Category: Journal News

Call for Papers Proposals

Allan McConnell, University of Sydney; Alastair Stark, University of Queensland (Special Issue Guest Editors)

For a special edition of the Journal of European Public Policy, we invite proposals for papers that explore the policy responses that have addressed the COVID-19 crisis. This special issue will seek to deliver insights into the nature and the effectiveness of national and/or international crisis responses to the disease through the application of public policy, governance and crisis management perspectives.

COVID-19 is a highly transmittable and potentially fatal coronavirus. The virus originated in Wuhan in China in December 2019. By late March 2020, there were over 720,000 cases world-wide in 177 countries and regions, with the number of cases escalating on a daily basis. In this short time span, the virus has created a global public health crisis that is unprecedented in living memory. Governments throughout the world have transformed rapidly into a ‘war time-like’ crisis-mode, attempting to diagnose, mitigate and suppress the virus, as well as moderate the cascading effects of disease control on the economy, healthcare systems and vulnerable populations. For millions of individual citizens, particularly those who are highly vulnerable physically, economically, and socially, we are witnessing extraordinary levels of public fear and anxiety. Response measures by governments facing unprecedented stress, have included travel bans, curfews, lock-downs, school closures and emergency budget stimuli and financial aid packages.

The scope of potential contributions is enormous, but we particularly welcome contributions which address responses to COVID-19 using theories, concepts and frameworks that are embedded within the discipline of public policy. Possible areas for empirical analysis are identified below, but we would welcome proposals that seek to examine any aspect of governmental responses to COVID-19 either in individual countries, or via comparative analysis/multi-country illustrations. Response includes pre-emptive responses, as well as responses in the acute stage. Potential themes include but are not limited to:

• Warning signs, anticipation and pandemic preparedness e.g. agenda/institutional/political biases filtering out potential threat of COVID-19, contingency planning based on prior experience (SARS, MERS, Ebola), training/exercises, early interventions or lack thereof) and strategic approaches (such as Singapore/South Korea, US).

• The nature of COVID-19 as a policy challenge e.g. sensemaking of the threat(s) involved in the crisis; ramping up of resources; addressing transboundary threats and spill-over effects across a variety of policy sub-systems; COVID-19 as a super wicked policy problem.

• Policy design and decision making under crisis conditions e.g. decision making under high threat conditions and extreme uncertainty; moral and ethical issues in decision making; the nature of policy tools for COVID-19 crisis management.

• Policy implementation and street-level behaviour e.g. the gap between central policy objectives and local reality; the effectiveness of policy tools on the ground; contingent policy formulation at the front-line.

• Evaluation, learning and accountability e.g. historical lessons ignored/used in COVID-19; intra-crisis learning during the emergency; inter-country learning and mimicry across borders; evaluating response measures prospectively and retrospectively; the politics of post-crisis accountability.

• Narratives, language and symbolic policy output e.g. crisis communication and the role of persuasion in relation to policy measures such as social distancing and panic buying; the role or narratives and metaphors – from war and identity to trajectories and resilience.

• Institutions and governance e.g. the role of emergency powers, inter-governmental and inter-organisational coordination; national policy styles and crisis behaviour; the role of governance traditions during crises.

• Political leadership e.g. leadership personality types and behaviour (such as Trump, Johnson, Merkel, Varadkar); crisis leadership challenges; leadership strategies and their effectiveness.

Expressions of interest consisting of a title, author(s) names and affiliation, and a short abstract (no more than 300 words) should be sent to allan.mcconnell@sydney.edu.au and alastair.stark@uq.edu.au by 1st June 2020. Successful authors should have a full article draft by 18 September 2020 with final submissions expected by 27 November 2020 (8,000 words maximum, including all figures, tables and references). All other inquiries ashould be sent to allan.mcconnell@sydney.edu.au and alastair.stark@uq.edu.au.

With the year coming to an end, we want to take a moment to thank all of you – our reviewers, authors and readers – for your continued support! It’s been another busy but very successful year for the journal, and you played no small part in that (both the ‘busy’ and ‘successful’ bits). We hope everyone gets a well-deserved break over the holidays and are looking forward to seeing you in the next year!

Stay tuned for our upcoming issues, debate sections and special issues. Follow us on Twitter (@jepp_journal), read and subscribe to our newsletter.

Seasons’ greetings and all good wishes,
Your JEPP team

PS: And if you’re keen to know how JEPP’s editorial team will spend their holidays, go ahead and scroll down!

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As usual, we will have a family Christmas at our seaside house in Akaroa, NZ. If the summer weather is true to form, Tessa and Molly will have a swim, though Sonia and I will sit on the beach with Murphy. As you can see from the photo, Murphy, despite his size, thinks he is a ‘lap dog’. He is not keen on swimming and prefers a good cuddle. Sensible chap!  However, he loves long walks through the woods and along the coastal path, so our family Christmas will involve at least some much needed exercise for me. He and I do three short  walks each day in our Christchurch suburb, and so he has adjusted to my slowing  pace quite well. I discovered recently that I am known locally  as  ‘the man with a dog’. So, here is a lesson for you all from this wise old man. Bugger chasing cites. If you want fame, just get yourself a dog!

PS. I showed Murphy a draft of my most recent bit of writing and he wagged his tail. He is a very loving dog (as you can see from the photo), but is none too bright. So, don’t just get any dog, get a dumb dog. If the referees say your work is shit, the dog will tell you it is just fine. The ideal referee in fact!

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Berthold and Jess will spend the second Christmas holiday in a row not under Florida’s palm trees, but in comparatively foul weather in their upper Bavarian home, eager to pursue every cue for a bit of sun with utmost determination (see picture). While Jeremy seems to have found the ideal referee in Murphy, Franzl – a very opinionated cat – never took much interest in Berthold’s academic musings, but showed great interest in the couch, watching Game of Thrones with glee. He can’t really be blamed.

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Michi is looking forward to the holiday break with his family even more desperately this year than usual. He has given up the idea of significantly reducing the gap between books bought and books read, and will focus on his son’s soccer career instead. Dribbling, diving and straddling already work quite well, but the next lesson will be difficult: teaching Kolja not to shout “Bull’s Eye” anymore when he scores.

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Philipp will celebrate the end of an eventful year, which included a finished PhD and a move from London to the Swedish Subarctic, with family and Yesmean in Munich. Despite now living in regions where you might expect to come across them in the wild, ironically Philipp recently met a few “wolves” in a hotel in Shoreditch (the highlight of this year’s Christmas seasons!).

Dear colleagues:

We are happy to announce two calls for proposals for special issues of the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP).

1. Call for Special Issue proposals – deadline: 30 November 2019

This is our regular call for Special Issues. Twice every year, in the spring and in the fall, we invite proposals for Special Issues and select up to two proposals. The fall-deadline for submitting your proposal is 30 November 2019. Make sure to consult the JEPP webpage for further particulars: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/journal-european-public-policy-special-issues/

2. Call for Special Issue proposal on ‘Public Policy Responses to Climate Change’ – deadline: 15 December 2019

JEPP invites proposals for a Special Issue on public policy responses to the challenges of climate change. We are open to innovative ideas on the shape and content of the SI, but wish to emphasise that we hope for a Special Issue that both draws on state-of-the-art academic scholarship, in the JEPP tradition, but also speaks to a much wider audience concerned with how to deal with the climate crisis facing the world today. In a nutshell, what do we academics know and how might it be of use? When preparing your proposal, please follow the regular Special Issue guidelines: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/journal-european-public-policy-special-issues/

Note that the deadline for this particular call is 15 December 2019.

Please feel free to get in touch with us, the journal editors, Jeremy Richardson and Berthold Rittberger, if you have any queries.

The annual Journal Citation Report published by Clarivate Analytics is out and we are proud that JEPP climbed the ladder in both of its listed sections, ranking at 12/176 in the Political Science category and 6/47 in the Public Administration category in 2018. JEPP’s unprecedented Journal Impact Factor score of 3.457 for 2018 (up from 2.994 in 2017) is the cherry on top. Another record year for the journal would not have been possible without the continued support from our family of authors, reviewers and readers, and we are very grateful for your help in making JEPP a success.

Dear members of the JEPP family:

As 2018 draws to a close, we want to use this opportunity to thank all of you – authors, reviewers, readers – for your continued support and commitment to our journal. This year, we introduced a Reviewer Prize to recognize the exceptional commitment of our reviewers and their selfless investment in helping to improve the work of our colleagues. Reviewing is the lifeblood of our profession, and we are extremely grateful to all of you for your excellent work.

We celebrated JEPP’s 25th anniversary this year, and we find it in a very healthy state: the number of submissions remains at a very high level, journal metrics continue to impress us, reaching new heights in 2018, establishing JEPP among the very top journals in the discipline. We thus very much hope to continue where we ended 2018, and are counting on your submissions, which we promise to process swiftly and fairly (which is our first and foremost goal).

Stay tuned for our upcoming issues, debate sections and special issues. Follow us on Twitter (@jepp_journal), read and subscribe to our newsletter.

Seasons’ greetings and all good wishes,
Your JEPP team

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Jeremy will, as usual, be spending Christmas with Sonia, Tessa , and Molly at their holiday home in Akaroa. Akaroa is a very pretty small seaside town, approx 75k from Christchurch (see photo). Jeremy has no intention of attempting paddle boarding again, but might kayak into the bay, simply to prove he is not really 76! This  annual ego trip will, no doubt, result in all sorts of aches and pains and a chorus of ‘we told you so’ from Sonia and the girls.

This year will be the first Christmas in Akaroa without Harvey the family dog, who passed away a few weeks ago, aged nearly 17. However, Murphy (see photo) the new family dog, will be part of the team, though seems not to be much of a beach dog. He has already shown interest in being a JEPP referee, following in Harvey’s footsteps (only joking folks!). We have no idea what type of dog he is (he was abandoned in town by his previous owner) but he is very loving and seems grateful that we adopted him.

 

 

 

 

Whatever one’s position on Brexit, Brexit will continue to preoccupy us for years to come. It will also most likely be remembered in the history books as a monumental ‘policy fiasco’ for both Britain and the EU. We are therefore calling for paper proposals focused on two main research questions: First, how did this policy fiasco come about both for Britain and the EU? Secondly, what lessons can be learned from this policy fiasco in terms of a) the future design the EU as a policy-making system, and b) the way that domestic policy systems face and process the challenges to domestic politics that EU membership presents.

Answers to these questions are likely to benefit from the extensive literature on policy failures, fiascos, blunders and crises, some of which has appeared in JEPP over the past years (Boin et al. 2009; Bovens and t’Hart 2016; Oppermann and Spencer 2016). The collection of papers would also underpin the current trend for academic analysts to use their expertise in a way that might have some ‘impact’ on the outside world. Put simply, what does the JEPP ‘family’ of scholars have to say about one of the biggest, if not the biggest crisis in the EU’s history, that might be useful to those policy actors trying to keep the EU project more or less on the rails?

The collection will be edited by Berthold and Jeremy and will be either a Debate Section, in which case papers will be 5,000 words, or a full Special Issue, in which case papers will be 8,000 words. We would expect to work to a fairly tight timeframe in view of the topical relevance . Please send your paper abstracts of no more than 500 words to Berthold & Jeremy by 15 January 2019 (berthold.rittberger@gsi.lmu.de, jeremy.richardson@canterbury.ac.nz).

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References:

• Boin, A., McConnell, A. and t’Hart, P. (2009) ‘Crisis exploitation: political and policy impacts of framing contests’, Journal of European Public Policy16(1): 81-106.
• Bovens, M. and t’Hart, P. (2016) ‘Revisiting the study of policy failures’, Journal of European Public Policy 23(5): 653-666.
• Oppermann, K. and Spencer, A., eds. (2016) Fiascos in Public Policy and Foreign Policy, Journal of European Public Policy (Special Issue), 23(5).

The latest Google Scholar journal metrics are out and they had a welcome surprise in store for us. JEPP climbed two ranks and now sits in 4th place in the Political Science category. The journal’s h5-index increased from 39 to 51 (with a h5-median score of 71).

We won’t tire to stress that JEPP’s success reflects the quality of our authors’ work, the countless hours our reviewers invest to keep the journal rolling, and the continued interest from our readers. We greatly appreciate your time and support.

Throughout 2018, we ask JEPP authors and members from JEPP’s editorial board to share with us their stories as to how the research published in JEPP over the past 25 years influenced their own thinking and research about Europe, the EU, and public policy. This is what they are saying.

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Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Scharpf, Fritz W. Economic integration, democracy and the welfare state. Journal of European Public Policy 4(1), 1997, pp. 18-36.

Over the years many excellent JEPP contributions on EU law and politics, EU social policy, Europeanization, implementation and enforcement have been major sources of inspiration for my own research. Thus it is not an easy task to pick out one among the many. However, the article ‘Economic integration, democracy and the welfare state’ by Fritz W. Scharpf published in 1997 inspired me greatly when I decided to do a PhD on EU integration and the welfare state. And it continues to be a piece I often return to when working on the complex encounter between EU free movement and the welfare state. The article is extremely rich and covers what to me remain core issues of EU policymaking. It brings together the challenges that Economic integration brings to the welfare state with EU democratic accountability, EU legislative politics and touches upon the ‘rules of negative integration’ as enforced by the European Court of Justice. Interestingly, the article concludes on a positive note, when it lists possibilities for a socially just Europe and states that even in a ‘fully integrated internal market, opportunities for significant and effective political choices are still available at the national level’. In my view, to explore those national policy options and how the welfare state continue to respond to internal market pressures are no less relevant today in a troubled Union as when Scharpf wrote his seminal piece more than 20 years ago.

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Thomas Winzen, University of Mannheim, Germany

Lewis, Jeffrey . The methods of community in EU decision-making and administrative rivalry in the Council’s infrastructure. Journal of European Public Policy 7(2), 2000, pp. 261-289.

Rittberger, Berthold. The historical origins of the EU’s system of representation. Journal of European Public Policy 16(1), 2009, pp. 43-61.

JEPP has published many inspiring studies on the institutional and democratic development of the European Union. These two articles, written by Jeffrey Lewis and Berthold Rittberger, respectively, are leading contributions and important influences on my own research. Lewis explored the intensity and complexity of negotiations in the Council of the European Union. For me, these characteristics, and the information deficits they create for external observers, raised the question of whether the European Union can maintain a measure of democratic input and accountability in its policy process. Rittberger’s work demonstrated that policy-makers have long had competing ideas of how to address this question. Variation in these ideas and the abilities of their proponents to influence institutional reforms have shaped the design of the EU’s system of representation. My own work builds on the insight that institutional design ideas vary in order to explain reforms of national parliamentary rights in the EU.

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Anne Rasmussen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Leiden University, Netherlands

Schrama, Reini & Asya Zhelyazkova. ‘You can’t have one without the other’: the differential impact of civil society strength on the implementation of EU policy. Journal of European Public Policy 25(7), 2018, pp. 1029-1048.

Being one of the last editorial board members to submit my piece, I have taken the liberty to select a brand new JEPP article, which I think is extremely topical and which expresses a trend in existing research on civil society and interests groups of which I think we will see more in the coming years. The article is written by @ReiniSchrama and Zhelyazkova and presents a large, systematic study on the impact  of civil society strength on implementation of EU policy. It fills an important gap in the literature and is a reference point for anyone interested in compliance with EU law, which remains a key priority of the European Union. It is also indicative of a recent development bringing the study of interest groups and civil society closer to what it once was: a field central to our understanding of politics more generally, not shying away from asking big questions and taking a broader approach situating groups within their wider political system (see Baumgartner and Leech, 1998). The study adds to a recent wave of scholarship that has extended the focus of research pertaining to interest groups by linking it closer to other areas of the broader discipline of political science, such as legislative studies and public opinion research. Schrama and Zhelyazkova’s study underlines that understanding the impact of civil society on democratic processes often requires a consideration of several dimensions of interest group activity and behavior. It finds that civic participation and involvement in decision-making are like ‘horse and carriage’: Only when civil society organizations are included in policy-making does policy implementation benefit from the existence of a vibrant civil society.

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Erik Jones, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, United States

Moses, Jonathon W. The social democratic predicament in the emerging European Union: A capital dilemma. Journal of European Public Policy 2(3), 1995, pp. 407-426.

After twenty-five years, it is easy to think of the JEPP as a mainstream, establishment journal in the study of European integration. I remember it as an edgy upstart. The Journal of European Public Policy was the place my friends and contemporaries went to try and establish new research agendas at the interdisciplinary frontier. JEPP was not easier to get into than other journals, but Jeremy Richardson was more willing to place a bet on emerging issues of concern than other journal editors. Sometimes – often, in fact – he won big.

Consider, for example, the collection edited by William D. Coleman and Geoffrey Underhill in the third issue of the second volume. The focus of that collection is on the interaction between the single market, capital market integration, and domestic politics. And the research agenda Coleman and Underhill set out remains central to unlocking everything from the recent crisis of the euro area to Brexit.

The paper by Jonathon Moses is a good illustration. Called ‘The Social Democratic Predicament in the European Union: A Capital Dilemma’, that paper sets out how the integration of European capital markets altered the balance of power between domestic interests in ways that undermined traditional policy formulas. It also explains how monetary integration may address the symptoms associated with market speculation but without redressing that fundamental domestic imbalance.

Moses has returned to that agenda time and again throughout his (prolific) career. His recent ECPR volume on the euro crisis is a straight-line continuation of that trajectory. To understand how Moses got there, careful scholars should remember to go back to the beginning. That article in JEPP was foundational in many respects.  Reading it again after all these years, I am still impressed.

Clarivate Analytics recently released its Journal Citation Report for 2017. JEPP continues to be listed in two sections: Political Science and Public Administration. While the journal dropped a few spots on the Political Science list, it remains safely in the top-twenty (now ranking 15/165), and it maintained its position among the top-ten journals in the Public Administration segment (ranking 8/47). After a record increase in JEPP’s impact factor last year, the journal posted its highest impact factor yet, increasing from 2.982 (2016) to 2.994 (2017).

Marking JEPP’s 25th anniversary this year, these results are special for our editorial team. There is no doubt that the journal’s continued success is built on the tireless efforts of our family of authors, referees and readers, and we greatly appreciate your time and support.

The Journal of European Public Policy‘s editorial team is proud to sponsor the Keynote Lecture “Euroscepticism and the Future of European Integration” delivered by Catherine De Vries at this year’s ECPR Standing Group on the European Union Conference in Paris. Join us and Catherine on Thursday, 14 June 2018,  from 6.15-8.00 pm at Sciences Po’s Amphitheater Boutmy.

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Euroscepticism and the Future of European Integration

The European Union is facing turbulent times. It is plagued by deep divisions over how to shape its future. Over half a century of integration has created a profound interconnectedness between the political, economic, and social fates of member states. At the same time, however, the fortunes of member states have started to diverge dramatically.

As a result, the political fault lines are widening. Today, they crosscut the continent from North to South on the economy and austerity, and from East to West on migration and human rights. What are the effects of these developments on public opinion? By presenting a wealth of empirical evidence, this lecture provides an overview of the contours of public opinion. Moreover, it discusses how it matters for behaviour in elections and how it shapes possible reform of the European Union in the future.

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Presenter:

Catherine de Vries is a Professor of Politics in the Department of Government at the University of Essex where she also serves as the Director of the Essex Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, and a Professor and Chair of Political Behaviour at the Free University Amsterdam. She is also an associate member of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford.  Over the years, she has published extensively on the most important societal and political problems facing Europe today, such as the ramifications of the Eurozone crisis, the success of extremist parties or political corruption. Her recent monograph Euroscepticism and the Future of European Integration with Oxford University Press provides a systematic account of public opinion towards Europe.