JEPP Online

While the European Commission conducts the EU’s bilateral trade negotiations, its room for manoeuvre is circumscribed by the Council. Analysing a series of EU-India trade agreements, Markus Gastinger argues that until the early 1990s the Commission had been able to acquire an information advantage vis-à-vis the Council during informal pre-negotiation phases, which enabled the Commission to move the substance of the ensuing official negotiations closer to its own preferences. Read his article “The tables have turned on the European Commission: the changing nature of the pre-negotiation phase in EU bilateral trade agreements” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn how EU member states have subsequently dried up the Commission’s access to exclusive information by shifting the institutional arenas for pre-negotiations. Have a look at Markus’s homepage and see what else his research has in store here.

Alasdair Young, professor of International Affairs at Georgia Tech and Chair of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA), introduces a selection of the best papers from the EUSA 2015 Biennial Conference published in the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP). You can find Alasdair’s recently published contribution to JEPP introducing the selection of papers and reflecting on the state of EU studies here.

 

By Alasdair Young

The European Union Studies Association (EUSA) is delighted to announce the publication of a collection of some of best papers from its 2015 biennial conference in Boston in the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP). The contributions went through a rigorous selection process.  They had to be nominated by the discussant of the panel on which they were presented.  Each nominated paper that was not already published or committed elsewhere was then reviewed by two members of EUSA’s current and out-going Executive Committee. The authors of the papers on the resulting short-list were provided with feedback and given a few months to revise their papers before they were submitted to JEPP’s standard, double-blind review process. Given this bottom-up selection process, the articles in this special issue do not even aspire to coherence.  Their (inadvertent) similarities as well as their differences, however, provide a fruitful springboard for reflection on the state of European Union studies, which seems particularly appropriate in the spring of 2016 as the EU confronts multi-dimensional challenges – the lingering Eurozone crisis, the referendum on British membership, the migrant/refugee crisis, and a wave of terrorist attacks. Continue reading “An inflection point in European Union studies?”

Assessing the influence of political actors on policy outputs is a thorny enterprise for every political scientist. What renders this task even trickier is when the agent of interest is concerned with maintaining an image of impartiality. Students of international public administrations’ role in intergovernmental negotiations are no strangers to this intricacy, and traditional methods of inferring influence are typically not suited to gauge the impact of international bureaucracies on negotiation outcomes. Help may be at hand and it comes in the form of analysing Twitter feeds. Helge Jörgens, Nina Kolleck and Barbara Saerbeck operationalize influence using techniques of social network analysis and Twitter data covering the three days of United Nations climate negotiations in 2014 in Peru. Read their article “Exploring the hidden influence of international treaty secretariats: using social network analysis to analyse the Twitter debate on the ‘Lima Work Programme on Gender’” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, and learn how social media helped them to uncover how the United Nations climate secretariat brokered a strengthening of gender concerns in international climate policy.

Few would dispute that many of the most pressing policy problems — ranging from climate change to the instability of financial markets and institutions — are transnational in character and require a joint response. Consequently, we have increasingly witnessed attempts to solve these issue through cooperation in international organizations. Considering the central role international organizations occupy in addressing societies’ most acute concerns, students of international organizations have surprisingly little tools to compare their performance in achieving these tasks. Jonas Tallberg, Thomas Sommerer, Theresa Squatrito and Magnus Lundgren recognize this shortcoming and propose a conceptualization of performance amenable to comparative, large-N analysis. Read their article “The performance of international organizations: a policy output approach” published in the Journal of European Public Policy and learn how a taxonomy of policy output comprising volume, orientation, type, instrument and target provides a more fine-grained measure of international organisations’ performances.

Although the European Commission along with French and German officials had identified sale and repurchase agreements – in short, repos – as speculative instruments that may threaten financial stability, attempts to include repo markets in EU Member States’ plans for a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) were short-lived. Finance lobbyists quickly orchestrated resistance against the repo-FTT, which eventually saw plans to tax repo markets dropped. Daniela Gabor, however, argues that this was not just another episode of narrow finance interests outweighing public demands. She argues that “the repo lobby successfully exploited the embeddedess of public actors in repo markets, drawing attention to the common interest that ECB and governments had in a repo market free of tax, and the costs otherwise”. Read her article “A step too far? The European financial transactions tax on shadow banking” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn how finance lobbyists can draw on converging public and private interests to build coalitions with actors such as the ECB and garner support against reform.

Recent scholarship on policy-making in the EU has increasingly questioned the European Commission’s status as an organization sui generis. For good reasons say Thurid Hustedt and Markus Seyfried, arguing that after all “co-ordination in the Commission is characterized by very similar characteristics to everyday co-ordination in central governments”.  Adopting a public administration perspective, they analyse the coordination of climate change policies among Directorates-General within the Commission. Their findings indicate that the Commission’s bureaucracy may be ordinary, yet also reveal the political role of Commission officials. Read their article “Co-ordination across internal organizational boundaries: how the EU Commission co-ordinates climate policies” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn how the Commission’s bureaucratic structures shape officials’ perceptions and behaviours in EU policy-making.

Author feature: Manuela Moschella

Manuela Moschella, professor in International Political Economy at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), introduces her most recent work and one of her recent JEPP publications. She is our (first) featured JEPP author. Not only is her work intriguing, her research appears twice in JEPP’s current issue (Vol. 23, no. 6).

Since the start of the crisis central banks have significantly expanded the list of policy tools to stabilize domestic economies. Moving beyond interest rate policy, leading central banks have adopted forward guidance, quantitative easing, qualitative easing and, recently, a policy of negative interest rates. However, we still know little about the determinants of central banks’ policy choices. Why did central banks choose one particular policy instrument instead of another? I’m currently puzzling with this question in a book project I’m developing with Domenico Lombardi (Centre for International Governance Innovation). In the book, we compare the unconventional monetary responses to the crisis offered by the Fed, the Bank of England and the ECB. The article we just published in JEPP (“The government bond buying programmes of the European Central Bank: an analysis of their policy settings”) is part of our ruminations as it zooms into the ECB to identify the factors that shape the design of its monetary policies. In addition to the “usual suspects” – interests, institutions and ideas – our analysis shows that the ECB’s self-image as independent from governments’ authority loomed large in its decisions.

JEPP is proud to announce the publication of its first Debate Section. This new format is devoted to sets of short articles, which take contrary or complementary standpoints on a common – topical and controversial – issue. At the same time, contributions are expected to be based on rigorous social science research, e.g. drawing on previous theoretical knowledge to understand the broader implications of recent phenomena and/or revisiting established theoretical accounts in light of fresh empirical evidence. Submissions to the debate section are peer reviewed as entire sets with a particular eye on their debate character, i.e. the degree to which individual contributions engage with each other. The Debate Section editor welcomes contributions or suggestions for contributions at any time (Michael.Blauberger@sbg.ac.at).

The inaugural Debate Section forthcoming soon is entitled, “British Exit from the EU: Legal and Political Implications”, edited by Graham Butler, Mads Dagnis Jensen and Holly Snaith. The reality of an EU Member State leaving the European Union is a salient issue. Such a scenario will have implications for the political, legal and economy aspects of both the Member State in question, and the Union itself as a whole. Beyond the immediate case of the forthcoming British referendum in June 2016 on whether to ‘remain’ or ‘leave’ the EU, the Debate Section casts analysis upon issues that may arise in future scenarios, such as (re)negotiation of membership or a ‘new settlement’, referendums, the broader implications of a shrinking Union, and challenges for the broadening levels of uncertainty. In addition to the three editors, the Debate Section includes contributions from Paul James Cardwell, Adam Łazowski, Daniela Annette Kroll, Dirk Leuffen, and Tim Oliver, that each delivers sharp compact contributions on different perspectives of ‘Brexit’, and wider issues of differentiated integration in Europe.

By Andreas Kruck

More recent accounts of credit rating agencies (CRAs) have largely been stories of failure. Nonetheless, CRAs continue to co-determine access to capital markets and costs of borrowing. Investors still follow CRAs’ standard of creditworthiness, and even powerful states zealously seek to preserve their top ratings. How can that be? Why is the authority of CRAs so resilient even in the face of recurrent, costly and widely recognized rating fiascos? In “Resilient Blunderers: Credit Rating Fiascos and Rating Agencies’ Institutionalized Status as Private Authorities”, I make a historical institutionalist argument to resolve this puzzle: Flawed public policy choices in the past and non-intended institutional dynamics have spawned later regulatory dilemmas culminating in the paradoxical outcome that CRAs’ mistakes have fostered a progressive institutionalization rather than a down-grade of their role as private governors. Read my contribution to the JEPP Special Issue on “Fiascos in Public Policy and Foreign Policy” to learn more about a particularly perplexing instance of path-dependent post-crisis reform and its broader lessons for (non-)learning from failures committed by private governors.

Cynical political pundits might contend that policy failures are the default outcome of politics – some tend to be surprised if policy actually works. But what feeds into our evaluation of policy as either successful or potentially disastrous? Mark Bovens and Paul ‘t Hart argue that the analysis of policy failures “is, by definition, not a neutral endeavour, since policy fiascos are not neutral events”. Read their article “Revisiting the study of policy failures” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn more about what makes us label policy as a ‘success’ or ‘failure’.