European Policy Analysis最新文献

Although the policy performance field acknowledges the importance of adopting a long-term decision making perspective to attain more sustainable policy outcomes, it overlooks the way in which sustainable governance conditions and policy performance relate to each other. We address this gap by investigating why some countries succeed in terms of policy performance while others do not. Applying a fuzzy-set QCA to 41 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and European Union countries of the Sustainable Governance Indicators data, we find out that successful economic and social policy performance is mainly driven by executive accountability conditions combined with effective implementation, while the high-quality of media plays a key role in successful environmental policy performance. Considering the multiple paths that practitioners can follow toward sustainable development benefits, they can also learn how to shift from short-term to long-term thinking by identifying “what works and why,” formulating good practices and guidelines for better policy performance in the respective national contexts.

This paper provides a critical assessment of the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) and compares it with other prominent indices that address specific components of governance: V-Dem, WGI, and BTI. We offer a comparative assessment of content validity of these governance measures, their data generation processes, and their convergent validity. We conclude that the SGI’s most important contribution is the conceptualization of policy performance as a discrete index. Other relative strengths are the theoretical embeddedness and the exclusion of irrelevant meanings of governance, and the conceptualization of three governance components (Governance, Policy Performance, and Democracy). However, in terms of geographic and temporal coverage, the SGI is clearly inferior to WGI and V-Dem. The handling of third-party statistical data, the absence of uncertainty scores, and the (a-theoretical) aggregation of different indicators are additional shortcomings of the SGI. Finally, the SGI’s iterative process of expert deliberation has merits but is prone to biases.

The concept of national policy styles differs between states in respect of whether their governments react to policy changes in an anticipatory or reactive fashion and whether they seek to achieve consensus with societal actors or impose decisions on them. To date, this conceptualization has been applied to a limited number of states and produced only a small set of case studies due to the absence of large-n data. We assess whether the dimensions on strategic planning and public consultation of the Bertelsmann Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) provide conceptually sound and empirically insightful indicators of national policy styles. Our explorative analysis reveals that the SGI are useful for operationalizing the concept of national policy styles and could advance the debate on it. Our analysis shows that differences exist between countries in terms of their policy styles, and that the policy styles remained stable in most countries between 2014 and 2020.

We use the Bertelsmann Foundation's Sustainable Government Indicators (SGI) to find out how executive efficiency and consensus capacity influence sustainable policy performance. Although those two concepts are often seen as opposites, we show that this is not the case and that they can actually complement each other: separately as well as together, an efficient executive and consensus capacity support more sustainable policy performance. However, government efficiency is a double-edged sword. Depending on the policy positions governments take, outcomes vary. In this respect, efficient government structures are an amplifier of policy outcomes. In the case of sustainable policy performance, left-leaning governments increase sustainable policy performance, while right-leaning governments do not.

To assess how immigration affects welfare states, studies have mainly used social expenditure as an indocator of welfare state strength, with inconclusive results. Furthermore, the relationship between immigration and different social policy fields has been mostly overlooked, and temporal dynamics have often been ignored. Using data on 21 OECD countries 1980–2010, this paper tests how immigration relates to (a) social expenditures, and (b) generosity of policy in regard to unemployment benefits and public pensions. Using dynamic and static panel models and controlling for relevant structural factors there is evidence for a robust and significant negative association between net migration and spending in the short term, with no evidence that migration increases social spending in later years. Some evidence is found for the compensation hypothesis, i.e., a positive association between net migration and unemployment generosity. A robust positive association was also found for net migration and pension generosity. There is thus little support that migration has a burdening or undermining effect on the welfare state.

The relationships of influence and activity between academics and other actors (public, private, and non-governmental) in the policy process are complex. Although older work often argued academic research at best had an indirect “environmental” or “enlightenment” effect on policy-makers, (May et al. (2016). Journal of Public Policy, 36, 195) recently argued that in the US case previous studies misconstrued the role of academic policy advice because they surveyed “average” academics and in so doing missed the significant impact of a small elite group of “hyper-experts” within an already small group of “super-users” interacting on a constant basis with government policy-makers. This article draws upon data from a survey of academics in four fields (Business, Engineering, Health and Politics) in six major Canadian Universities to map out the relationships existing between academics and other actors in the public, private, and non-governmental sectors and test for the existence of this elite pattern of interaction in a second country.

The influence of the European Union on national power structures, actors' institutional opportunities, and governance networks is well established in cases of Europeanization processes unfolding in member states or associated countries for which a formal agreement is in place. This article focuses instead on Europeanization processes that are more informal and do not include formal agreements but bottom-up dynamics. Empirically, we analyze the collaboration network in Swiss energy policy with Exponential Random Graph Models and find that actors with EU contacts and those that consider the international process as important are particularly active in the domestic governance network, whereas actors considering the domestic process as strongly Europeanized and those with pro-EU beliefs are particularly inactive. This points towards a complex influence of informal Europeanization on domestic governance networks.

This paper explores how a joint belief shift among policy actors in the Eurozone crisis led to a deep institutional change in Eurozone governance: the banking union. Based on Rinscheid's framework of institutional change, we apply discourse network analysis (DNA) of actor statements in European newsmedia to show how banking union ideas emerged and gained ground between 2000 and 2012. We complement the DNA with analysis of secondary sources to provide explanations of how the rise and dissemination of banking union ideas came about. Our findings show that potential junctures in a crisis provide opportunities for policy actors to exploit and instigate a joint belief shift, but only if certain critical antecedents allow for this. Our study complements EU policy analysis studies by offering a fine-grained theory and methodology to assess and understand the role of (coalitions of) key policy actors and their ideas in processes of EU institutional change.

Utilizing Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) as a basis, this article aims to further the understanding of the influence institutional factors have on agenda-setting and policy formulation in the European Union (EU). It does so by analyzing the policy process of the Just Transition Fund (JTF) from agenda-setting to policy formulation by the Commission. The research finds that policy entrepreneurship is strongly determined by the characteristics and overlap of institutional policy windows. In the JTF case, the institutional context enhanced the influence of policy entrepreneurs within the European Parliament, especially the S&D party, on the combined process of agenda-setting and policy formulation. Therefore, this paper illustrates that EU MSF scholarship would benefit from taking institutional factors more into account. The conclusions also indicate that supranational institutions can play a larger role in EU climate policy formulation than some of the current research suggests.