing.
