European Policy Analysis最新文献

Although street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) play a key role in the implementation of market-based instruments (MBIs), their participation is widely understudied. This paper addresses this blind spot by engaging the concept of street-level bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship. Using the case of conservation banking, a market-based environmental policy in the United States, we explore why this novel instrument has only been adopted in a handful of jurisdictions. We examine both non-adoption and adoption of conservation banking to find that SLBs are likely to engage in such entrepreneurial acts when a new policy form is particularly useful in legitimizing regulatory enforcement. Implementing a MBI is, however, not straightforward. Organizational conditions can restrain SLB autonomy to implement MBIs, preferring instead to persist with baseline policies, which further underscores the importance of SLB risk-taking behavior. SLBs must strategically straddle their unique position between the market and the hierarchy to enroll different actors into the new policy arrangement, all within dynamic political–economic conditions.

This article explores the intersection of policy implementation, conflict/peacebuilding, and the role of the EU PEACE program in Northern Ireland (NI). Conflict societies see a great investment of external funds, attempting to promote conflict resolution. Specifically, this article analyses the fourth wave of such funding in NI to examine why the EU PEACE program has not fully brought about its intended policy outcomes. Using Matland's conflict-ambiguity model of policy implementation, we identify how EU funds can be skewed to support local political interests. Simultaneously, the EU PEACE program continues to adhere to strict implementation criteria that makes little sense given the local context. Therefore, contrary to its objectives, the implementation of EU funding can compound rather than ameliorate divisions in postconflict NI. Instead of prescribing strict implementation criteria, EU policy could focus on improving the administrative capacity and discretion of local administration in devising locally relevant implementation strategies.

Administrative style is a central concept in public policy and administration research. Despite the developments in the field, less is known about the effect different administrative styles have on policy output. To contribute to filling this gap, the article offers an original framework to explore the link between administrative styles and policy output based on the consolidated distinction between functional and positional orientations as constitutive elements of administrative styles. This framework is applied to an under-investigated case of public organization in the Italian context, that is, the administrative apparatus headed by the Extraordinary Commissioner for the Covid-19 Emergency, to test the general hypothesis that what makes the difference in determining output performance is an administration's positional orientation, not only its functional one. Doing so, the article contributes to “second generation” administrative style research and provides a theoretical and analytical framework to be tested in future cross-national and cross-sectoral comparisons.

Active Labor Market Policies (ALMPs), which include state-funded apprenticeships, have long been used as a way of encouraging unemployed youth into skilled and semiskilled trades. However, new forms of “nonstandard” employment are now dominating young people's experience of the labor market. In fact, unpaid internships are becoming a normal part of a modern curriculum vitae and viewed as a necessary rite of passage for a successful school-to-work transfer, especially in the middle-class professions. Through the use of freedom of information requests, policy documents, evaluation reports, and semistructured interviews, this paper examines the role of unpaid internships in shaping the four most recent ALMPs targeted at Irish youth since the Great Recession (2008). It theorizes that the increased prevalence of unpaid internships in the entry-level jobs market leads to Irish policymakers designing youth unemployment ALMPs based on a private-sector unpaid internship model. This paper will first situate youth unemployment policy within the literature on ALMPs and unpaid internships. It will then combine process tracing as a within-case research method with a comparative case study of the four ALMPs. In conclusion, this paper finds that Irish youth unemployment policy designed during periods of economic crisis tends to prioritize the needs of host organizations and mirror employment norms established through unpaid internships. Conversely, during periods of economic growth, the Irish youth unemployment policy reverts to a more regulated model that protects the entry-level jobs market. Furthermore, this paper recommends that European states should prohibit the use of unpaid internships to avoid further entrenching precarious and discriminatory work patterns.

This comparative paper adds to the literature by exploring the connection between policy entrepreneurship and collaboration among street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) in two countries. We asked if SLBs, as policy entrepreneurs, promote collaborative efforts in their work. If so, in what ways? The study was based on qualitative research and in-depth semistructured interviews with 20 SLBs in social services in Israel and Germany. Our findings suggest that as policy entrepreneurs, SLBs use diverse ways of working together, and a higher level of policy change demands a higher level of collaboration. We offer three generic types of SLB policy entrepreneurs: collaborative policy entrepreneurs, collaborative-coordinator policy entrepreneurs, and coordinator-cooperative entrepreneurs. We suggest administrative cultures and policy styles may shed light on the presence of types of SLB policy entrepreneurs.

While national policy styles have (re)gained academic attention in recent comparative public policy work, the concept still needs a widely accepted operationalization that can allow the collection and analysis of data across contexts while steering away from construct validity threats. We build on Tosun and Howlett's (2022) work and employ a mixed-methods approach, which relies on exploratory factor analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis. We put forth an operationalization, using Bertelsmann's Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) as proxies, that achieves conceptual clarity and distinctiveness, informational robustness, and statistical power. Ultimately, we construct two composite indicators—mode of problem-solving and inclusiveness—calculate them in 41 countries and present policy style classifications based on their combinations. We report the distribution of countries across four policy styles (administrative, managerial, accommodative, adversarial) and conclude with an analysis of the clusters, assessments of robustness, and comparison with other national policy style classification schemes.

Accessible housing is essential for disabled and elderly people with physical restraints to live independently. In reality, however, there is a considerable lack of accessible housing in Germany. While investigating the reasons for this insufficient supply, this article discusses the underlying policy mix and scrutinizes German accessible housing politics. Based on 50 semi-structured interviews in the two states Saxony-Anhalt and Hesse, it identifies the weak political influence of disability lobbyists as the primary reason. Lacking structural, organizational, and institutional power, they do not get access to decision-makers in housing politics but are labeled as social policy actors. On the other hand, housing and building industries have considerable resources to push their housing policy agenda. Nevertheless, the empirical findings clearly show the challenging endeavor of integrating social and building policies in accessible housing while contributing to the overarching understanding of politics in minor policy fields.