European Policy Analysis最新文献

This special issue is the sequelto the issue on COVID-19 policies published in European Policy Analysis in fall 2020, which focused on the European countries' early responses to the pandemic. The collection aims to go beyond the “honeymoon” phase of the outbreak, that is, the first wave. The selected cases—Sweden, Greece and Cyprus, Germany, Turkey, Hungary, and the Eurozone—provide a variety of national features in terms of political systems, institutional structures, and policy styles. The featured articles adopt different theoretical perspectives and are authored by scholars from a variety of disciplines, who pursue both interpretative and explanatory goals by focusing on policy adoption, policy perception, and learning opportunities, but also on local pandemic management and policy outcomes. A fil rouge unites the featured contributions: they all show the importance of analyzing change over sufficiently long timeframes, to capture the complexity of existing trends.

Using the concept of a policy style developed by Howlett and Tosun, this article explores the linkages between Turkey's policy style and its pandemic management. Turkey took both preemptive and restrictive measures with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the virus hit the country, flights to and from various countries including China were suspended, the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) was established, and a COVID-19 disease guide was prepared. After the virus entered the country, immediate restrictive measures, such as national lockdowns and international and intercity travel restrictions were put in place. Turkey adopted a centralized response to the pandemic with the President, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Health, and the SAB acting as central players. From the perspective of policy style, this article shows how Turkey's general characteristics of policy-making processes have been reflected in its pandemic management policies.

The paper provides a case study on how the Orbán regime in Hungary has dealt with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in 2020–2021. Despite having led worldwide rankings in pandemic-related death rates since the second part of 2020, the government was not politically shaken by COVID-19. Institutionally unrestrained, the governing majority periodically renewed emergency legal regimes to control public discourses and curtail the financial resources of opposition-led local governments. The policy conduct of the regime is discussed in the context of authoritarian populism, which is conceptualized along a strategy-based approach to populism. In this, authoritarian populism is seen to generate democratic legitimacy for dismantling the institutional foundations of liberal democracy and the rule of law. This had been happening in Hungary well before COVID-19 kicked in, but the pandemic provided enhanced opportunities for this strategy. Meanwhile, fiscal policies became increasingly expansionary, signalling a partial return to the practice of preelection overspending.

Education reform has emerged as the main policy priority during the global pandemic. Given the effect of education on individual well-being and macrolevel socioeconomic growth, countries have undertaken a variety of policy measures to offset the negative ramifications of the health outbreak on learning processes. This article examines policy conditions that shape disparities in education policy and learning outcomes across eurozone countries. It argues that sustaining robust education systems in the postpandemic era calls for policy initiatives that strengthen digital literacy and ensure equitable learning opportunities for all student demographics. Examining pre-existing education policy and digital literacy, I argue that strengthening partnerships among education stakeholders and making efficient use of resources effectively sets eurozone countries on a path to education recovery. Policy measures that advance the digitalization of learning infrastructures have the capacity to increase human capital and narrow postpandemic socioeconomic disparities among eurozone countries.

Policy design is influenced by stakeholders' attitudes and contextual constraints. While the latter factor is highly variable, attitudes toward policy instruments are deemed more stable across both policy domains and time. This article uses evidence from a cross-sectional survey of Czech university students to examine the autonomy of policy instrument attitudes (APIA) in five policy domains. Only 16% of students endorse a small set of universal instruments for a wide range of applications (so-called instrumentalists) which indicates rather low cross-domain consistency of attitudes (strong APIA hypothesis). Attitudes toward information instruments are correlated within policy domains, thus providing some support for the weak version of APIA. However, this association does not apply to other instruments. The results suggest that the majority of students can be seen as contingentists whose evaluation of the merits of instruments is based on instruments' suitability for a particular problem.

This paper leverages the resource regime concept to systematically analyze the shape of data governance established by European Union (EU) digital policy. It highlights what gives shape and coherence to this data governance across different policies and how this governance structures relations between actors in the data economy. The analysis shows a common thrust in the EU's digital policies since its 2010 Digital Agenda. Overall, EU data governance is market-creating not only through rules that directly aim at strengthening market integration and limiting anti-competitive behavior but also through regulation that works to protect and promote EU-based industries and to bolster their competitiveness in a global economy. EU digital policies complement each other in establishing more favorable conditions for EU businesses in relation to non-EU competitors, and this market-creating neo-mercantilist orientation is rooted even in data and consumer protection policies that also have a market-correcting dimension.

In this article, we draw from qualitative interviews with political parties' representatives and a content analysis of party programs to identify how political parties frame animal welfare policies in Norway. In analyzing the framing of animal welfare and its significance for understanding agricultural post-exceptionalism, we found that though they frame animal welfare issues in conflicting ways, most see Norwegian animal welfare as reasonably good but perceive potential for improvement. They also generally understand societal claims as lacking or having an unclear factual basis, which has legitimized their nonaction as political parties. Even so, because of active new actors such as animal welfare organizations and retailers, the parties do not believe that public pressure will wane. Although introducing new farm animal welfare policies can represent a move towards post-exceptionalism in Europe's agri-food sector, the discourse on animal welfare policies amongst political parties implies that such is not the case in Norway.

In this article, we statistically examine the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented by the national governments of Greece and Cyprus during 2020 to (a) limit the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and (b) mitigate the economic fallout brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. Applying a modified health belief model, we hypothesize that behavioral outcomes at the policy level are a function of NPIs, perceived severity, and social context. We employ a Prais-Winsten estimation in 2-week averages and report panel-corrected standard errors to find that NPIs have clear, yet differential, effects on public health and the economy in terms of statistical significance and time lags. The study provides a critical framework to inform future interventions during emerging pandemics.

Our analysis asks whether the pandemic situation affects welfare state support in Germany. The pandemic has increased the health and income risks calling for welfare state intervention. While increased needs, more deservingness, and higher state responsibility during such a crisis would suggest augmented support generally and among those at risk, this might be a short-term effect and cost considerations could reverse this trend. We study public attitudes towards four key social policy areas based on the German Internet Panel (GIP). We use three waves prior and further three waves since the pandemic had been declared in March 2020. The analysis shows both continuity in the popularity of social policies, in particular health and pensions, and some short-term increase in support for unemployment and family policies. The results after nearly 2 years suggest rather continuation with some thermostatic short-term boosts in support instead of any long-lasting change.

This special issue of European Policy Analysis aims at combining the increasingly comprehensive comparative democracy research with public policy analysis. In comparative democracy research, various datasets have been developed and regularly collected in recent decades to describe and assess institutional features of democratic and non-democratic political systems. Some of these datasets also include at least some variables to cover public policies while others do not (Apaza, 2009; Coppedge et al., 2021; Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2020). At the same time, policy research always seeks to integrate institutionalist factors, in particular in the context of international comparisons (Béland, 2019; Hornung, 2022; Zohlnhöfer et al., 2016). Moreover, the perspective of policy research is increasingly broadening beyond Anglo-Saxon countries as the original scope of application and addresses policy processes and outcomes in a variety of states and political systems which makes the systematic study of the relationship between the characteristics of political systems on the one hand and their policy performance on the other particularly important (Bandelow et al., 2022).

The specific focus of this special issue is on a discussion of the relationship between democratic qualities, good governance (executive capacities and executive accountability), and policy performances (economic, social, environmental, and pandemic policies) in OECD and EU states. Data for the analysis of this relationship is provided by the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) project of the Bertelsmann Foundation since 2009 (Jäckle & Bauschke, 2009; Schraad-Tischler & Seelkopf, 2016; Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2020). SGI can serve as a central data basis because it includes data on all of the above-named pillars. The SGI project provides a European perspective as it includes many European (mostly German) scholars even though it also collects data for non-European democracies. This issue is thus also intended to contribute to one of EPA's central goals, namely the discussion of European perspectives on policy research. In selecting authors for the contributions, a balance had to be struck between relevant knowledge of the data set on the one hand and the challenge of possible biases in assessing the SGI’s strengths and weaknesses on the other. While Bertelsmann Foundation officials were involved in discussions during the planning phase of this special issue to some extent, they had no influence on the composition of the contributions, their content, or the review process. The concept of this issue was developed independently of the Bertelsmann Foundation. There were neither financial nor content-related or other influences. Many of the methods and results presented here lend themselves to applications to other data sets. It is important for us to emph