European Policy Analysis最新文献

Understandings of different policy learning types have matured over recent decades. However, relatively little is known about their nonlinear and interactive nature, particularly within crisis contexts. In this article, we explore how two of the most prominent learning types (instrumental and social) shifted and interacted during the COVID-19 crisis. To do so, we created a policy learning storyboard of the Belgian COVID-19 policy response over 2 years (from early 2020 to late 2021). Our analysis highlights the relationships between different epochs of instrumental and social learning throughout the crisis and their implications for policy change. Furthermore, while extant policy learning literature often posits that social learning unfolds over relatively long periods (spanning a decade or more), our empirical account shows that within certain conditions, creeping crises can lead to the creation of long-term crisis policy-making paradigms and goals. At this level, accelerated social learning can take place and lead to paradigmatic shifts within relatively shorter periods than in noncrisis conditions. Theoretically, our findings enhance our understanding of policy learning types and their relationships with policy change, particularly within crisis contexts.

Scholars agree that securitized discourses mainly drive migration policy. However, to fully understand the migration discourse, it is necessary to look also at the discourse legitimating the acceptance of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Namely, how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) legitimate the potential acceptance of migrants in EU plenary debates within the human security speech acts that prevail in the European Parliament plenary debates. By exploring legitimation categories, I show that human security discourse might remain part of the exclusion process, similarly to other security concepts and discursive strategies. In other words, the results show that in human security speech acts, MEPs evoke the “language of exclusion practices” containing the victimhood trope and building the “hierarchy of vulnerability.” Moreover, MEPs' efforts to legitimize immigration in this way might be counterproductive. In particular, the article discusses whether attempts to elicit grand emotions such as pity or shame helps to attract the audience.

Within European Cohesion Policy, some regions manifest chronic problems with absorbing structural funds, probably due to inadequate administrative capacity. Despite the continuous assistance to improve capacity and the accumulation of learning and experience, poor performances still persist in some territories, rendering the initial explanation partial. By collecting (reports' analysis and field research), consolidating (grounded theory), and mapping (system dynamics) two Italian regions with contrasting absorption performance, this study investigates how regional authorities may be trapped in systemic decision-making structures that prioritize short-term outcomes perpetuating low absorption rates. Within a multilevel-governance context, we suggest that these decision-making traps stem from the discrepancy between European and local policy-makers' mental models; although European policies aim to promote timely absorption, sometimes they fail to acknowledge local authorities' actual agenda and may unintentionally prompt regions to overemphasize short term funds' expenditure instead of improving administrative capacity in the long term.

This article discusses “public,” “multi-level,” and “territorial” governance, highlighting the reformulation of the state based on a double dynamic, vertical and horizontal, of displacement of state power in the European Union. We propose that public governance opened up to the ambivalence between “multi-level” and “territorial” governance. This ambivalence is evident in the practical challenges within European governance in the making. According to these challenges, Europeanization raises two priorities: subnational structures that enable the state to get closer to the territory and the people, and beyond borders networks between states, institutions, and people(s). This possibility of effectively involving new actors (at all levels) in the political process of the construction of European regions requires a multi-spatial metagovernance approach.

Actors' toolset to affect institutional change by doing institutional design is limited because criteria for effective institutional design are often too general and abstract. This paper aims to identify institutional design strategies and explore how they influence institutional change. The theoretical framework builds on Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development framework to map institutional change, and it identifies six institutional design strategies: framing, puzzling, powering, network composition, network outcomes, and network interaction. A comparative case study on Dutch infrastructure renewal opportunities – one case's institutional design interventions attained collective renewal, the other did not – maps institutional change in decision-making rounds through institutional directions. Key findings include that institutional change of position, boundary, choice, and information rules first is conducive to collective action. Moreover, mimicry of especially choice rules is pivotal. Furthermore, institutional design strategies have a configurational nature: microlevel strategies have mesolevel consequences, and some configurations instigate change, whereas others cause dynamic inertia.

This special issue is the sequelto the issue on COVID-19 policies published in European Policy Analysis in fall 2020, which focused on the European countries' early responses to the pandemic. The collection aims to go beyond the “honeymoon” phase of the outbreak, that is, the first wave. The selected cases—Sweden, Greece and Cyprus, Germany, Turkey, Hungary, and the Eurozone—provide a variety of national features in terms of political systems, institutional structures, and policy styles. The featured articles adopt different theoretical perspectives and are authored by scholars from a variety of disciplines, who pursue both interpretative and explanatory goals by focusing on policy adoption, policy perception, and learning opportunities, but also on local pandemic management and policy outcomes. A fil rouge unites the featured contributions: they all show the importance of analyzing change over sufficiently long timeframes, to capture the complexity of existing trends.

Using the concept of a policy style developed by Howlett and Tosun, this article explores the linkages between Turkey's policy style and its pandemic management. Turkey took both preemptive and restrictive measures with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the virus hit the country, flights to and from various countries including China were suspended, the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) was established, and a COVID-19 disease guide was prepared. After the virus entered the country, immediate restrictive measures, such as national lockdowns and international and intercity travel restrictions were put in place. Turkey adopted a centralized response to the pandemic with the President, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Health, and the SAB acting as central players. From the perspective of policy style, this article shows how Turkey's general characteristics of policy-making processes have been reflected in its pandemic management policies.

The paper provides a case study on how the Orbán regime in Hungary has dealt with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in 2020–2021. Despite having led worldwide rankings in pandemic-related death rates since the second part of 2020, the government was not politically shaken by COVID-19. Institutionally unrestrained, the governing majority periodically renewed emergency legal regimes to control public discourses and curtail the financial resources of opposition-led local governments. The policy conduct of the regime is discussed in the context of authoritarian populism, which is conceptualized along a strategy-based approach to populism. In this, authoritarian populism is seen to generate democratic legitimacy for dismantling the institutional foundations of liberal democracy and the rule of law. This had been happening in Hungary well before COVID-19 kicked in, but the pandemic provided enhanced opportunities for this strategy. Meanwhile, fiscal policies became increasingly expansionary, signalling a partial return to the practice of preelection overspending.

Education reform has emerged as the main policy priority during the global pandemic. Given the effect of education on individual well-being and macrolevel socioeconomic growth, countries have undertaken a variety of policy measures to offset the negative ramifications of the health outbreak on learning processes. This article examines policy conditions that shape disparities in education policy and learning outcomes across eurozone countries. It argues that sustaining robust education systems in the postpandemic era calls for policy initiatives that strengthen digital literacy and ensure equitable learning opportunities for all student demographics. Examining pre-existing education policy and digital literacy, I argue that strengthening partnerships among education stakeholders and making efficient use of resources effectively sets eurozone countries on a path to education recovery. Policy measures that advance the digitalization of learning infrastructures have the capacity to increase human capital and narrow postpandemic socioeconomic disparities among eurozone countries.

Policy design is influenced by stakeholders' attitudes and contextual constraints. While the latter factor is highly variable, attitudes toward policy instruments are deemed more stable across both policy domains and time. This article uses evidence from a cross-sectional survey of Czech university students to examine the autonomy of policy instrument attitudes (APIA) in five policy domains. Only 16% of students endorse a small set of universal instruments for a wide range of applications (so-called instrumentalists) which indicates rather low cross-domain consistency of attitudes (strong APIA hypothesis). Attitudes toward information instruments are correlated within policy domains, thus providing some support for the weak version of APIA. However, this association does not apply to other instruments. The results suggest that the majority of students can be seen as contingentists whose evaluation of the merits of instruments is based on instruments' suitability for a particular problem.