Do Policy Capacities Matter for Federal Policy Design? Evidence From the Implementation of Three Social Policies in Brazil

ABSTRACT Bringing together the literature on policy design, policy capacity and policy making in multilevel systems, this paper argues that the effectiveness of policy design in federal countries depends, ceteris paribus , on the adequacy of federal and local policy capacities. Consequently, for policy design to be effective, federal policy capacity is assumed to be able to tailor policy design to existing local policy capacity or to design policies that are able to activate the improvement of local policy capacity. To demonstrate the interconnection between federal policy capacity and effective policy design, the paper analyses three relevant social policy programmes in Brazil. The emerging empirical evidence confirms that considering federal policy capacity as a key driver of policy effectiveness in multi‐level systems is a promising analytical perspective.