European Policy Analysis最新文献

{"title":"The (mis)fit of policy programs to political institutions and its influence on programmatic action – How crisis has differently hit French and German health policy","authors":"Johanna Hornung","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/epa2.1108","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) is a relatively new theoretical perspective that adds a complementary lens to the explanation of policy processes and policy change. Yet, a key requirement of a valid policy process framework is its capacity to be proven wrong. Besides the empirical cases that provide evidence for the occurrence of programmatic action, it is necessary to present examples in which programmatic action did not occur, and to explain why this is the case. Proceeding from the observation that programmatic groups and policy programs existed in French and German health policy throughout the 1990s, this contribution answers the question why in 2020, programmatic action is still present in France but not in Germany and why the German policy program did not survive the financial crisis of 2008. It argues that misfit to pre-existing institutional logics and changing institutional logics in the course of programmatic action hinder program success.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"7 S1","pages":"120-138"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1108","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72167630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Health reform in Brazil: The sanitaristas as programmatic actors","authors":"Andreza Davidian","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/epa2.1107","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Brazil has one of the largest public health systems in the world. By applying the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF), this study provides an endogenous explanation for the health reform and brings new lenses to understand one of the most successful cases of social protection expansion. It demonstrates the relevance of a group of professionals who had a common perception of why the policy should change and a coherent policy change program. Cognitive frameworks, organizational resources, and strong professional culture allowed the sanitaristas occupying key positions in the state apparatus, behaving strategically as a collective actor. The evidence provided suggests the approach's relevance to this case due to considerations of political-institutional specificities. Treating the <i>sanitaristas</i> as a programmatic actor is helpful to explain their role in promoting change and the endurance of the programmatic consensus they have built, which has been crucial to support the universal healthcare model in the country.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"7 S1","pages":"64-95"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1107","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72191625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unboxing the vague notion of policy goals: Comparison of Croatian public policies","authors":"Ana Petek,&nbsp;Nikola Baketa,&nbsp;Anka Kekez,&nbsp;Marko Kovačić,&nbsp;Mario Munta,&nbsp;Krešimir Petković,&nbsp;Marjeta Šinko,&nbsp;Borna Zgurić","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/epa2.1106","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study aims at empirically improving public policy theory by unfolding the concept of policy goals and contributing to their classifications. The research focuses on the thematic dimension of policy goals and investigates 11 Croatian governmental strategies using qualitative content analysis. The research identifies original policy goal types and classifies them into sector-, process-, evaluation-, instrument-, and value-oriented goals. Article concludes with a more comprehensive definition of policy goals, as governmental statements about desired futures in relation to specific sectoral purposes, values, and principles in democratic political systems, policymaking process improvements, necessary instrumental innovations, and evaluation standards that should be fulfilled. The application of this definition and developed goals’ classification reveals that elements of policy-process theories, evaluation research, policy design theory and instrument analysis, democracy theory, and sector-specific research need to be synthesized to better understand the concept of policy goals and to advance their research.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"7 2","pages":"451-469"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1106","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72161167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Public policy responses to COVID-19 in Europe","authors":"Barry Colfer","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1097","DOIUrl":"10.1002/epa2.1097","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;This introductory article to the &lt;i&gt;European Policy Analysis&lt;/i&gt; special issue on “Public Policy Responses to COVID-19 in Europe” proceeds through four parts. Part I presents an abbreviated timeline of how the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged in China in late 2019, its recorded arrival in Europe in February, and the lockdown measures and public policy responses which followed during the first six months of 2020. Part II briefly reviews some of the contributions that an analysis of the public policy responses to COVID-19 in Europe might make to the debates in the social sciences. Part III briefly presents potential areas for future research that lie beyond the limited scope of this issue. Part IV introduces each of the fifteen contributions that follow.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On 31 December 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission in Wuhan City, Hubei province, China, reported a cluster of 27 cases of pneumonia which were said to be linked to a wholesale fish and live animal market in the city. The first recorded cases of what would become known as coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and the virus that causes it (the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 -SARS-CoV-2&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;) was confirmed in China in early January. The genetic sequence of the virus was shared publicly on 11–12 January shortly after the first death had been recorded in China—that of a 61-year-old man with underlying health conditions. By 13 January Thailand had recorded its first case—the first outside of China—and by 20 January human-to-human transmission of the disease was confirmed by the Lancet medical journal (Chan et al., &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first cases of COVID-19 in Europe were recorded in France and Germany on 24 and 28 January 2020, respectively. In each case, infections related to persons who had recently traveled from China. On 26 January, the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)—an independent EU agency responsible for strengthening Europe's defenses and preparedness against infectious diseases—reported that there was “a high likelihood” of cases being imported into those European countries with the greatest volume of people traveling to and from Wuhan and Central China (ECDC, &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;) and on 30 January the World Health Organisation (WHO) designated the outbreak of novel coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) (WHO, &lt;span&gt;2020a&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over the coming weeks, several European countries implemented screening measures for travelers arriving from China and many airlines suspended flights to and from the region altogether in a bid to limit the spread of infection. On 04 February, a first major outbreak of COVID-19 was recorded outside of China on board the Diamond Princess, a British-registered cruise ship. The ship, along with its passengers and crew, was quarantined for almost a month in the Port of Yokohama in Japan. By mid-March, more than 700 of the 3,711 on board had tested pos","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"6 2","pages":"126-137"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1097","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"103691867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The perils of succor: The European Union's financial role in the Western Balkans during COVID-19","authors":"Albana Shehaj","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1102","DOIUrl":"10.1002/epa2.1102","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Western Balkans' response to the first wave of COVID-19 was efficient and swift. The countries’ capacity to mitigate the crisis has been vastly facilitated by EU fiscal disbursements. The funds have enabled governments to implement health and economic policies that counteract the crisis' socioeconomic repercussions. In this article, I examine the temporal effects of EU conditionality on the health outcomes and democratic governance of Balkan states. Identifying three features of the domestic political context—government accountability, the strength of opposition parties, and judicial system effectiveness—I assess the likelihood of divergent effects of the funds on health and democratic outcomes. I argue that while beneficial in the short term, in the long run, the EU funds risk enabling state capture and inadvertently jeopardizing the Western Balkans' post-pandemic democratic prospects. I empirically substantiate my argument by examining the relationship between prior EU allocations (Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance) and clientelism in WB states during 2007–2017.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"6 2","pages":"264-276"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1102","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"111320548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Handling the COVID-19 crisis in France: Paradoxes of a centralized state-led health system","authors":"Patrick Hassenteufel","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1104","DOIUrl":"10.1002/epa2.1104","url":null,"abstract":"<p>France was one of the European countries that was most severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in the first half of 2020. Despite the effective capacity of crisis management often ascribed to majoritarian democracies, the French centralized state-led health system is subject to rising critiques for the measures it has adopted and for the strategies it deployed to fight COVID-19. The identified policy failures question the central government’ capacities in crisis management more generally. This article sheds light on the policy responses to COVID-19 taken by the French executive and emphasizes that to understand the link between crisis and policy change, the policy trajectories prior to the crisis, the degree of politicization of the crisis, and the actor constellations existing throughout the crisis play a major role. National crisis reactions thus were far more driven by policy actors and political constellations, than by scientific advice or functionality.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"6 2","pages":"170-179"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1104","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"107532048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Europe’s essential workers: Migration and pandemic politics in Central and Eastern Europe during COVID-19","authors":"Ruxandra Paul PhD, BA","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1105","DOIUrl":"10.1002/epa2.1105","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract How do countries navigate the tradeoffs between public health and economic reopening? What explains variation in state responses to COVID‐19? Historically, governments have tackled pandemics as external, nonconventional security threats, restricting immigration to protect citizens from contagious outsiders. Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries could not frame COVID‐19 this way because European integration and free‐movement migration blur the line between insiders and outsiders. This article examines the conditions and coalitions that shaped policy outcomes, and argues that migration systems played a double role in policy change: as structures for policy diffusion and as venues for migrants’ agency. Governments learned from one another's experiences, but diffusion occurred unevenly according to countries’ position within migratory systems.","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"6 2","pages":"238-263"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1105","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39491731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Herd-immunity across intangible borders: Public policy responses to COVID-19 in Ireland and the UK","authors":"Barry Colfer","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1096","DOIUrl":"10.1002/epa2.1096","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The responses to COVID-19 in Ireland and the UK differed, and will have consequences for life in these islands that will extend far beyond the current crisis. Ireland went into lockdown relatively early on 12 March, while after a slow initial response, with plans for herd immunity, the UK started introducing restrictions around 20 March and quickly became a world leader in cases. While the UK has also presented similar responses seen elsewhere in Europe, one further area of note sees the devolved responses in different parts of the UK diverge considerably. These differences cannot be explained purely in terms of epidemiological conditions, as the trajectories of the virus in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are broadly similar. The reality is that the leaders of the devolved governments reached different political judgments from PM Johnson, which may bring further pressure to bear on the UK's constitutional makeup.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"6 2","pages":"203-225"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1096","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39493268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ultra-orthodoxy and selective voluntarism: How did the Orbán regime react to the first wave of the pandemic?","authors":"Zoltán Ádám","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1103","DOIUrl":"10.1002/epa2.1103","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Viktor Orbán's regime in Hungary is a prime example of authoritarian populism in a relatively developed country that has been part of the European Union since 2004. The paper argues that in response to the pandemic, the Orbán government pursued a set of selectively voluntarist policies that have been informed by an ultra-orthodox, state-centered worldview that sought to minimize the regime's democratic accountability and to reduce the counter-mobilization ability of the opposition. These policies had been associated with comparatively low infection and death rates in the first wave of the pandemic, hence enabling high approval ratings for the government despite generating considerable human and economic costs. In light of rising infection and death rates from September 2020, however, it is yet to be seen whether the COVID-19 crisis, in balance, will reinforce or undermine popular support to the regime.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"6 2","pages":"277-292"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1103","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39491732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"High politics in the Low Countries: COVID-19 and the politics of strained multi-level policy cooperation in Belgium and the Netherlands","authors":"Toon Van Overbeke,&nbsp;Diederik Stadig","doi":"10.1002/epa2.1101","DOIUrl":"10.1002/epa2.1101","url":null,"abstract":"<p>COVID-19 presented Europe with an, in many respects, unprecedented challenge. While the virus proved itself to be transnational in nature, not taking heed of borders, government responses were largely national. Still, governments soon found themselves engaged in complex multi-level policy cooperation at the national, subnational, and supranational levels. This paper looks at the crisis response in the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) to understand the impact of this process on the political system. We argue that efficient multi-level policy cooperation in both countries has run up against the limits of existing institutions, leading to significant political grievances. In Belgium, slow negotiation between the central and regional governments has put the federal system in question. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the absence of European institutions tasked with fiscal policy coordination has increased the salience of the EU fiscal sphere once again.</p>","PeriodicalId":52190,"journal":{"name":"European Policy Analysis","volume":"6 2","pages":"305-317"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1002/epa2.1101","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39491733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}