European Policy Analysis最新文献

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.

While much work has looked at how governments responded to the Corona pandemic, little consideration has been given to how the crisis affected party competition and what positions political actors took during this period. How were political actors' positions on COVID-19 portrayed in daily newspapers? And how can we explain these patterns? To answer these questions, this article examines the discourse surrounding both German lockdown decisions by analyzing the public coverage of two German daily newspapers. By means of discourse network analysis, the most central actors of the public discourse are revealed at first. Second, relevant factors influencing the discourse centrality of political actors are analyzed. Therefore, a linear regression is performed to identify party-political factors that have a significant influence on political actors' discourse centrality. Participation in the executive branch in the Länder and federal level as well as having candidate status emerge as central factors influencing discourse centrality.

The aim of this paper is to advance a pragmatist-constructivist perspective on the policy process. Building on the pragmatist concept of “transaction,” this perspective suggests that we can further illuminate the policy process by moving towards a more relational analysis that focuses on the emergent co-construction of actors and issues. It stresses that policy processes are always a form of valuation where values are discovered and invented and through which interests are staked out and identities are forged. The article conceptualizes the policy process as an assemblage of intervening policy situations where policy valuation, problematization, and policy formulation take place and where collective action and problems/solutions are built and tested. The Policy Transaction perspective ultimately opens our eyes to how policy processes form and define the relationship between state and society.

本文旨在提出一种针对政策过程的实用主义-建构主义视角。基于实用主义的“交易”概念，这一观点表明，我们能通过转向更加关系化的分析来进一步阐明政策过程，这种关系化的分析聚焦于行动者和问题的共同建构。本文强调，政策过程始终是一种评估形式，在这种评估中，价值被发现和发明，利益被确定，身份被塑造。本文将政策过程概念化为干预政策情境的集合，其中政策评估、问题化和政策制定在此发生，并且集体行动和问题/解决方案在此建立和测试。政策交易视角最终让我们看到政策过程如何形成和定义国家与社会的关系。

Disproportionate policy responses—policy over- and underreaction—are ubiquitous in policy affairs, yet detecting their full spectrum remains uncharted territory. To this end, I developed a descriptive-analytical framework centering on a novel conceptual tool, the Ladder of Disproportionate Policy, based on assessing the gap between the scope of the audience that the policy ostensibly serves and the degree of policy (mis)fit, that is, how the policy tools are set and adjusted to serve the actual audience. This scale assumes that policymakers can “game” these two policy dimensions before and during policy implementation. Political executives can climb up and down this conceptual Ladder and ascend or descend one dimension independently of the other in addition to moving from one side to the other. The case of the 2021 food voucher policy in Israel illustrates the feasibility of the Ladder.

Scholarship is growing on societal transitions, describing radical societal change involving multiple sectors and scales, and transformative governance, describing how public, private, and civil society actors use tools of policy to pursue this fundamental change, aiming to build resiliency and sustainability. Much of this literature has a systems-level focus and does not closely examine how governance participants, working individually or collectively, can steer a jurisdiction toward or away from transformativeness. This paper offers a corrective, integrating policy entrepreneurship scholarship with transformative governance research to advance understanding of how human agency underpins societal change. Drawing on accounts from 50 interviewees across eight case studies of US cities grappling with flooding hazards, we show how policy entrepreneurship can boost the political and economic resources that city officials rely upon to help propel radical shifts towards greater social, economic, and environmental equity.

Summer is the time for conferences and the release of new journal rankings. For the editorial teams of journals specializing in policy process research, including European Policy Analysis (EPA), both are interconnected. Ideally, they both help to increase the chances of attracting more high-quality submissions and special issues, while also promoting the journal among readers and reviewers.

The citation scores for 2023 remained very high for EPA. Both in the Web of Science and Scopus, the journal is ranked in Q1 of the political science category. Our new Impact Factor (IF) is 2.7, which positions us at 56/317 in Political Science and 23/91 in Public Administration. In Scopus, we have an outstanding CiteScore of 9.7, placing us at 9/706 in Political Science and International Relations, and 11/232 in Public Administration. These figures are, of course, situational and will fluctuate frequently; they likely say little about the actual quality of the journal. However, we hope they contribute to attracting more interest in the journal, thereby helping us to firmly establish EPA as a leading journal for European perspectives in policy process research.

Relevant conferences in both political science and public policy are also very helpful in this regard. We engage in regular exchanges with the editorial teams of other journals to discuss new challenges. These include formal developments such as open access, the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, and possible reactions from commercial publishers and professional associations, all of which we must address. Simultaneously, there are exciting substantive developments in our field. These include new approaches and methods for understanding networks in policymaking, which are particularly intriguing in the diverse European countries and the European Union (EU) multi-level system. Are there European perspectives and knowledge from which the international policy process community can benefit? The freely submitted contributions in this issue make important contributions in this regard and will hopefully generate significant interest.

Capano et al. (2024) investigate a question of fundamental importance to current policy process research: What constitutes political networks? What are the motives for cooperation between policy actors, and what role do coalitions between actors play in policy-making? Policy process research has developed and tested a variety of perspectives on specific cases of collaboration (Guo, 2022; Ingold et al., 2021; Möck, 2021). This paper draws on three perspectives and examines their explanatory power through the example of two networks of administrative reform in Italy. What do we find in these networks? Are they more akin to policy communities, which are stable coalitions of heterogeneous actors with a common interest to frame the policy discourse (Jordan, 1990; Miller & Demir, 20