European Policy Analysis最新文献

This study introduces a translation perspective to analyze the policy harmonization process, highlighting imitation, brokering, and editing in shaping policy dynamics at EU and national levels. The translation perspective emphasizes that while policy development is ongoing, the protracted process signals a shift in EU-wide coordination of skilled labor migration. We show how ongoing translation efforts have transformed the coordination of skilled labor migration across the EU, as labor migration policies have translated into each other, resulting in mutual transformation. The study provides insights into the complex processes of policy harmonization via the Blue Card, enhancing understanding of EU labor migration policy. The findings demonstrate the continuous nature of policy translation between multiple contexts. The article traces developments surrounding the EU Blue Card Directive, including a parallel scheme in Austria, offering insights into skilled migration policy dynamics beyond linear diffusion models.

European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) engender European Union (EU) support in generating economic growth, but their effect is conditional on individual European identity and educational background. This study investigates whether the positive impact of ESIF spending on EU attitudes also depends on the alignment of funding with the economic needs of recipient regions. We examine this issue with the Spanish case (1990–2019), employing a unique combined data set of Eurobarometer waves and regional NUTS-2 economic indicators. Our findings indicate that EU funds manage to decrease Euroscepticism only in laggard regions, which receive the lion's share of funds and allocate them to public goods easily perceived and communicated to the local population. Conversely, the effect of ESIF on transforming attitudes is absent in middle and high-income regions. The findings suggest a more complicated relationship between ESIF and EU support, which necessitates taking both individual and contextual factors into account.

In Europe, and specifically in countries bordering the Baltic Sea, preparedness issues have moved up the policy agenda since Russia's 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine. “Ordinary people” are encouraged to prepare for crises—be it through stockpiling food at home, fact-checking information, or signing up for military training. This article unpacks the process through which individual subjects are “responsibilized.” More specifically, it analyses how the risk of war is communicated to make targets act responsibly, drawing on empirical evidence from Finland, Latvia, and Germany. A main tenet is that policy actors appeal to nationally distinct sets of moral codes to responsibilize publics. The Finnish war experience attests to the value of being united, willing and capable of fighting back. Latvia's defence is framed as an integrative force—with the ultimate aim to deter aggressors and ensure national survival. In Germany, inconsistent messaging prevails, simultaneously reassuring and alerting the public.

This paper investigates whether the systematic application of open strategy can align goals in emerging public-private hybrid organizations, which face the challenge of integrating different identities, forms, and rationales from both public and private stakeholders. We develop an evaluative framework, addressing three crucial issues for a public-private hybrid's early development: What is the public-private hybrid's purpose? Who are the strategic actors involved? What knowledge and skills are needed? By applying the framework to a qualitative case study from the field of Swiss innovation policy, we learn that inclusiveness and transparency largely depend on the timeline of a hybrid's emergence. Public-private hybrids can either choose an inclusive, transparent but gradual, and slow strategy process or a speedy process characterized by the traditional ‘management at the top’ approach. This study offers both empirical and theoretical insights into strategy development in public-private hybrid organizations and its significance for public policy implementation.

How can we explain the system of governance underlying the conditionality regime of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF)? Two contrasting instruments were adopted by the European Union to deal with the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis. The initial adaptation of the intergovernmental European stability mechanism was followed by the RRF, an instrument adopted as an add-on to the EU budget and combining both supranational delegation and intergovernmental filters. Using the lenses of historical institutionalism, and a coalition-based explanatory framework, this article examines the impact of past institutionalization patterns on the shift towards the RRF combined model. It argues that space for supranational delegation occurred as the result of the incremental innovation of the standard Community regime at work in EU budget-related policies.

This paper studies how scientists participated in policy debates during the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland not only by telling facts but also by telling stories. It combines insights from Narrative Policy Framework and science communication literature with a conceptualization of scientific advice to study how scientists used narratives and the devil-angel shift narrative strategy to communicate about policies and problems. Quantitative content analysis of Swiss newspaper articles shows that in statements with problem advice scientists use more narratives than in statements with policy advice and that the devil-angel shift score for problem advice is significantly lower for narratives with problem advice. Overall, the research shows that problem advice is a good predictor for the use of the devil shift. However, when scientists used narratives with policy advice, they often followed a negative narrative strategy that also highlights problems.

The European Union (EU), especially in the context of Cohesion Policy (CP), has played a crucial role in developing and promoting policy evaluation practices across its Member States. Evaluation systems across the Member States have been established to assess CP investments. Remarkably, the use of evaluation research and its contribution to stimulating policy learning has remained a “black box.” To address this issue, this article aims to develop a novel framework centered around four conditions for evaluation-based policy learning, namely: (1) policy relevance, (2) resources and organizational settings, (3) quality of evaluation, and (4) evaluation culture. These conditions are retrieved from the existing literature on policy evaluation and applied to the six-country cases across the EU. The findings suggest how loosening the formal EU evaluation requirements could affect policy learning in the Member States.

Explanations for collective action focus on both institutions and narratives. On the one hand, institutional approaches emphasize the role of rules that guide human behavior. On the other hand, accounting for the narratives through which policy actors make sense of their actions helps in understanding strategic behavior. However, applying institutional and narrative perspectives together is daunting, in part because there has not been a common way to integrate the two approaches. In this article, we draw from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to elaborate a novel analytical approach that combines ANT with the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) and the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). We use IGT's and NPF's analytical categories in a processual perspective to examine how policy-makers strategically use institutions and narratives to create and stabilize a network of actors in innovation policy processes. We illustrate our approach through an in-depth analysis of the development of a smart city.