Assessing the coordination of R&I policies: An evaluation approach combining expert assessment and automated content analysis

There is a long-standing agreement among scholars that the involvement of multiple authorities and the use of diverse policy frames hinders the coordination between policies. This paper responds to recent calls for exploring new empirical methods to study horizontal policy coordination by using automated text analysis. A key contribution is that our approach allows generating a quantitative indicator of the semantic alignment between policies. In addition, we develop a framework that embeds the algorithmic analysis in the workflow of human experts and we offer several guidelines for future efforts to combine automated policy analysis with expert assessment. Empirically, we focus on the case study of Portugal and analyse the potential link between the measures of the Recovery and Resilience Plan, part of the Next Generation EU (2021-2026), and the innovation priorities of its Smart Specialisation Strategies (2021-2017).