Interesting results - but are they valid?

QCA\u2019s grasp on causation is often questioned from a probabilistic, experimental understanding of validity. QCA results however rely on logical and set-theoretical inferences. Is a difference in languages enough to justify a separate validity yardsticks? And what secures that QCA is delivering valid results? The review of quantitative and qualitative exemplary yardsticks shows that traditions share validity concerns, yet give them different contents. The article argues that such difference is legitimized by the special assumptions about causation that inform their research processes. It therefore clarifies QCA causal ontology, identifies its special threats, and evaluates the strategies in use to prevent or tackle them - also adding a new one to address over-specified hypotheses. In this, the nomothetic yardstick proves to be a fertile framework, yet hardly a proper guideline for solutions

Yardsticks, Paradigms, and the Beast

This paper aims to support the position questioning the relevance of the European democratic deficit because conventional yardsticks have changed \u2013but from a policy\u2010process viewpoint. Starting from Rodrik\u2019s \u201caugmented trilemma\u201d, I\u2019ll argue that conventional yardsticks revolve around the \u201cgovernment model\u201d of the Bretton\u2010Woods compromise, where limited capital mobility allowed the segmentation of the economic space into domestic markets that the Musgravian approach to public goods put under political control. But the paradigm shift of the 1980s freed capitals and hence pushed political systems to choose their new position within the trilemma: adopting the golden straitjacket and delivering even public goods via national (quasi\u2010)markets, as in the UK; or giving up the State primacy and relying on overlapping markets and local communities\u2019 deliveries, as in Sweden. In both cases, I\u2019ll show how policy legitimacy there lies on the outcome side of policies and effectiveness evaluation \u2013a new arena where distinctive modes of stakeholders\u2019 and policy\u2010takers\u2019 participation draw \u201cunconventional\u201d accountability mechanisms and thus re\u2010design political rights. Since its commitment toward the neo\u2010lib paradigm, it\u2019s instead to these two models that the EU governance system could refer in order to fix its legitimacy problems \u2013 given the international integration wave still keeps up

Dispositivi istituzionali per «buone» politiche pubbliche : il notice-and-comment americano

Larga parte della letteratura condivide l\u2019assunto secondo cui la qualit\ue0 delle politiche pubbliche dipende dalle istituzioni in cui vengono forgiate. Altrettanto consolidata \ue8 per\uf2 anche la convinzione che non esista un solo modo per fare le buone policy, e che i dispositivi concreti debbano essere diversi in rapporto al tipo di sistema politico, per rispettarne i principi fondativi e inserirsi in modo produttivo entro le sue dinamiche. Il lavoro ricostruisce la razionalit\ue0 dei disegni istituzionali efficaci e, nel contesto dei sistemi politici pluralisti, si concentra sul caso del notice-and-comment americano, ripercorrendone evoluzione ed effetti del funzionamento

Gauging the Import and Essentiality of Single Conditions in Standard Configurational Solutions

Standard Qualitative Comparative Analysis is especially suited to explain diversity but is often diagnosed with weak findings. Its protocol either can dismiss necessary conditions as irrelevant and make solutions that are untrue to observations, or add irrelevant conditions as causal and make incorrect solutions. Additionally, the algorithm may not recognize the functional dependencies among the conditions. These claims call for different gauges to assess the single conditions that are retrieved by Standard minimizations. This article develops \u201cimport\u201d and \u201cessentiality\u201d to establish whether a condition has explanatory merit alone and within the wider model. When applied in exemplary studies, these gauges indicate that Standard solutions are more sound than often conceded

Either effective or democratic? : Considerations on the accountability of the European Central Bank

Accountability is a concept usually applied to delegated policy makers, to indicate their obligations to justify their behavior with respect to some legitimate legal, expert, and public concern. The contribution considers whether and to what extent the concept and related obligations can apply to the European Central Bank

An IAD perspective on administrative accountability

Accountability is the control side in a relationship of delegation. Its devices elicit information from the agents to prove that they meet key values and legitimate concerns. Expected to yield effective and democratic policies, it can spoil them instead \u2014 and the debate is still open on which facets exactly matter. The Institutional Analysis and Development framework suggests that convincing reasons lie in the institutional design. To it, institutions are effective as enforced instructions that restrain the players\u2019 strategies in an action situation \u2014 and their power varies with the contents and the completeness of their syntax. Following the framework, the article locates the critical juncture of accountability in the administrative sphere, and the roots of the dilemma in the distrust that accountability designs entail when they conceive the bureaucracy as an agent instead than as a trustee. Finally, it applies the Institutional Grammar Tool to the procedures that can mark the difference between the agent\u2019s and the trustee\u2019s design, in the prospect of empirical adjudication

Convincing explanations with QCA : the contribution of “essential” configurational models

Since long, the scientific discourse maintains that sound models are a necessary requisite to convincing explanations. How to design them so that they suit configurational thinking is the question that Amenta and Poulsen first have explicitly put in the methodological agenda of Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The article contributes to the substantive and to the technical side of the answer. It reasons that the cogency of the starting hypothesis requires factors supporting the expectation that, were they jointly given, the outcome would certainly obtain; and considers Ostrom\u2019s \u201caction situation\u201d as a fruitful framework for guidance in selection. It then addresses the related risk of overly rich models by adapting Baumgartner\u2019s difference-making principle for specification tests to be run on candidate factors before minimizations. Exercises in replication will show the extent to which these criteria provide a useful diagnostics of existing models, and a blueprint for more convincing configurational explanations

Has the paradigm really shifted? : Trying to explain the variation in policy changes of the EU15 countries

Policy change is an issue ranking high in many governmental and academic agendas, especially in the old common Europe. Face to the problems of economic growth that since the 1970s affect many countries, policy change is expected to maintain, if not to improve, citizens’ affluence and the availability of resources for enforcing social equity, however defined. Especially after Hall’s seminal work, this implies to focus on the change of the paradigm that lies beyond public policies: Namely, as the relevant paradigms for growth‐oriented policies are economic, on the shift from demand‐sided to supply‐sided frameworks of reference. The analysis is supposed to highlight the role that different modes of accounting and evaluation play in stabilizing the paradigm shift: as a (more or less) meaningful discipline of whose players’ behavior, and/or as a different arena where stakeholders, policy‐takers, administrative bodies and maybe executive bodies can clear their preferences up, align their framing, and finetune the implementation design to make it viable without losing the nature of change –i.e. fixing framing conflicts by argument and evidences, and allowing policy actors learning. The results could then link the research to the questions raised by detractors of the neoliberal paradigm when accusing it for harming democracy because of the narrower range of options it leaves to voters. This contribution could support the thesis for which the order that results from the paradigm shift is instead ‘differently democratic’, as it recognizes the need for a reauthorization of policy changes to come from the actors in the administrative field, in order to balance and refine the amorphous consent expressed by vote without reversing it. This would mean a different way for citizens to play political rights–not just as voters but also as those with a stake in the concrete way a “public” good is (poorly) produced and delivered here and now– and to deal with social conflict, in this way dispersed and at the same time attached to the concrete problem