Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: procedural mechanisms of accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi-level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi-level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multilevel governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria— accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness— and points towards substantive institutional reforms.Published versio

Covert action failure and fiasco construction: William Hague’s 2011 Libyan venture

In 2011 William Hague, then British Foreign Secretary, authorized a Special Forces team to enter Libya and attempt to contact rebels opposed to Muammar Gaddafi in the unfolding civil war. However, its members were detained by the rebels, questioned and ejected from the country. This article puts the literature on public policy failures into dialogue with that on covert action as a tool of foreign policy. It asks: why did this not develop into a fully-fledged policy fiasco when journalists and politicians alike judged it to have been a major error of judgement on Hague’s part? Using narrative analysis of the contemporary reporting of this incident, we argue that the government – possessing the advantage of information asymmetry accruing from operational secrecy – was ultimately able to win the battle of narratives in a frame contestation process. The study of information asymmetry can enhance the recently revivified research into foreign policy failures

Influence of shear stress magnitude and direction on atherosclerotic plaque composition

British Heart Foundation (BHF) grants (no. RG/11/13/29055 and PG/15/49/31595), awarded to R.K. and E.P. who are employed by Bioengineering and the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial College London. The grants also supported R.M.P. and S.M.B. V.V.M. was supported by a BHF. PhD studentship

The politicisation of evaluation: constructing and contesting EU policy performance

Although systematic policy evaluation has been conducted for decades and has been growing strongly within the European Union (EU) institutions and in the member states, it remains largely underexplored in political science literatures. Extant work in political science and public policy typically focuses on elements such as agenda setting, policy shaping, decision making, or implementation rather than evaluation. Although individual pieces of research on evaluation in the EU have started to emerge, most often regarding policy “effectiveness” (one criterion among many in evaluation), a more structured approach is currently missing. This special issue aims to address this gap in political science by focusing on four key focal points: evaluation institutions (including rules and cultures), evaluation actors and interests (including competencies, power, roles and tasks), evaluation design (including research methods and theories, and their impact on policy design and legislation), and finally, evaluation purpose and use (including the relationships between discourse and scientific evidence, political attitudes and strategic use). The special issue considers how each of these elements contributes to an evolving governance system in the EU, where evaluation is playing an increasingly important role in decision making

The Use of Evidence in Health Policy in Ghana: Implications for Accountability and Democratic Governance

The use of evidence in policymaking is often argued to improve accountability, effectiveness, and stakeholder involvement in policy decisions. The features of this practice, however, remain vague in the discourse of evidence-based policymaking, with the risk of obscuring important governance and legitimacy implications. In programme planning and evaluation especially, the use of evidence can be critical to translate technical measurements of policy achievements into political values for shaping future policy directions. This chapter presents a case study from Ghana to discuss how institutionalized evidentiary practices used in policy review affect aspects of governance. Drawing on interviews, we reflect on how the evidence review process—agreed in collaboration with development partners—links to the evidence advisory system and the accountability systems in place. We find that the uses of evidence promoted by international donors actually creates disconnect with the national accountability system in place, with implications for democratic governance

Probabilities, causation, and logic programming in conditional reasoning: reply to Stenning and Van Lambalgen (2016)

Oaksford and Chater (2014, Thinking and Reasoning, 20, 269–295) critiqued the logic programming (LP) approach to nonmonotonicity and proposed that a Bayesian probabilistic approach to conditional reasoning provided a more empirically adequate theory. The current paper is a reply to Stenning and van Lambalgen's rejoinder to this earlier paper entitled ‘Logic programming, probability, and two-system accounts of reasoning: a rejoinder to Oaksford and Chater’ (2016) in Thinking and Reasoning. It is argued that causation is basic in human cognition and that explaining how abnormality lists are created in LP requires causal models. Each specific rejoinder to the original critique is then addressed. While many areas of agreement are identified, with respect to the key differences, it is concluded the current evidence favours the Bayesian approach, at least for the moment

Accountability for Practical Reasoning Agents

Postprin

The blameworthiness of health and safety rule violations

Man-made disasters usually lead to the tightening of safety regulations, because rule breaking is seen as a major cause of them. This reaction is based on the presumptions that the safety rules are good and that the rule-breakers are wrong. The reasons the personnel of a coke factory gave for breaking rules raise doubt about the tenability of these presumptions. It is unlikely that this result would have been achieved on the basis of a disaster evaluation or High-Reliability Theory. In both approaches, knowledge of the consequences of human conduct hinders an unprejudiced judgement about the blameworthiness of rule breaking

State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?

This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). We argue that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. In doing so, we tackle long-standing stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for. We highlight how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. We demonstrate the potential pay-off with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies, we argue, suggest a reorientation of how we understand the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. We conclude by pointing to the benefits to the discipline in embracing elite ethnography both to diversify the methodological toolkit in explaining the complex dynamics of disaffection,and to better enable engagement in renewed public debate about the political establishment