Category: Journal Content

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’.

Disproportionate responses to ill-conceived threats can be just as costly as underestimating a particular risk, especially when it comes to foreign policy-making. When “states and international organizations over- and under-react to perceived transboundary threats and hazards that emanate from or easily spread beyond a given state’s territory, their mistakes can have equally harmful consequences for the citizens they mean to protect”. Read Christoph Meyer’s article “Over- and under-reaction to transboundary threats: two sides of a misprinted coin?” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to find out what conditions states’ misapprehension of external threats.

Following the aphorism that those who will not risk cannot win seems not to bode well for British prime ministers. Klaus Brummer argues that British leaders with particularly high self-confidence and in pursuit of conflictual political strategies are more likely to be attached the label ‘fiasco-prime ministers’ than their cannier colleagues. Read his article “‘Fiasco prime ministers’: leaders’ beliefs and personality traits as possible causes for policy fiascos” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn how personality traits of individual decision-makers can contribute to the evolution of policy fiascos.

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!

“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 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.

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.

What is the relationship between power and ideas? What makes ideas powerful? How do ideas drive social and political change? Daniel Béland, Martin B. Carstensen and Leonard Seabrooke, guest editors of the Journal of European Public Policy’s Special Issue “Ideas, political power and public policy”, present an exciting set of contributions, which set out to address these pressing questions. Join Martin as he introduces the Special Issue’s contributions and have a look at the issue itself here. We hope you enjoy reading!

 

The quest for a solution to the European financial crisis has produced divisions inside the European Parliament. Nonetheless, Mícheál O’Keeffe, Marion Salines and Marta Wieczorek show that internal divisions did not shape the EP’s external negotiation strategy in trilogues with the European Commission and the Council. Their article “The European Parliament’s strategy in EU economic and financial reform” published in the Journal of European Public Policy illustrates that the EP opted for similar bargaining tactics when it stands united (financial supervision) and when it is divided, as in the case of economic governance reforms. In both instances, parliamentarians placed a premium on legitimacy and transparency concerns with regard to the EU’s response to the crisis.