European Policy Analysis最新文献

This study explores how autism and education policy are affected by austerity measures in Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Greece by using a path dependence analysis. The implementation of mixed mainstream classrooms and improvements to infrastructure coincided with the ratification of inclusive education policy. Austerity measures appeared temporally associated with furthering of integration and inclusion policy for all countries under study, potentially due to the economic incentives of an integrated system. This trend is especially visible in Ireland, Portugal, and Greece, whereas lesser so in Italy. Even though the initial focus of this analysis was autism, the findings are applicable to the general area of special education needs due to the non-specific nature of national policies.

Public problems are not complex per se but are defined as such. This article explores how problem definition in terms of complexity is strategically used in narratives to expand or contain a policy conflict. We draw on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine how actors use narratives to define problems and link these problems to solutions and characters. Empirically, we examine narratives used in the Moscow waste management debate by drawing on content analysis of online texts and interviews. The results show that government actors seek to contain conflict by assigning less complexity to the waste problem than nongovernmental actors, who expand conflict by defining the waste problem as politically complex. Narratives with high problem complexity include many victims and villains and propose multifaceted and institutional solutions, while narratives with low problem complexity focus on technocratic solutions. Implications for the Russian waste controversy and the NPF are discussed.

Successive crises and shifts in geopolitics necessitate a more coherent Europe, with the euro as a key instrument, yet the enlargement of the euro area is unfinished. The paper reconstructs diverging trends in non-EA countries, and considers the motivations of key stakeholders in countries without commitment to enter. The approach applied is dual: we reconsider economic arguments of a currency reform and conduct political economy analysis with the underlying hypothesis that euro adoption, for businesses, is a cost/benefit issue, while for governments, parties, and voters it is a sovereignty issue with cost/benefit aspects attached. The authors conclude that macroeconomic and business considerations would support Eurozone entry in all CEE countries concerned. As for key stakeholders, society and the business community support the euro, but particular government interests are at stake. Post-pandemic realities would reconfirm rational arguments for euro entry; to make that happen, economic nationalist and state developmental concepts need be discarded.

Based on the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF), this article presents a comparative analysis of the Chilean and Colombian policies of quality assurance (QA) in higher education. Despite their instrumental commonalities, these policies actually reflect two contrasting approaches to quality: a flexible approach in Chile versus an excellence-oriented approach in Colombia. The article shows that both policies were initially developed by groups of prestigious academics who shared most of the features of programmatic elites and that the contrast between the approaches to quality arises from the divergent evolution of the policy program of these groups: The policy of QA was subjected to an instrumental layering in Chile while, in Colombia, it followed a path-dependent evolution. The study shows that sociological perspectives like the PAF can provide a more complete and dynamic understanding of the Evaluative State that takes into account the instrumental and the social dimensions of quality-related activities.

The Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) is a relatively new theoretical perspective that adds a complementary lens to the explanation of policy processes and policy change. Yet, a key requirement of a valid policy process framework is its capacity to be proven wrong. Besides the empirical cases that provide evidence for the occurrence of programmatic action, it is necessary to present examples in which programmatic action did not occur, and to explain why this is the case. Proceeding from the observation that programmatic groups and policy programs existed in French and German health policy throughout the 1990s, this contribution answers the question why in 2020, programmatic action is still present in France but not in Germany and why the German policy program did not survive the financial crisis of 2008. It argues that misfit to pre-existing institutional logics and changing institutional logics in the course of programmatic action hinder program success.

Brazil has one of the largest public health systems in the world. By applying the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF), this study provides an endogenous explanation for the health reform and brings new lenses to understand one of the most successful cases of social protection expansion. It demonstrates the relevance of a group of professionals who had a common perception of why the policy should change and a coherent policy change program. Cognitive frameworks, organizational resources, and strong professional culture allowed the sanitaristas occupying key positions in the state apparatus, behaving strategically as a collective actor. The evidence provided suggests the approach's relevance to this case due to considerations of political-institutional specificities. Treating the sanitaristas as a programmatic actor is helpful to explain their role in promoting change and the endurance of the programmatic consensus they have built, which has been crucial to support the universal healthcare model in the country.

This study aims at empirically improving public policy theory by unfolding the concept of policy goals and contributing to their classifications. The research focuses on the thematic dimension of policy goals and investigates 11 Croatian governmental strategies using qualitative content analysis. The research identifies original policy goal types and classifies them into sector-, process-, evaluation-, instrument-, and value-oriented goals. Article concludes with a more comprehensive definition of policy goals, as governmental statements about desired futures in relation to specific sectoral purposes, values, and principles in democratic political systems, policymaking process improvements, necessary instrumental innovations, and evaluation standards that should be fulfilled. The application of this definition and developed goals’ classification reveals that elements of policy-process theories, evaluation research, policy design theory and instrument analysis, democracy theory, and sector-specific research need to be synthesized to better understand the concept of policy goals and to advance their research.