European Policy Analysis最新文献

This paper analyzes through qualitative and quantitative analysis of European Union (EU) policy documents the framing of EU policy on energy-efficient buildings from the 1970s to 2022. We find that it has been framed in different ways over the decades and the framing has expanded to include more and more benefits. Through this expansion, energy efficiency has been linked to other policy areas, such as security, environmental, economic, and social policy. The shifts in framing can be seen as responses to external events. The expansion can also be explained using two metaphors to analyze how the framing differs depending on political positioning. One where policy is seen as a Swiss knife, able to solve multiple political problems, and one where policy is seen as a Trojan horse, where new policy domains are snuck in by policymakers disguising it as energy efficiency policy to increase EU competency in relation to national governments.

Energiewende (energy transition) has become a worldwide critical challenge. Unlike extensive literature that explains Germany's energy transition focusing on federal actors, this study analyzes the role of Schleswig-Holstein in federal wind energy policy-making. Schleswig-Holstein was an economically poor state governed by the Christian Democratic Union from 1950 to 1988 and supported nuclear energy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By integrating the notions of “leaders,” “pioneers,” and “entrepreneurs,” and exploring the relationship between these change agents and “followers,” this study elucidates a nuanced classification of actors. An examination of proceedings of the federal assembly, the second chamber, and the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament revealed that Schleswig-Holstein changed its role from a potential veto-coalition player in the 1970s to a constructive pusher of repowering older windmills in the 2009 Renewable Energy Act revision. This study also highlights that leaders, pioneers, and entrepreneurs do not necessarily overlap and do capture different change agents.

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.