December 2018 – JEPP Online

Seasons’ greetings from JEPP!

18th December 201818th December 2018JEPP Online

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

Akaroa Lighthouse (Christchurch, New Zealand) & Murphy (good boy & friend of the show)

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.

This year, Berthold and Jess will trade Christmas under palm trees for the Swabian metropolis of Tübingen, Berthold’s home town, where they will be busy sampling regional specialties, such as g’schmelzte Maultaschen and Spätzle mit Zwiebelrostbraten.

JEPP’s situation room (photo) will be in recess for a few days over the holidays. Not that we don’t like our digs, but we believe that JEPP deserves a short break from us, too.

Michi will celebrate Christmas twice: with his mother, sister and families in Bavaria and Olga’s family in Gatchina, St. Petersburg region, Russia. Most importantly, it will be Kolja’s “inaugural visit” to his Russian great-grandmother.

Apart from celebrating and eating, as usual, Michi will try to reduce his backlog of must-read fiction and continue wondering what Kolja was trying to tell him on this photo taken recently on his first birthday.

Same procedure as every year, Philipp will swap London’s hustle and bustle for the family home in Munich over the holidays, devour the leftover Christmas cookies and do his best to get off the grid for a few days to reflect on an eventful year.

Clearly, he has also taken a recent interest in Christmas tree decorations and may (for the first time in his life!) take part in setting up the tree at home, that is if his parents trust him handling the precious Christmas baubles.

How do supreme audit institutions manage their autonomy and impact?

18th December 2018JEPP Online

Jon Pierre (University of Gothenburg) & Jenny de Fine Licht (University of Gothenburg)

Over the past decades, institutions tasked with auditing public service providers have experienced a remarkable transformation of their portfolio of responsibilities. Supreme audit institutions no longer see their role confined to the identification of issues but work closely with their auditees to drive public management reform. Supreme audit institutions’ new role comes with a caveat, however, say Jon Pierre and Jenny de Fine Licht. In their article “How do supreme audit institutions manage their autonomy and impact? A comparative analysis” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Jon and Jenny highlight that auditors who engage in continuous dialogue with their auditees are at risk to compromise their autonomy from the latter. Case studies of supreme audit institutions in Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden show how these institutions try to balance autonomy with the need to cooperate with public service providers. Results from their analyses suggest that there appears to be no silver bullet to resolve this dilemma but rather “different blends and logics of auditing that are reflected in different organizational arrangements” to manage the tension between opening-up to external actors and the safeguarding of auditors’ autonomy.

Regulating European Union lobbying: in whose interest?

18th December 2018JEPP Online

Adriana Bunea (University of Southampton)

The regulation of interest group participation in the EU’s policy-making process has long been the source of contention among the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council. While the Council had long resisted any attempts to regulate its interactions with private actors, EU Member States recently signalled their support for an Interinstitutional Agreement on a Mandatory Transparency Register advocated by the European Commission. In her article “Regulating European Union lobbying: in whose interest?” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Adriana Bunea argues that the key to this sudden shift in the Council’s position lies with the Commission’s strategy when formulating the agreement. Following a public consultation process on the agreement’s proposal, the Commission proved responsive to the input from stakeholders speaking on behalf of the public. Adriana finds that this strategy allowed the Commission to act as a legitimate policy initiator representative of public preferences, fostering its negotiation leverage vis-à-vis the Council. Her analysis suggests that on this issue “with high public salience and visibility, the Commission was ready to trade long-standing policy collaborators for a realignment with stakeholders that better served its contemporaneous needs for democratic legitimacy.”

Explaining institutional strength: the case of national human rights institutions in Europe and its Neighbourhood

18th December 2018JEPP Online

Corina Lacatus (University of Edinburgh)

National human rights institutions play a critical part in the effective implementation of human rights law at the national level. Illustrated by the pursuit of illiberal agendas of the current administrations in Hungary and Poland, national human rights institutions may have to fulfil their roles in increasingly hostile environments. In her article “Explaining institutional strength: the case of national human rights institutions in Europe and its Neighbourhood” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Corina Lacatus offers original data capturing the strength of national human rights organizations across 50 countries in Europe and its neighbourhood, and demonstrates that some human rights institutions are better equipped to withstand external pressure than others. Her data shows that EU member states generally support stronger national human rights institutions than their non-member neighbours, arguing that “the influence of the EU on institutional strength may be tied to processes of norm sharing through learning and persuasion, which are more effective once countries are integrated in the network of member states.”

Call for Paper Abstracts: The Brexit Policy Fiasco

4th December 2018JEPP Online

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).

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).