European Policy Analysis最新文献

Bureaucratic elites and national public administrations' experts play a key role in the preparation of supranational policies and in shaping global governance instruments. However, we know surprisingly little about what factors drive their preferences and support for supranational solutions. Drawing on the results of a vignette and conjoint experiment and the case of the European Commission's policy initiative to develop European Public Sector Accounting Standards, this study analyzes the effect of the communicative framing of a policy's objective and how experts' attitudes influence their preferences for policy outcomes. The study shows that the communicative framing of a policy's objective based on functional needs rather than on normative grounds increases support among national administrations' experts. Moreover, the study finds evidence that experts who internalized a public service motivation and those with a supranationalist collective identity are more willing to give up national sovereignty in favor of supranational policy solutions.

Through learning, policy actors can maintain, reinforce, or revise their beliefs and positions about the design and outcomes of policies. This paper critically analyzes factors influencing policy learning by comparing policy processes of two EU laws of the recent “Fit for 55” climate package: (i) revised provisions on increasing energy efficiency in companies included in the recast Energy Efficiency Directive and (ii) the new FuelEU Maritime regulation provided for decarbonizing maritime shipping. Learning across coalitions with competing beliefs was encountered in the first case but not in the other despite similar institutional settings. The difference is attributed to a more politicized debate on decarbonizing shipping, leading to consensus through bargaining instead of deliberation, and a circumscribed leader of one coalition, with a less flexible negotiation mandate. The paper adds to the theory on policy learning, suggesting that levels of politicization and polarization, as well as the mandates of the coalition leaders, influence cross-coalition learning.

Free movement of goods within the EU is guaranteed via mutual recognition: any product lawfully produced in one member state must also be accepted in all other member states. While unleashing economic benefits from trade without regulatory barriers, mutual recognition potentially limits member states' ability to address societal concerns with regard to production conditions. This hypothesis is addressed via the case of farm animal welfare in Germany, combining a thorough policy analysis with 20 elite interviews. The results demonstrate how the discourse of inner-European competition has discouraged policymakers to adopt stricter legislation over the past three decades, exemplifying the impeding effect of mutual recognition on member states' policies. Understanding these mechanisms is vital for handling regulatory diversity within integrated markets and offers insights into similar policy areas. This research contributes to the broader issue of national sustainability standards in a globalized world, where collective preferences increasingly collide with economic goals.

While scholars have investigated how media frame human mobility and securitize irregular border crossings, little research has been dedicated to how European Union (EU) actors are portrayed in media coverage of migration across the Mediterranean. By integrating framing into narrative analysis through the Narrative Policy Framework, our article fills this gap. Specifically, we provide a content analysis of Italian, Maltese, and Spanish newspapers and identify the key narratives underlying the portrayal of specific EU actors. We show that, overall, lack of EU solidarity is the prevalent issue in Italian, Maltese, and Spanish newspapers alike, followed by the alleged inefficiency of EU actors. Accordingly, the EU and its key actors are regularly narrated as either villains, responsible for the crisis and deserting member states in need of solidarity, or as weaklings unable to take effective action. These narratives appear remarkably consistent across countries, over time, and newspapers with different ideological orientation.

Recent trends toward mechanistic approaches offer a new perspective in understanding policy change and stability. This paper analyzes causal mechanisms leading to unexpected policy change by using punctuated equilibrium theory. As empirical illustration, the paper presents a case study on the introduction of the German mandatory lobbying register in 2021 after a 16-year-long debate. Methodologically, the paper employs process tracing and qualitative content analysis to examine policy documents. We identify a combination of three mechanisms: end of a de-thematization of the policy issue, growing dominance of the issue network favoring stricter transparency regulations, and issue validation through the accumulation of scandals. Thus, policy change results from the descend of policy actors defending the status quo while those advocating for change ascend to an influential position, and actively exploit focusing events as fertile ground for reform. The paper contributes to a refined theoretical understanding of the causal mechanisms of policy change.

Policy networks can propose solutions (policy communities, and epistemic communities), defend specific instruments (instrument constituencies), and programmatically prioritize change or stability (programmatic groups). This paper focuses on two specific networks that have been present in 30 years of administrative reform in Italy, and it empirically assesses what type of network they are according to their origins, developments over time, membership and motivations to stay together, and role in the policymaking. This comparison, while improving the current understanding of the networking taking place in the Italian administrative reform, shows that if policy networks are very relevant in the policy process, it is analytically more fruitful and empirically more reliable to assess their characteristics empirically, rather than to assume their existence in advance (and make hypotheses on this basis) or to use the concept in a purely metaphorical manner.

Two years of the Covid-19 pandemic caused significantly different death tolls in European countries. Nine of the 30 countries with the highest accumulated fatalities belong to Central and Eastern Europe, although the solidarity of the European Union (EU) provided vaccines for all member states. Using correlation and cluster analysis, this paper identifies the demographic, social, and political factors which can explain the differences. As generally accepted in the literature, the death toll is measured by the number of excess deaths. The examination separates the prevaccination and vaccination periods. While the impact of other factors is also present, vaccination coverage has a salient explanatory role in the excess deaths of the second period. The experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic simultaneously highlight the importance and sociopolitical constraints of health policy at the European level. The analysis confirms that complementary competences between the European and national levels are adequate for the EU health policy.