European Policy Analysis最新文献

This paper aims to identify the processes that lead to the establishment of public-private partnerships (PPPs) with a focus on the financial and policy incentives of the actors involved. To this end, it applies the Multiple Streams Framework to a qualitative case study to answer the following research question: are actors of PPPs for innovation motivated due to financial incentives or can they be policy driven? Although the fiscal context plays an important role in our case, the study shows that policy goals, such as providing infrastructure or public services and promoting innovation can be the main drivers for establishing a PPP. These findings offer a theoretical and practical contribution to analyze PPPs as a phenomenon. First, we establish a theoretical framework of possible incentives for actors in PPPs and, secondly, provide new insights into the PPP discussion in the public administration literature.

This article draws on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to analyze the recent debates over Moscow's public transport policy. Despite a proliferation of NPF implementations in recent years, applications in authoritarian institutional settings remain rare. We seek to fill this gap by examining how the actors combine narrative strategies, characters, and plots to advocate their vision of public transport development in Moscow. To this end, this study tests NPF meso-level hypotheses on narrative strategies and their connections with plots and characters used in the context of Russian electoral authoritarian regime. The results show that the NPF hypotheses are applicable for the analysis of policy debates in an authoritarian context. While the governmental coalition uses an angel shift strategy—focusing on heroes, beneficiaries, and stories of control—to contain the scope of conflict, the opposing coalition implies a devil shift strategy with a specific attention to villains, victims, and different plots to expand the scope of conflict.

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has ignited a remarkably active research community, one of its main contributions being distinct narrative elements—including settings, characters, and plots. Yet, while the plot constitutes a core element of narrativity, it has received less attention vis-à-vis other narrative components. Existing classifications of plots have been proven to possess a great ability to capture “universal” policy stories, but not the specific variations of different types of policies. This article presents a typology of plots by linking their universal and policy-specific themes, thereby theorizing from Lowi's seminal typology of regulatory, distributive, and redistributive policies. Empirically, it focuses on the political communication of Germany's policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy narratives were mined from Twitter and from governmental press conferences (March–June 2020). The qualitative NPF analysis demonstrates that the identified plots—restricting-to-control, liberating-to-promote, providing-to-promote, giving-to-give, and giving-to-promote—can grasp different regulatory, distributive, and redistributive policies as well as their variety.

We compare the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT). Given the focus of this special issue on the NPF, we first theorize how the IGT can contribute to the development of NPF categories, but also how the former gains conceptual leverage from the latter. We argue that it is useful to consider jointly NPF and IGT as this expands the benefit of NPF usage for policy researchers—uncovering not only the stories policy actors tell but also what these stories mean in terms of institutional statements. We provide a demonstration of how the conversation between these two policy lenses may develop by analyzing original data on the design of consultation procedures in the European Union, Finland, Ireland, and Malta.

Socioeconomic inequalities in health have been an issue in all European countries since the publication of the “Black Report” in the United Kingdom in 1980. However, data show that nowadays there are important socioeconomic health inequalities within EU countries. The purpose of this paper is to review EU-15 government reports that address socioeconomic inequalities in health. We reviewed 101 reports. The pioneer countries in analyzing this topic have a Beveridge-type health system, and they are the leaders over time. The top socioeconomic indicators used are education level, social class, deprivation level of the area, and nationality. Given the current COVID-19 pandemic situation and its economic consequences, EU governments need to continue monitoring the existing inequalities in health and to act transversely in all public policies.

One of the European Union (EU) institutions’ responses to the alleged “democratic deficit” in the EU is the introduction of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). The ECI provides an agenda-setting tool accessible to different advocacy groups. This study investigates the narrative strategies of ECI organizers to mobilize citizens across the EU. Which storytelling characteristics are present in the policy narratives used by ECIs? To address this question theoretically, we rely on the Narrative Policy Framework. Empirically, we examine 59 ECIs registered between 2012 and 2020. The analysis concentrates on three dimensions of policy narratives: the mentioning of (i) story characters and (ii) cost-benefit frames as forms of narrative strategy to increase public attention, and (iii) evidence as a means of persuasion. Our findings show that ECIs predominantly make use of the devil shift in their policy narratives and use cost-benefit frames and evidence to expand the scope of conflict.

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.