Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions最新文献

Digital sovereignty has emerged as a central organizing principle in European Union governance, yet systematic understanding of its conceptual evolution remains limited. This article provides the first macro-level analysis of how digital sovereignty evolves across institutional and academic domains. Through analysis of 156 academic articles and 808 EU policy documents using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, we reveal sophisticated patterns in institutional conceptualization and evolution of digital sovereignty. Our findings demonstrate that its development reflects complex adaptive processes rather than linear policy progression. We identify a significant shift in institutional discourse from 2013 to 2016, where digital sovereignty transitions from a narrow technical concept to a comprehensive policy framework. This conceptual flexibility enhances rather than inhibits digital sovereignty development. The study advances understanding of how institutions construct and deploy new governance concepts in response to technological change while revealing previously obscured patterns in institutional interconnection.

Prioritization between societal issues is a necessary component of political decision-making at the helm of governance. The attention-based view explains how performance below aspirations directs political attention to a singular policy domain, but leaves unaddressed how politicians prioritize between multiple performance shortfalls across policy domains. This article provides a framework and an experimental test of situated attention that explains how politicians prioritize between simultaneous societal issues across different policy domains. Our framework outlines how politicians rely on issue characteristics concerning importance (salient vs. non-salient), problem-definition (‘hard’ vs. ‘easy’), solution (i-framed vs. s-framed) and temporal scope (short-term vs. long-term). A discrete choice experiment utilizing a probability sample of 964 elected politicians is conducted to provide an empirical test, revealing that politicians are more likely to prioritize policy issues that are salient, ‘easy’, s-framed and short-term, as well as robustness of these effects across variation in political ideology. We conclude by discussing implications for an attention-based understanding of political decision-making in contemporary governance.

This article integrates insights from comparative political economy and public policy studies into the populism scholarship to analyze how populist governments (PoGos) transform economies, with important implications for the regulatory state. While previous research shows that populists centralize power and pursue illiberal policies, approaches can vary across policy domains. Investigating Poland's Law and Justice (PiS) government (2015–23), this article reveals how PoGos manage sectoral conflicts within the growth coalition of businesses and voters. The findings reveal that PoGos tailor governance modes based on the intensity of sectoral conflicts. In the financial policy domain, where conflict was low, PiS centralized governance to nationalize the financial system. Conversely, in the migration policy domain, with high tension, PiS facilitated decentralized governance to liberalize migration. The findings demonstrate that PoGos employ diverse governance strategies across policy domains, underscoring the importance of a cross-sectoral lens in assessing their impact on the regulatory state. The study offers broader implications for understanding how governments reconfigure growth coalitions to reshape economies.

Democratic backsliding around the world has sparked debate about its impact on public administration and governance. This article explores a growing yet less visible phenomenon threatening democracy. It examines the influence exerted by authoritarian populists over autonomous regulatory agencies through militarized patronage, that is, the discretionary appointment of military officers to civil positions. Scholars have not fully untangled how and why contemporary populists employ militarized patronage, and much less is known about militarization of autonomous regulatory agencies. To fill this gap, we highlight enabling factors underpinning militarized patronage and draw on a unique empirical dataset that integrates military with civil service records to account for the militarization of autonomous regulatory agencies in Brazil during the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022). The article deepens our understanding of the role of civil-military relations in restructuring regulatory governance during populist rule, and the effects of democratic backsliding on regulatory governance.

While research suggests that bureaucratic performance is critically contingent on employee selection procedures, few studies examine the perceived legitimacy of different recruitment regimes in the eyes of citizens. This study investigates how perceived bureaucratic legitimacy is shaped by the principles guiding the selection process (merit-based vs. political recruitment) and by its outcome in terms of descriptive representation. We suggest that both meritocratic recruitment and descriptive representation significantly enhance bureaucratic legitimacy, yet that the legitimizing effect of meritocratic recruitment is particularly important in contexts with low quality of government. Citizens in contexts permeated by favoritism, corruption, and low political trust are more vigilant against political recruitment and place less importance on gender balance. Using a unique survey experiment fielded across 27 European countries, we find support for these propositions. Our findings have implications for understanding perceived trade-offs between bureaucratic autonomy and accountability, and perceptions of bureaucratic legitimacy.

Bureaucratic responsiveness scholarship focused on examining how independent agencies align with the expectations of political principals and professional standards. However, little is known about how citizens perceive the legitimacy of these different responsiveness behaviors. To address this gap, we draw on insights from political science, public administration, and psychology. We hypothesize that three responsiveness signals increase citizens' perceptions of bureaucracies' legitimacy: political independence, competence, and warmth signals in communication. We draw on a survey experiment in Slovakia and Finland, manipulating the independence, competence, and warmth of the European Food Safety Authority. The results suggest that when political representatives contest a scientific agency's advice, signals of competence and warmth strengthen citizens' legitimacy perceptions of the agency. This study advances responsiveness scholarship by expanding its focus to bureaucratic responsiveness models that emphasize adherence to professional standards, support from professional peers, and affective communication with citizens, addressing both cognitive and affective legitimacy evaluations.