The politics of research and innovation: Understanding instrument choices in complex governance environments – the case of France and Italy

•A new treatment of R&I policy instruments, based on authority and automaticity components, is applied as an analytical tool to investigate instrument choices.•An innovative theoretical contribution combines policy instruments and mission-diffusion-oriented R&I polices typology.•Changes in the political orientations of different cabinets influence the formulation of national Research and Innovation policy strategies, without following a left-right cleavage.•Path dependent effects strongly influence the politics of R&I policy instrument selection in France, despite the different partisan orientations of the cabinets in office.•Italy shows a reversal dynamic in R&I instrument choices across different cabinet periods and any clear path-dependent effect can be identified. What governments desire to achieve, and how they want to accomplish their goals, represent the core of any policy design process. However, it is still unclear how partisan politics, in its combined effect with path-dependency forces, influence policy makers’ choices over alternative instrument mixes. Through a comparative analysis of Research and Innovation (R&I) instrument choices in countries characterized by different paradigmatic models of policy (Italy and France), the paper investigates how the politics of different cabinets influence the formulation of national R&I strategies and the extent to which these decisions are constrained by the legacy of previous choices. By capitalizing on a new proposed treatment of policy instruments, the paper contributes to the definition of the types of tools found in policy mixes, investigating how national R&I instrument mix variations develop. The results of the analysis indicate how the selection of R&I policy instruments does not closely follow traditional left versus right-wing political cleavages, and their evolution is generally influenced by a combination of different context-dependent dynamics. However, when partisan acceptance of consolidated R&I instrument mixes across cabinets is present, this triggers a consolidating effect on path-dependency forces.