Is the Aotearoa New Zealand Policy Process: fit for purpose?

New Zealand is generally thought to be well governed by international standards, with low levels of corruption, innovative policies in some sectors, and high levels of trust in the system of government. But all is not well in the public policymaking system. Rather, the system resembles an endless conveyor belt of unsolved, or partially solved, policy problems that have a tendency over time to become bigger ‘crises’. Effective public policymaking is hard and policy ‘stuff-ups’ happen worldwide. But New Zealanders should not accept policy failures as a fact of life. Our central thesis is that, via a series of reforms, the policymaking process could become much more effective in achieving successful policy outcomes

Government‒business relations in multilevel systems: the effect of conflict perception on venue choice

In multilevel systems, organised interests, including business firms, can pursue their political goals at different levels. At the same time, national systems of interest representation provide important incentive structures for corporate political behaviour. In this context, corporate political strategy is guided by firms’ perceptions of their relationship with policy-makers. If this relationship is under strain in one venue, firms shift their lobbying effort to alternative venues, subject to constraints reflecting national institutional legacies. Using survey data on 56 large German and British firms, the article investigates empirically how perceptions of government‒business relations and national systems of interest representation interact to shape the political behaviour of large firms in multilevel systems. The analysis shows that perceived conflict with public authorities at the national level leads to increased business lobbying at the EU level. Furthermore, national types of interest representation shape relative business engagement at the EU level as well as the readiness of firms to shift venue

Government‒business relations in multilevel systems: the effect of conflict perception on venue choice

In multilevel systems, organised interests, including business firms, can pursue their political goals at different levels. At the same time, national systems of interest representation provide important incentive structures for corporate political behaviour. In this context, corporate political strategy is guided by firms’ perceptions of their relationship with policy-makers. If this relationship is under strain in one venue, firms shift their lobbying effort to alternative venues, subject to constraints reflecting national institutional legacies. Using survey data on 56 large German and British firms, the article investigates empirically how perceptions of government‒business relations and national systems of interest representation interact to shape the political behaviour of large firms in multilevel systems. The analysis shows that perceived conflict with public authorities at the national level leads to increased business lobbying at the EU level. Furthermore, national types of interest representation shape relative business engagement at the EU level as well as the readiness of firms to shift venue

Exploring the capabilities of ChatGPT in women’s health: obstetrics and gynaecology

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming healthcare, with Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT offering novel capabilities. This study evaluates ChatGPT’s performance in interpreting and responding to the UK Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists MRCOG Part One and Two examinations – international benchmarks for assessing knowledge and clinical reasoning in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. We analysed ChatGPT’s domain-specific accuracy, the impact of linguistic complexity, and its self-assessment confidence. A dataset of 1824 MRCOG questions was curated, ensuring minimal prior exposure to ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s responses were compared to known correct answers, and linguistic complexity was assessed using token counts and Type-Token ratios. Confidence scores were assigned by ChatGPT and analysed for self-assessment accuracy. ChatGPT achieved 72.2% accuracy on Part One and 50.4% on Part Two, performing better on Single Best Answer (SBA) than Extended Matching (EMQ) Questions. The findings highlight the potential and significant limitations of ChatGPT in clinical decision-making in women’s health

"Women's rights, the European Court and Supranational Constitutionalism"

This analysis examines supranational constitutionalism in the European Union. In particular, the study focuses on the role of the European Court of Justice in the creation of women’s rights. I examine the interaction between the Court and member state governments in legal integration, and also the integral role that women’s advocates – both individual activists and groups – have played in the development of EU social provisions. The findings suggest that this litigation dynamic can have the effect of fueling the integration process by creating new rights that may empower social actors and EU organizations, with the ultimate effect of diminishing member state government control over the scope and direction of EU law. This study focuses specifically on gender equality law, yet provides a general framework for examining the case law in subsequent legal domains, with the purpose of providing a more nuanced understanding of supranational governance and constitutionalism

Consultations with interest groups and the empowerment of executives : evidence from the European Union

We examine how an executive's consultations with interest groups during the formative stage of the policy process affect its bargaining success during the decision-making stage after it has proposed new policies to legislative actors. Our theory sets out how consultations with interest groups strengthen the executive by bolstering its formal and informal agenda-setting power. The empirical testing ground for our theory is the European Union (EU), and in particular the consultations held by the European Commission. The analysis assesses the effects of these consultations on the congruence between the Commission's legislative proposals on controversial issues and EU laws. Our analysis incorporates detailed information on the type and scope of each consultation. In line with our theory, we find that the Commission had more success during the decision-making stage after conducting open consultations with large numbers of interest groups during the policy formation stage

Power, Connected Coalitions, and Efficiency: Challenges to the Council of the European Union

This article is concerned with challenges to reforming the voting procedures of the Council of the European Union (EU). The next major waves of EU enlargement will cause the Union to increase to a membership of first twenty-one, and then twenty-six or possibly even more states. How does enlargement affect the Council's inherent "capacity to act" under the currently used qualified majority voting rule? It is demon strated here that the expected increase in EU membership will most likely induce a larger "status quo bias" as compared to the present situation in the Council if the crucial majority decision quota is not lowered. In addition, the article is responding to some criticism that has been applied against assessing the leverage of EU governments in one of the EU's most important institutions: the Council of the EU. By resorting to techniques that capture the influence of a priori coalitions on the one hand and "connected coalitions" among EU governments on the other—applying n- person cooperative game theory—the piece illustrates how the assessment of relative voting leverage in the framework of weighted voting systems may be extended and applied to situations in which the specific distribu tion of members' preferences is known. These calculations are again relevant in the face of the upcoming rounds of EU enlargement and projects for institutional reform.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68064/2/10.1177_019251219902000404.pd

Public opinion and environmental policy output: a cross-national analysis of energy policies in Europe

This article studies how public opinion is associated with the introduction of renewable energy policies in Europe. While research increasingly seeks to model the link between public opinion and environmental policies, the empirical evidence is largely based on a single case: the US. This limits the generalizability of findings and we argue accordingly for a systematic, quantitative study of how public opinion drives environmental policies in another context. Theoretically, we combine arguments behind the political survival of democratic leaders with electoral success and environmental politics. Ultimately, we suggest that office-seeking leaders introduce policies that seem favorable to the domestic audience; if the public prefers environmental protection, the government introduces such policies in turn. The main contribution of this research is the cross-country empirical analysis, where we combine data on the public's environmental attitudes and renewable energy policy outputs in a European context between 1974 and 2015. We show that as public opinion shifts towards prioritizing the environment, there is a significant and positive effect on the rate of renewable energy policy outputs by governments in Europe. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic, quantitative study of public opinion and environmental policies across a large set of countries, and we demonstrate that the mechanisms behind the introduction of renewable energy policies follow major trends across European states

Perceptions of institutional complexity and lobbyists’ decisions to join lobbying coalitions – evidence from the European Union context

YesWe use data from in-depth interviews with business lobbyists in Brussels to investigate why they choose to join lobbying coalitions. We find that lobbyists face two competing institutional incentives. First, they are confronted with incentives to ally with other European organisations, develop multilateral policy messages, and communicate messages to the Commission and the Parliament. Simultaneously, they face inducements to join narrower coalitions, develop bilateral policy messages, and direct those messages at the Council. Lobbyists’ receptivity to these incentives – and thus their choices of lobbying coalitions – differs with their age, educational background, and with the type and ownership structure of the organisations they represent. Combined, our findings contribute to the limited, mainly American literature on interest coalitions by demonstrating that lobbyists operate in complex institutional environments, and that their interpretations of and reactions to institutional complexity are shaped by individual- and organisational-level factors