European Policy Analysis最新文献

What narratives accompany the emergence of a negative reputation? I combine research on public organizations’ reputation with narrative analysis. Narratives offer multiple benefits to reputational research, playing an important role in human cognition and comprising social constructions of both organizations and other actors. Organizations profit from insights of narrative analysis concerning their reputation management. I apply the Narrative Policy Framework to the Swiss Child and Adult Protection Agencies (CAPA). A quantitative analysis of 667 narratives in mass media shows that the emergence of the CAPA’s negative reputation was accompanied by villain depictions early on, with narratives assuming a different quality after an implementation scandal. Also the CAPA’s target groups underwent marked changes in their depictions, most notably with problem causers being cast as heroes in several narratives, thus questioning the CAPA’s basic legitimacy as problem-solving organization. These findings provide the CAPA with concrete starting points to amend their reputation.

The present study proposes an analysis of climate change (CC) narratives in answers to an open-ended survey question, where we ask what a climate-friendly lifestyle may imply. The representative survey has been conducted online by the Norwegian Citizen Panel/DIGSSCORE, located at the University of Bergen. The survey provided 1,149 answers from respondents across Norway. The analysis combines a lexical and a text linguistic approach (Fløttum & Gjerstad, 2017), based on Adam's (2008) analysis of the narrative text sequence (initial situation–complication–(re)action–resolution–final situation), and inspired by the Narrative Policy Framework's (NPF) notions of plot and narrative characters (Jones et al., 2014). Our analysis identified four main topics: consumption, transportation, politics, and energy, while the cast of characters is dominated by the first-person singular, frequently portrayed as hero, and the first-person plural in a predominantly villainous role. The frequent use of negation and argumentative connectives reflects the contentious nature of the issue.

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) highlights the role of arguments and emotions included in stories to influence the policy process. Most applications refer to highly politicized issues. How are narratives used in less politicized debates? This paper applies the NPF to two debates within the European Parliament (EP) which generally gain less public media attention than national debates. By conducting a discourse network analysis of two policy debates on agri-food technologies in the EP, we show that both debates do not rely as much on emotions as compared to public debates, but are to a greater degree based on argumentative and scientifically grounded reasoning. The use of the NPF characters of victims, villains, and heroes are fairly limited. Instead, the recently introduced character of the beneficiary is used frequently to highlight the advantages and benefits of the preferred policies.

This study explores how autism and education policy are affected by austerity measures in Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Greece by using a path dependence analysis. The implementation of mixed mainstream classrooms and improvements to infrastructure coincided with the ratification of inclusive education policy. Austerity measures appeared temporally associated with furthering of integration and inclusion policy for all countries under study, potentially due to the economic incentives of an integrated system. This trend is especially visible in Ireland, Portugal, and Greece, whereas lesser so in Italy. Even though the initial focus of this analysis was autism, the findings are applicable to the general area of special education needs due to the non-specific nature of national policies.

Public problems are not complex per se but are defined as such. This article explores how problem definition in terms of complexity is strategically used in narratives to expand or contain a policy conflict. We draw on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine how actors use narratives to define problems and link these problems to solutions and characters. Empirically, we examine narratives used in the Moscow waste management debate by drawing on content analysis of online texts and interviews. The results show that government actors seek to contain conflict by assigning less complexity to the waste problem than nongovernmental actors, who expand conflict by defining the waste problem as politically complex. Narratives with high problem complexity include many victims and villains and propose multifaceted and institutional solutions, while narratives with low problem complexity focus on technocratic solutions. Implications for the Russian waste controversy and the NPF are discussed.

Successive crises and shifts in geopolitics necessitate a more coherent Europe, with the euro as a key instrument, yet the enlargement of the euro area is unfinished. The paper reconstructs diverging trends in non-EA countries, and considers the motivations of key stakeholders in countries without commitment to enter. The approach applied is dual: we reconsider economic arguments of a currency reform and conduct political economy analysis with the underlying hypothesis that euro adoption, for businesses, is a cost/benefit issue, while for governments, parties, and voters it is a sovereignty issue with cost/benefit aspects attached. The authors conclude that macroeconomic and business considerations would support Eurozone entry in all CEE countries concerned. As for key stakeholders, society and the business community support the euro, but particular government interests are at stake. Post-pandemic realities would reconfirm rational arguments for euro entry; to make that happen, economic nationalist and state developmental concepts need be discarded.

Based on the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF), this article presents a comparative analysis of the Chilean and Colombian policies of quality assurance (QA) in higher education. Despite their instrumental commonalities, these policies actually reflect two contrasting approaches to quality: a flexible approach in Chile versus an excellence-oriented approach in Colombia. The article shows that both policies were initially developed by groups of prestigious academics who shared most of the features of programmatic elites and that the contrast between the approaches to quality arises from the divergent evolution of the policy program of these groups: The policy of QA was subjected to an instrumental layering in Chile while, in Colombia, it followed a path-dependent evolution. The study shows that sociological perspectives like the PAF can provide a more complete and dynamic understanding of the Evaluative State that takes into account the instrumental and the social dimensions of quality-related activities.