{"title":"Public Employment Services and Vulnerable Youth in the EU: The Case of Rural NEETs","authors":"Francisco Simões, Elena Marta","doi":"10.17645/pag.7432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.7432","url":null,"abstract":"The Covid-19 pandemic created unprecedented pressure to accelerate public employment services (PES) digitalisation across Europe. In fact, there is now a considerable amount of funding dedicated to that goal in broadband policy packages, such as the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism. This pressure for digitalizing PES presumes that its benefits outweigh the existing risks, regardless of citizens’ singularities, such as vulnerable young people going through the school-to-work transition. Bearing that in mind, and following a bioecological model framework, our article addresses two main goals. Firstly, based on a targeted literature review, we detail the challenges and possibilities posed by PES digitalisation for vulnerable young people in EU countries, which have been widely overlooked in the literature. We specifically argue that despite several practical advantages (e.g., releasing staff from time-consuming administrative tasks), PES digitalisation will only be beneficial for vulnerable young people if three interrelated challenges are taken into account: nurturing trust in institutions and digital tools, supporting digital transformation of PES institutional organization, and adopting a co-design lens for PES digitalisation. Secondly, using a knowledge integration approach, we describe a model for assessing PES capacity to digitally support rural young people not in employment, education, or training to enter the labour market. We conclude that the overemphasis on the expected advances of overall PES digitalisation must be followed by thoughtful consideration of PES digitalisation processes to ensure EU social inclusion targets for the younger generations.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139212929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The European Green Deal Agenda After the Attack on Ukraine: Exogenous Shock Meets Policy‐Making Stability","authors":"Frank Wendler","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7343","url":null,"abstract":"The present article investigates how the EU climate and energy governance framework launched by the European Green Deal has been affected by the exogenous shock of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine. Harnessing punctuated equilibrium theory, the theoretical approach applies its conceptual triad of policy images, venues, and feedback to the adoption of the current REPowerEU program as a critical test case of highly stable policy-making encountering a situation of exogenous shock. In the empirical part, a mixed-method content analysis of policy documents issued by the European Council and Commission from the adoption of the European Green Deal in 2019 to the current stage is presented to gauge the impact of the Russian attack on agenda-setting at the macro and meso-political levels of the EU. A second step evaluates how the expanded and more geopolitical policy image of the REPowerEU agenda is applied to extant governance processes. In this regard, the analysis identifies three factors limiting the impact of exogenous shock: the availability of three separate policy subsystems for the parallel processing of policy components, institutional safeguards for maintaining policy stability through supranational rules and provisions, and the critical function of the Commission in limiting revisions to a few targeted proposals. In conclusion, policy stability outweighs aspects of disruption and change, while the more diverse set of policy processes creates new challenges for the coherence of efforts to achieve decarbonization.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139211870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wagner Group Flows: A Two‐Fold Challenge to Liberal Intervention and Liberal Order","authors":"Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, Karen Philippa Larsen","doi":"10.17645/pag.7367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.7367","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on Wagner Group (WG) forces, liberal interveners too readily dismiss the scope of WG’s Africa engagements, including economic and political “flows” that, in combination, challenge liberal interveners’ taken-for-granted access in several states on the African continent. Operationalising the notion of “flows,” we present an analysis that foregrounds both the scope of WG’s Africa engagements and the challenges. We portray WG as a broad enterprise by attending to military, economic, and political flows. This broadening is relevant to how WG is understood to challenge liberal interveners. Besides country-specific challenges to liberal interveners’ access (notably in states where they have been asked to depart or co-exist with WG), a broader reading of WG’s Africa presence also foregrounds challenges at a different level, namely to liberal interveners’ assumptions about the inevitable attractiveness of the liberal international order. A liberal order that Russia has utilised WG’s Africa presence to contest. As such, challenges at the level of liberal order go beyond WG’s Africa presence and must, therefore, be viewed alongside other challenges to liberal intervention and order, from the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If liberal interveners’ missteps and historicity, as well as the scope of WG’s Africa engagements, remain underappreciated, then various challenges specific to the WG, but also broader challenges to liberal interveners’ assumptions about liberal order as self-evidently attractive, are too readily dismissed. Liberal actors’ dismissiveness may invite misguided responses and unintentionally become an enabling factor for WG’s influence in Africa.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139213716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Legal Traditions as Economic Borders","authors":"Shintaro Hamanaka","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7161","url":null,"abstract":"This article makes two main claims: A state’s legal tradition is embedded into its domestic institution in each issue area and a state that has a common/civil law-type domestic institution in a certain issue area (not necessarily a state that has common/civil law tradition) prefers common/civil law-type international agreements in the same issue area. The consequence of these two claims is that states’ legal tradition is often one of the primary sources of international cooperation, especially issue-specific cooperation. This in turn means that the difference in legal traditions is often a potential factor that would induce economic disintegration. By conducting theoretical and empirical investigations of three issue areas covered by free trade agreements (i.e., trade in goods, trade in services, and investment), this article demonstrates that different modes of governance are preferred by civil and common law states domestically and internationally, and that the difference in domestic systems partially explains participation and non-participation in international agreements.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"18 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139211355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Multi‐Level Governance Feedback and Health Care in Italy in the Aftermath of Covid‐19","authors":"David Natali, E. Pavolini, Andrea Terlizzi","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7356","url":null,"abstract":"At the crossroads of EU studies and public policy analysis, a vast literature identifies global crises as one of the main triggers of change. The present article provides a test of this hypothesis in the case of health care in the aftermath of the pandemic crisis that hit Europe between 2020 and 2022. We use Italy as an extreme case, where both the magnitude of the Covid-19 outbreak and the effect of the pre-existent domestic cost-cutting strategy potentially opened a large window of opportunity for change. Through the lenses of historical institutionalism, we aim to shed light on policy change in multi-level health governance systems. Evidence collected through semi-structured interviews, triangulated with secondary sources, proves that the governance of health care in Italy has experienced no paradigmatic change. We show that “governance feedbacks” have reinforced pre-existing dynamics and inhibited more radical forms of change.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"191 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139210810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Young People's Perceptions of Youth Unemployment: Insights From 11 European Countries","authors":"J. Tosun, Bogdan Voicu, Claudia Petrescu","doi":"10.17645/pag.7480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.7480","url":null,"abstract":"Youth unemployment has been an issue in European countries for many years. However, the attention paid to it by policymakers has varied over time, and there are high cross-country variations in both the size of the phenomenon, representations of it, and policy interventions. This study adds an intra-country component to the country-comparative dimension and assesses the factors affecting how young adults perceive youth unemployment. From a theoretical perspective, we postulate that the perception of youth unemployment as an issue depends on both sociotropic and egocentric evaluations. To address these research questions, we analyse data from the Cultural Pathways to Economic Self-Sufficiency (CUPESSE) dataset, which comprises responses from more than 20,000 young adults (aged 18–35) from 11 European countries (nine European Union member states together with Switzerland and Turkey). The empirical analysis is based on multilevel modelling and reveals that the problem perception varies both across countries and within them following the hypothesised pattern. The findings show that two factors are particularly important for explaining young people’s perception of youth unemployment as a problem: first, whether they experienced their parents being unemployed when growing up, and second, whether their friends are unemployed.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139212047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Economic Security and the Politics of Trade and Investment Policy in Europe","authors":"Guri Rosén, Sophie Meunier","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7858","url":null,"abstract":"Facing recent global disruptions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate change, and the race for raw materials and technology needed for the green transition, economic interdependence—not least unilateral dependence—has increasingly come to be seen as a security threat. In response, the EU has put resilience and strategic autonomy at the centre of its trade and investment agenda. The EU was long resistant to this geoeconomic turn, that is, the use of economic tools for geopolitical purposes in normal times. Since 2017, however, the EU has placed greater emphasis on identifying and mitigating the security vulnerabilities that accrue from open markets. This geoeconomic turn has culminated in the June 2023 release of the European Commission’s Economic Security Strategy, which aims to maximise the benefits of economic openness while minimising the risks from economic interdependence. The aim of this thematic issue is to analyse the foundations of this new European focus on economic security and, more specifically, on the increased use of geoeconomic instruments. Coming at this objective from a variety of disciplinary traditions, methodologies, and substantive focus, our contributors tackle, among others, the following questions: Why has the EU abandoned its reluctance to use geoeconomics and finally made the switch towards economic security? How does the EU’s approach compare with other major global players? And, what are the long-term implications of the EU’s economic security strategy for European integration, its relationship with partners and allies, and the global economic order?","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139209839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Global Fragmentation and Collective Security Instruments: Weakening the Liberal International Order From Within","authors":"Mateja Peter","doi":"10.17645/pag.7357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.7357","url":null,"abstract":"Collective instruments, such as UN peacekeeping or mediation, are a lens through which we can examine broader normative fault lines in the international order. They hold both practical and symbolic value. In the post-Cold War moment, these instruments started reflecting liberal values. They became concerned with balancing the rights of individuals and state sovereignty. These advances around “human protection” are now in question, with contestation perceived as emerging from non-Western powers. I contribute to the debates on the “pragmatic turn” within collective responses but contend that while the focus in current debates about the normative shift has become global fragmentation, the momentum for the de-prioritization of human protection within collective instruments comes from within the liberal order itself. Human protection is now a broadly shared and firmly entrenched norm, but to shield the norm from abuse, the collective international community progressively restricted any use of force to advance the norm within the instrument of UN peacekeeping. The co-optation of UN peacekeeping into counter-terrorism efforts and the introduction of stabilization mandates undermined the principled nature and moral authority of the instrument of peacekeeping itself. This, in turn, compromised the implementation of human protection. This development is now accelerated and exposed due to global fragmentation, influencing not just peacekeeping but also other adjacent activities, such as mediation.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"356 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139211106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Implementation of EU Trade Agreements Under an Assertive, Open, and Sustainable Trade Policy","authors":"María J. García","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7224","url":null,"abstract":"Since the 2010s the EU has expanded its preferential trade agreements, responding to challenges at the World Trade Organization and preferential trade agreements of key geoeconomic competitors. However, preferential trade agreements are only as good as their implementation. The EU 2021 Trade Policy Review for a more assertive trade policy includes a greater focus on preferential trade agreement implementation. An analysis of preferential trade agreement implementation reports identifies challenges in operationalising these. It shows that since 2019 there has been an increase in EU recourse to formal dispute settlement mechanisms under preferential trade agreements demonstrating the shift to greater assertiveness. Interestingly, most of the cases are of limited economic significance to the EU but serve to reinforce the message of enforcement of trade rules.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139213304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Recovery and Resilience Dialogues: Cheap Talk or Effective Oversight?","authors":"Edoardo Bressanelli, Nicola Chelotti, Matteo Nebbiai","doi":"10.17645/pag.v11i4.7344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v11i4.7344","url":null,"abstract":"The recovery and resilience dialogues were introduced by the regulation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility, and the first of such dialogues took place in May 2021. The European Parliament invites the Commission, approximately every two months, to exchange views on matters relating to the national recovery and resilience plans and progress in their implementation. Through an analysis of an original dataset composed of the questions asked by the MEPs in the 10 dialogues held between May 2021 and April 2023, this article provides a systematic empirical assessment of the European Parliament’s capacity to hold the Commission accountable. Drawing on the literature on the economic and monetary dialogues and adapting the operationalisation of key variables to the new instrument, this article shows that the recovery and resilience dialogues are an effective instrument for information exchange and debate, but they serve as a weak instrument of political accountability. Additionally, it casts new light on significant differences between MEPs: South and East European members are considerably more active than members from Northern Europe. At the same time, parliamentarians only occasionally ask questions targeting other member states.","PeriodicalId":51598,"journal":{"name":"Politics and Governance","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139213450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}