European Policy Analysis最新文献

This article argues that European Union (EU) peacebuilding scholarship can benefit from organizational research on the socio-spatial dynamics of policy implementation. It introduces a strategic-relational heuristic to address two key gaps: the marginalization of grassroots agency in spatial analyses and the separation of strategy from structure. Drawing on the Strategic-Relational Approach (SRA), the paper examines EU peacebuilding as a form of metagovernance. Using Northern Ireland as a case study, it shows how voluntary and community groups not only respond to but also shape metagovernance as an opportunity structure. Key dimensions—geographic reach, thematic focus, governance mechanisms, and spatial elements like territory, place, scale, and networks—are central to this process. Yet, persistent shortcomings reveal tensions where policy and politics intertwine. The article concludes that metagoverning peacebuilding is a dynamic, context-specific process shaped by diverse actor strategies and overlapping territorial influences, requiring an understanding of both strategic tools and opportunity structure.

In this article, we examine concepts that underpin the theories of the policy process. We exemplify the applicability of these concepts in the European policy-making contexts through a systematic scoping review of European applications of the policy entrepreneur. Our findings include that (i) the overwhelming majority of the studies anchored the policy entrepreneur in the Multiple Streams Framework; (ii) more than half of the studies were contextualized at the EU level and in the UK country context; (iii) policy entrepreneurs were identified in a wide range of policy sectors, and (iv) policy entrepreneurs were identified as being individuals as well as organizations but mostly elite actors, often policy-makers. Future avenues for research include policy entrepreneurship in political parties, exploring the interactions of policy entrepreneurs and the role their other identities (public servant, elected official, NGO official, etc.) play in how reactive or proactive they are in seeking opportunities.

The culture of consensus influences legislative decision-making within the Council of the European Union, often leading to broad coalitions in which even the preferences of isolated member states are considered. Nevertheless, despite its significance, this culture has been insufficiently studied through formal models predicting EU legislative outcomes. This paper presents the Consensus model, a mixture of the procedural and bargaining approaches, accounting for the culture of consensus. This iterative model starts from the Commission's ideal stance and persists until no member state challenges a policy position, which then becomes the adopted outcome. The European Parliament contributes to shaping the trajectory from the Commission's proposal to the final result. Using the DEU-III data set, I assess the Consensus model's predictive ability, demonstrating its superior performance compared to two random outcome models. Notably, the Consensus model performs on par with the Nash bargaining model.

In the context of Europeanisation and neo-corporatism, we examine the lengthy process of revising the Nondiscrimination Act in Finland, spanning from 2007 to 2023. The focus is on the mandate of the Nondiscrimination Ombudsman in the workplace and on explaining the sudden policy change of strengthening it after a prolonged standstill. The study employs the Advocacy Coalition Framework, especially the approach of Coalition Opportunity Structures, combined with path dependency in relation to legal frames, in examining the struggle between the labour policy coalition and the coalition of human rights advocates. The case exemplifies the intertwining of legal, institutional, and political structures as strategic means and necessary precursors to policy change, which was a breakthrough for the human rights advocates. Yet the ultimate decisive factor was the political landscape, which reminds us of the inherently political nature of national-level lawmaking, further supported by the erosion of tripartite lawmaking.

The development of policy process theories is progressing rapidly. Scholars increasingly apply these theories originated in the US to different contexts and continents, such as Europe. Furthermore, scholars at different career stages, including junior scholars, work on and with these theories. Focusing on junior scholars, this paper poses the following question: What are the key considerations of European junior scholars engaging in policy process theory development? We present three observations: The first observation refers to the general construction of a research project contributing to theory development. The second observation investigates how teaching policy process research and public policy, in general, can advance theory development. The third observation focuses on how to bridge the science-practice gap as a junior scholar working on policy process theories. The three observations highlight the potential of making use of your own agency as a junior scholar engaging in policy process theory development in Europe.

While there is an increasing interest in the role of emotions in policy studies, not much is known about how emotions unfold in one of the most emotional situations that can be encountered in politics: political scandals. To investigate how the discursive articulation of emotions shapes the policy responses to political misconduct from a constructivist perspective, this article delves into one of the most shocking corruption scandals hitting the European Union (EU) institutions in decades: the money-for-influence scandal, also popularly known as Qatargate. The article shows which emotions the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) expressed in the wake of the scandal and how the discursive articulation of these emotions shaped their policy responses regarding transparency and accountability. This article combines the analysis of 28 EP plenary debates with interviews with six MEPs and high-level EU officials.

This personal reflection starts with the theme of how Theories of the Policy Process or ToPP (Sabatier, 1999) was received by European researchers and why this volume was particularly important for scholars working on the policy process of the European Union. Yet (this is the second theme) policy process research in Europe was also stimulated by other theoretical frameworks. A third theme is the status of theory in Europe today, balancing the reception of ToPP with the presence of frameworks like the référentiel, Europeanization, and policy learning. Finally, the fourth theme is about the future. The successful cumulation of theory-inspired policy process research does not suggest the need for another set of new theories. Rather, the key is to integrate ToPP with theory-oriented research on the policy stages that are less explored by existing theories (such as implementation and evaluation theories), public administration theory, and the normative perspective on governance.

The first issue of European Policy Analysis (EPA) in 2025 demonstrates how the various political crises can act as a magnifying glass to further emphasize the explanatory power and relevance of policy process research. This applies both to the long-term economic and social challenges in Europe and to short-term and temporary crises, although they have to be treated very differently (Mavrot et al., 2024). With regard to lessons learned and future resilience, it is important to systematically analyze the experiences of past crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy process research can make an important contribution here, particularly with regard to the role of science in the policy process (Capano et al., 2024; Chen & Zhang, 2024; Hadorn et al., 2022; Weible et al., 2020). One of the important lessons learned was the special role of scientists not only in advising politicians but also in political communication. Here, Switzerland's small federal democracy, with its special direct democratic elements offers a special environment. Ksinsik (2025) combines concepts of science communication with the Narrative Policy Framework in a paper that has won the Best Paper Award of the ECPR Standing Group of Public Policy. The study looks at the special way Swiss scientists worked with policy discussions during the pandemic. It uses an index from NPF research to measure the devil-angel shift (Chang & Koebele, 2020). By analyzing Swiss newspaper articles, the research reveals that scientists employed narratives more frequently when providing problem advice compared to policy advice.

Equally focusing on the domestic impact of the COVID-19 crisis, Demler (2025) investigates changing party competition and political actors' positions in Germany as a result of the crisis. Just as the first article in this issue, she ties in with similar analyses of COVID-19 discourses across countries (Lemor & Montpetit, 2024; Persson et al., 2022) and looks at the discourse in German newspapers to extract information on the positions of political actors and measures their centrality in the discourse network. The findings indicate that those actors that are central in the discourse are characterized by being part of the executive branch of the Länder and federal level and having candidate status. Hence, the polarization of discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic was less an issue of government versus opposition but between legislative and executive branch, whereby crisis communication apparently was also actively used for personal profile-building.

In the third contribution to this issue, Cantó et al. (2025) examine how and why macroeconomic factors such as economic development moderate the relationship between European Structural and Investment Funds and EU Support. The empirical basis of this study consists of Eu