European Policy Analysis最新文献

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.

Economic populism was once recognized as a paradigmatic understanding of the boom-and-bust cycles of Latin America. By now, the concept has lost its analytical strength and academic attractiveness. Nevertheless, policy analysts cannot neglect the supply side analysis of contemporary populism, that is, what populists actually do once elected into government. Adopting and operationalizing the ideational definition of populism, the article identifies three major consequences of populist incumbency: (1) the inclination of populists to embark on redistributive policies favoring “our” people against “others,” (2) their critical attitude toward autonomous organizations, professionals, and institutions, and (3) their antagonistic relationship with the competitive market mechanism. The article demonstrates that populism is no longer about myopic and irresponsible policies; instead, populists tend to disregard the institutional constraints of economic decision making.

The last decade we saw an increasing academic, policy, and professional interest in the use of co-creation to tackle societal challenges. Most research focused on qualitative analysis of case studies. This led to an understanding that co-creation is essential for social innovation. We started this paper by analyzing co-creation strategies ex ante to understand how EU-funded consortia intend to tackle societal challenges. By quantitatively analyzing 300 EU projects and qualitatively analyzing the Horizon2020 “co-creation for growth and inclusion” call, our research revealed four different types of consortia. We characterized these types by the coordinators and dubbed them, respectively, as research led, government led, enterprise led, and other led. These consortia were quite different in terms of diversity and preferred partners. We also distinguished three distinct co-creation strategies that are focused on inclusion of stakeholders, the outcome, or tool development. We discovered that these strategies are not linked to types of consortia or projects, but only to the call text. We therefore conclude that the policy design of Horizon2020 led to a program that aims to stimulate innovation, but has become too rigid to be able to do so.