European Policy Analysis最新文献

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.

The 2008 global financial crisis, climate change, and, ultimately, the COVID pandemic have once again challenged the European Union's (EU) capacity to find effective policy solutions to common problems. The article investigates how the novel policy narrative underpinning the European Green Deal (EGD), a new EU growth strategy aimed at transforming the EU into a fair and prosperous society with no net greenhouse gas emissions, has evolved into concrete policy commitments. By combining the theoretical insights of the narrative policy framework and the assumptions of constructivist approaches to the study of politics, we focus on the relevance of strategic narratives for the understanding of power dynamics related to the approval of the EGD' center piece—the European Climate Law. Our findings show how, by effectively using legitimacy arguments, the European Commission and the Parliament managed to secure a swift approval of the Regulation.

This paper argues that “following the science” is not always the best strategy. It does so by examining the first phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in three countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden. All three countries possessed highly respected infectious disease agencies with wide stakeholder involvement. Despite this, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish public health agencies underplayed the threat of the COVID-19 virus, discouraged intrusive mitigation measures, and were slow to admit their mistakes. Countries that trusted their national agencies, specifically the Netherlands and Sweden, witnessed higher mortality. By contrast, the Danish government marginalized its epidemiologists and suppressed the spread of the virus. The paper thus demonstrates the limits of trusting national scientific expertise, even when properly embedded within social networks, during periods of heightened uncertainty.

The first contribution in this issue deals with the complexities of influence, relationships, and demands in academic policy advisory systems. Migone et al. (2022) investigate the provision of academic advice in Canadian policy processes. Using a survey on policy-related activities of university researchers in business, engineering, health, and politics, the authors identify relationships and the reciprocal demand between academics and (non)governmental or private sector actors. Over 80% of respondents partnered at least once with extern stakeholders, mostly from private and nongovernmental institutions. The differentiation between academic disciplines shows that researchers in politics and health are more likely to give policy advice to public institutions and NGOs while academics in business and especially engineering conduct research mostly with and for private sector partners. Academic policy interaction was most frequent between the public sector and health academics, and the private sector and engineering experts. The survey results on these elite groups of so-called “super-users” and “hyper-experts” (May et al., 2016) indicate that the academics' field of study drives policy advice more than their rank.

Contributing to the research on policy formulation and policy adoption, the subsequent article investigates the autonomy of policy instrument attitudes (APIA). Policy instruments can be understood as “techniques of governance that are used to give effect to stated policy objectives” (Howlett, 2022, p. 3). Attitudes toward these “techniques of governance” are discussed as changing depending on related policy problems and objectives (“contingentists”) or as universal preferences for an instrument, relatively independent of the context (“instrumentalists”). The latter, as argued by Veselý (2021), suggests that pre-existing attitudes precede and therefore highly influence the decision for policy instruments. To empirically test this argument, Nekola et al. (2022) conducted a cross-sectional survey of students at Czech universities who were asked to assess the suitability of multiple policy instruments to solve problems in five policy domains. In general, information instruments were evaluated as more suitable than finance or regulation instruments across policy domains. However, the individual-level aggregation of policy instrument attitudes showed that most students change their preference depending on the respective policy problem and domain, therefore challenging the APIA concept.

Neef et al. (2022) transfer the discussion on policy design to the institutional level and contribute to this issue with an investigation of institutional design strategies and their influence on institutional change. The authors build on Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development framework (Ostrom, 1990; Schlager & Cox, 2017) and Teisman'

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.