Policy blunders are a common feature of public and foreign policy-making. While we all seem to know a policy failure when we see it, how can policy failures be analyzed systematically? What are their causes and consequences, and – most importantly – who’s to blame? Kai Oppermann and Alex Spencer, guest editors of the Journal of European Public Policy’s latest Special Issue “Fiascos in public policy and foreign policy” present an exciting and insightful collection of the latest research on policy fiascos and bridge the divide between scholarship on public and foreign policy failures. Take a look at their introduction outlining the aims and key findings of the Special Issue, and don’t forget to check out the issue itself here as well!
Month: March 2016
Copy-editors of the world untie! You have nothing too lose!!
By Peter Kidd
As a copy-editor working on JEPP, I am one of those to blame when a typo makes it through from submitted manuscript to printed journal. But we’re all human – well, I am – and being human we all make mistakes. I know I do. That’s why I buy pencils with erasers on the end.
So what exactly do I do? What do I add to the publication process?
I see my job as ensuring that the text of a submission is optimized so that the reader can absorb its content and meaning with as little effort as possible. If a reader needs to go back and re-read a sentence or paragraph, I have not been 100 per cent successful in copy-editing the text. Continue reading “Copy-editors of the world untie! You have nothing too lose!!”
To defect or not to defect?
“MEPs may find themselves trapped between their loyalty towards the leadership and their own standing in the party” writes Daniel Finke in his article “The burden of authorship: how agenda-setting and electoral rules shape legislative behaviour” published in the Journal of European Public Policy. Whether or not MEPs seek confrontation with their national party leadership over legislation authored by their European parliamentary group depends chiefly on how MEPs were elected in the first place as well as on their electoral standing.
The EU’s foreign policy: Not so normative after all?
The Normative Power Europe concept popularized the essentialist claim that the EU’s internal constitution translates into its external behaviour. But how exactly does the EU’s internal identify affect foreign policy? Kai Hebel and Tobias Lenz contend that “what looks like the outcome of identity-driven processes … often results from political processes that are highly contingent”.
Read their article “The identity/policy nexus in European foreign policy” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to find out more about the nuts and bolts linking collective self-understandings and foreign policy outcomes.
Banning parties in the name of democracy?
Do supranational institutions and legal norms influence the domestic politics of banning political parties? Studying two cases of party closure, the former Basque nationalists Batasuna and the pro-Kurdish DTP, Selin Türkeş-Kılıç shows that besides the political considerations for party bans, domestic court rulings on such bans sought to reinforce the legitimacy of these bans. Constitutional court justices evoked principles of international and European law, even if they contradict the initial recommendation of EU institutions to refrain from a party ban. To find out more read Selin’s article “Political party closures in European democratic order” published in the Journal of European Public Policy.