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With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European security has gained new levels of traction in some countries. Ending their historical position of non-alignment, Finland and Sweden have decided to become members of the NATO and Denmark has dismissed its 30-year opt-out from the Common Security and Defence Policy. At the same time, Norway has kept its stable position of non-alignment. In their recently published study, Marta Migliorati analyses these developments and proposes that crises can either amplify or reverse decoupling i.e., the disconnection between symbolic commitments to international institutions and the limited implementation of their policies. If crises intensify interdependence between states, preferences of elites and the public may shift towards deeper integration and thus windows of opportunities for policy change evolve. To test this theoretical framework, Marta Migliorati studies recent defense policy changes (or the lack thereof) in Nordic countries. The results of the analyses show that while in Sweden and Finland, citizens’ preferences for non-alignment had already started to slowly decrease, a drastic change of public sentiment to also end non-alignment symbolically only unfolded when the volatility of the international environment reached its peak with the Russian invasion in 2022. Similarly, although for Sweden a NATO membership is relatively costly due to investment in military capabilities, the Russian attack changed the originally strong preferences of citizens and political elites against a NATO membership. By contrast, in Norway, the crisis did not open a window of opportunity for change due to the historical de-politicization of EU matters by Norwegian elites and the rather Eurosceptic public. Overall, the study suggests that crises can indeed lead to stronger integration but only if they foster the respective preferences among elites and citizens alike.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are representatives responsive to citizens and interest groups? Anne Rasmussen and Simon Otjes argue in their innovative study that politicians have an incentive to respond to voters’ interests but not to policy preferences of all interest groups. Instead, politicians should prioritize interest groups that are ideologically close to them as a result of a higher sense of identification and agreement on specific policy issues. Additionally, politicians might attempt to enhance chances for re-election when reacting to information of ideologically close interest groups that probably represent – at least to some extent – the policy positions of the party’s constituents. Based on a comprehensive experimental design with around 2000 elected representatives at the local, regional and national level in Denmark and the Netherlands, they show that politicians indeed tend to be sensitive towards public opinion when stating their intended voting behavior but not necessarily to interest groups. In line with their expectations, interest groups can only influence politicians’ voting intention if they are ideologically close to them. While it is good news for democracy that public opinion is more important to politicians’ decision-making than interest groups, the study also demonstrates that interest groups have the potential to convince like-minded politicians to adopt policies that diverge from those of voters.

 

Industrial decarbonization is one option to limit climate change, but can come with costs in form of short-run unemployment. Thus, it might lead to political discontent due to feelings of economic and political unfairness among residents whose regions experience relatively more industrial decarbonization (i.e., brown sectors). In his convincing article, Zhen Jie Im tests these expectations in 60 West European countries based on fluctuations in employment rates and CO2 emissions as proxies for industrial decarbonisation and labor market trends. He combines this data with micro-level data from the European Social Survey to understand their effect on citizens’ feelings of unfairness and political discontent. Zhen Jie Im shows that if industrial decarbonization is accompanied by employment decline in brown sectors – presumably due to firms struggling with adjustment costs – perceptions of unfairness arise and political discontent increases. Yet, regions in which these sectors experience reduction in CO2 emissions but not employment rates exhibit lower levels of economic unfairness. Overall, this study implies that policy-makers can limit negative public opinion towards structural reforms limiting climate change by designing policies that avoid labor market disruptions.

 

JEPP encourages submissions of manuscripts for the Research Agenda Section at any time of the year. Typically, contributions to the research agenda section are broader in scope and more open-ended than individual research articles. They are expected

1. to review the state of the art in a particular field of interest and, against this background,
2. to develop an innovative research agenda with broad appeal to JEPP readers (i.e. going beyond the author’s individual research agenda).

Meeting both aims in 5.000 words proved challenging in the past, which is why we extended the word limit to 8.000.

Research agenda articles can depart from a review of recent trends in an established field of research or bring together different literatures around one common topic or concept. Previous contributions to this section have been very well cited and have also been used for teaching purposes, i.e. as research-oriented updates to conventional textbook chapters. Research agenda articles are subject to the normal peer review process and are edited by Michael Blauberger (for any questions, please contact him: michael.blauberger@plus.ac.at).

Dear friends of JEPP:

it is time to once again to thank you, our dear reviewers, authors and readers, for producing great research, constructively commenting on manuscripts and engaging with the pieces published in JEPP. We hope 2024 will be as productive for research on public policy, European politics and the EU as 2023 was.

Before we ring in the new year, we will spent some quiet days in the sun or the snow, or what is left thereof. Scroll down to read more about our plans. Hopefully, all of you can also enjoy a well-deserved break over the holidays. We are looking forward to hearing from you in 2024! Stay tuned for our upcoming issues, debate sections and special issues. Follow us on Twitter (@jepp_journal) or Blue Sky (@jeppjournal.bsky.social) and subscribe to our newsletter.

Happy holidays!

Your JEPP team

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For Michael, this will be the first Christmas without his beloved mother Monika. She died in August 2023 after difficult last months. To share the innumerable good memories of her, Michael will meet with some of her old friends over the holidays. Monika loved her grandson Kolja, whose first day in school she missed only narrowly and with whom she remains unbeaten as a team playing Memory. Her favorite flowers were cowslips.

 

Sarah and her family will leave their ‘creatively’ decorated home (photo) in Innsbruck to celebrate Christmas with her parents in the Black Forest. It will be their first Christmas as a family of four since the newest family member, Paula, was only born in October. They will hopefully eat a lot of Swabian treats like Maultaschen (Swabian Ravioli) and potato salad. before they return to the white mountains and back country skiing in Austria.

 

As usual, we will be spending Christmas at our holiday home in Akaroa, joined by our daughters Tess and Molly, and their partners Billy and Iain. Murphy, the family dog, will supervise Billy and Iain on the BBQ as Murphy is very particular about how his steak and sausages are cooked. As regular JEPP readers will be glad to hear, I remain persuaded that paddle boarding is NOT for anyone over 80. My more modest target is simply to get as far as this view.

 

Berthold and Jess will leave their digs in Upper Bavaria & Salzburg to spend Christmas with Berthold’s family in Tübingen, that is, in the heartland of Swabian-protestant ascetism. They hope for a feast nevertheless. Semih (pictured) will take a well-deserved vacation at his favorite cat hotel, where he and his friends will surely plot how they can fill our lives with ever more excitement in 2024. Happy holidays, everyone!

The main purpose of this Special Issue is to provide an empirical analysis of the implications and constraints that confront policy-makers across a range of policy sectors in the aftermath of the UK’s momentous decision to leave the European Union. For the last seven years, the British Government has sought to ‘get Brexit done’ while assessing the scope for transformation of UK public policy. As the guest editors Patrick Diamond and Jeremy Richardson argue, the referendum decision to leave the EU unquestionably represented a critical juncture in British politics (Diamond and Richardson 2023). Indeed, Brexit was the first time in British political history that plebiscitary democracy triumphed over representative democracy (Dudley and Gamble 2023). Yet the intervening period of withdrawal negotiations have been characterised  by stasis, fiasco and muddling through, despite the UK Government’s intension to maximise regulatory divergence from Europe while reclaiming national sovereignty. An already weakened machinery of government came under severe strain in attempting to cope with the stark realities of Brexit (Diamond 2023). ‘Taking back control’ might have been a good marketing slogan, but delivering on it has been fraught with difficulties. For example, the UK’s attempt to depart from the EU’s state aid regime has left the UK in a state of ‘orbiting Europeanisation’(McGowan 2023). Similarly, in the case of criminal justice policy, the sheer weight of practical day to day realities has limited the degree of divergence (Mitsilegas and Guild 2023)

 

 

 

 

 

 

While in some strategic sectors, notably defence and foreign affairs, higher education, and agriculture there have been observable changes in policy direction as a consequence of Brexit (Martill 2023; Corbett & Hantrais 2023; Greer & Grant 2023), Brexit appears in practice to look less like a critical juncture since the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) was signed. Significant constraints have impacted on policy-makers, while path dependencies have gradually reasserted themselves. Moreover, there are certain features of the Brexit decision itself, combined with structural characteristics of the current UK policy-making process, that present huge challenges in the post-Brexit era. They are as likely to perpetuate stagnation and stasis as they are to facilitate far-reaching policy change.

Having only just begun to understand the inordinate complexity of Brexit, in May 2023 the UK Government announced that it is was amending the Retained EU Law Bill (REUL). REUL itself goes to the heart of the UK’s post-Brexit policy dilemma, illustrating the sheer scale of the policy challenges which the Brexit process has created. The British Government must decide how to deal with a swathe of legislation and regulation that have accumulated during fifty years of UK membership of the EC/EU. Undertaking this convoluted and intricate task has been compared to trying to unscramble an omelette. The post-Brexit challenge is to decide, first, how much of this EU legislation is to be ‘unmade in Britain’, and secondly, the specific content of that ‘unmade in Britain’ public policy.

Moreover, scrapping rules and regulations that seem minor or insignificant may actually be hugely consequential for the Conservative Government’s traditional allies, notably the private sector and, in particular, small business. Indeed, British business interests often played an active and influential role in the formulation of those very rules through their effective lobbying activities in Brussels. There will be long-term consequences for a whole raft of other interest groups, notably the trade unions (Copeland, 2023), women’s organisations (Sanders & Flavel, 2023), environmentalists (Gravey & Jordan, 2023), healthcare providers (Dayan et al, 2023), groups directly affected by foreign policy and trade policy (Martill, 2023; Garcia, 2023), as well as corporate interests in the financial sector (James & Quaglia, 2023). Decisions will no doubt depend on the effectiveness of interest groups in lobbying Parliament, although the current Government has not been especially inclined to work with external stakeholders since the Brexit process began seven years ago.

 

As this Special Issue illustrates, there are sectoral variations in the degree to which British public policy might diverge from existing EU policy over time, with the ideology of parties and factions within them likely to play an important role. If there is significant change, it will in turn have distributional consequences. For example, the presumption that de-regulation and ‘cutting red tape’ is inherently desirable is not a policy precept with which all businesses agree. Separate UK regulatory frameworks fit the ‘regain our sovereignty’ frame, but do they sit comfortably alongside the need for businesses to avoid having to comply with several different regulatory frameworks? Diverging from EU public policies will provoke a backlash from those (many) interest groups who have benefitted from EU membership, and will eventually present a strong challenge to those inclined towards a top-down, dirigiste, policy style. As Kelly and Tannan point out, ‘muscular’ approaches risk taking a wrecking ball to carefully crafted policies designed to solve intractable problems (Kelly & Tannam, 2023).

Moreover, the EU itself has a view on regulatory divergence by Britain. Just because it is no longer in the EU, Britain has not become an independent actor that faces no external constraints on its policy decisions. The reality of constrained policy choices is one that the short-lived Truss Administration discovered to its cost in autumn 2022 when forced to abandon a major package of tax cuts intended to enhance post-Brexit competitiveness in the face of a collapse of market confidence due to ballooning levels of UK government debt. The lack of engagement so far, both with interest groups and, at least prior to the election of Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister, with the EU itself, merely increases the potential for policy errors and blunders. The importance of effective consultation with interest groups who are a huge repository of knowledge about the practical workings of EU public policies has yet to be acknowledged. As such, the UK seems destined to experience long-term policy drift with stagnation and stasis more likely to characterise key policy sectors than change and recalibration.

The authors of this blog are Patrick Diamond and Jeremy Richardson.

How can policy process research help to address policy and policymaking problems? This special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy seeks to address that question by examining the theory and practice of policy analysis. The call for papers sought state of the art articles that conceptualise the politics of policy analysis, and empirical studies that use theoretical insights to analyse and address real world problems. Contributions could draw on mainstream policy theories to explain how policymaking works, and/ or critical approaches that identify and challenge inequalities of power. Both approaches identify three general reference points or assumptions.

First, policy analysis is not a disinterested, objective search for truth and an optimal policy solution. It is not a technocratic process that can be separated from politics. Techniques such as cost-benefit analysis require technical skills, but are not a substitute for political debate. Therefore, phrases like ‘evidence based’ do not describe policymaking well.

Second, policy analysis is not part of a simple, orderly policy process. It does not contribute to a tightly managed policy cycle consisting of linear and clearly defined technical stages. Policymaking is a highly contested but unequal process. Many policymakers, analysts, and influencers cooperate or compete to use information selectively to define problems, and select policy solutions with inevitable winners and losers, in processes over which no actor has full understanding or control.

Third, optimal policy and linear policymaking are not good ideals anyway. The language of optimality depoliticises policy analysis and reduces attention to policy’s winners and losers. Simple images of policymaking suggest that policy problems are amenable to technical policy solutions. They downplay power and contestation. Ignoring or denying the politics of policy analysis is either naïve, based on insufficient knowledge of policymaking, or strategic, to exploit the benefits of portraying issues as technical and solutions as generally beneficial.

Further, governments are not in the problem solving business. Instead, they inherit policies that address some problems and create or exacerbate others, benefit some groups and marginalize others, or simply describe problems as too difficult to solve. The highest profile problems, such as global public health and climate change, require the kinds of (1) cooperation across many levels of government (and inside and outside of government), and (2) attention to issues of justice and equity, of which analysts could only dream.

This description of policymaking complexity presents a conundrum. On the one hand, there exist many five-step guides to analysis, accompanied by simple stage-based descriptions of policy processes, but they describe what policy actors would need or like to happen rather than policymaking reality. On the other, policy theory-informed studies are essential to explanation, but not yet essential reading for policy analysts. Policy theorists may be able to describe policy processes – and the role of policy analysts – more accurately than simple guides, but do not offer a clear way to guide action. Practitioner audiences are receptive to accurate descriptions of policymaking reality, but also want a take-home message that they can pick up and use in their work. Critical policy analysts may appreciate insights on the barriers to policy and policymaking change, but only if there is equal attention to how to overcome them.

We see this Special Issue as not only the source of five new articles (by Claudio M. Radaelli; Joshua Newman and Michael Mintrom; Johanna Hornung; Kennet Lynggaard and Peter Triantafillou as well as Céline Mavrot, Susanne Hadorn and Fritz Sager) but also the spark for a longer term discussion about how to engage head-on with this theory-practice conundrum. In this more general project, we seek new research that can perform a dual purpose, to:

1. improve policy theories and generate new empirical insights, and
2. provide practical lessons to non-specialist audiences, many of whom would otherwise use too-simple models of policymaking to guide their understanding.

The following blog posts engage with these issues in five different ways:

Occupy the semantic space! Opening up the language of better regulation

Evidence-Based Policy, Artificial Intelligence, and the Ethical Practice of Policy Analysis

Social identities and deadlocked debates on nuclear energy policy

Discourse analysis and strategic policy advice: manoeuvring, navigating, and transforming policy

Blood, Sweat, and Cannabis: Real-World Policy Evaluation of Controversial Issues  

You can also read the full introduction to the Special Issue: Cairney, P. (2023) ‘The politics of policy analysis: theoretical insights on real world problems’, Journal of European Public Policy.

 

The author of this blog post is Paul Cairney, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of Stirling, UK