Customizing Europe: transposition as bottom-up implementation

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.European Union (EU) implementation research has neglected situations when member states go beyond the minimum requirements prescribed in EU directives (goldplating). The top-down focus on compliance insufficiently accounts for the fact that positive integration actually allows member states to transcend the EU’s requirements to facilitate context-sensitive problem-solving. This study adopts a bottom-up implementation perspective. Moving beyond compliance, it introduces the concept of ‘customization’ to depict how transposition results in tailor-made solutions in a multi-level system. The study analyzes the hitherto unexplored veterinary drug regulations of four member states. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis and formal theory evaluation, this paper assesses how policy and country-level factors interact. Results reveal the countries’ different customization styles. The latter simultaneously reflect the interplay of domestic politics with institutions, and the ‘fit’ of EU regulatory modes with domestic, sectoral interventionist styles. Compliance approaches cannot fully explain these fine-grained patterns of Europeanization

The Notions of Regulation and Self-Regulation in Political Science

This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.While political scientists concur about the increasing importance of regulation, the extant literature features a notable diversity of contemporary definitions of regulation. The various understandings of regulation put different emphasis on the role of the state and regulation as an instrument or a process, respectively. This article scrutinizes and clarifies the notions of regulation and self-regulation in the Political Science literature. Along three analytic questions – what is regulated, who regulates, and how is it being regulated? –, the essay illustrates developments from regulation as government intervention to regulation as governance and finally, regulation as various mechanisms of social control. The latter includes hybrid, private, transnational, voluntary and self-regulation. The article discusses the usefulness of modern notions of regulation, as well as potential future research trajectories. It concludes that there is a need for a conceptual consolidation that integrates different regulatory processes, actors and instruments and enables comparative, explanatory empirical assessments of regulatory impacts

‘Donate your organs, donate life!’ Explicitness in policy instruments

This is the final version of the article. Available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this record.Behavioural research suggests that the intensity with which policy instruments indicate a direction of desired behavioural change affects how target populations respond to them. However, comparative research on policy instruments focuses on their calibration, restrictiveness, density and formal intensity, but does not account for the degree to which they specify the particular policy goal. Moving beyond nudging and “command and control” approaches, this paper adds the dimension of explicitness to existing taxonomies of policy instruments. The explicitness of an instrument results from two questions: first, does the instrument specify a direction of behavioural change? Second, does the instrument attach valence to this behaviour? The paper proposes a stepwise measurement procedure and links explicitness with policy outcomes. A comparative case study of organ donor policy in Switzerland and Spain illustrates how accounting for the explicitness dimension can improve our understanding of policy instruments and their effectiveness

Food Safety Policy: Transnational, Hybrid, Wicked

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in this recordAccording to the World Health Organization, between 2010 and 2015 there were an estimated 582 million cases of 22 different foodborne enteric diseases. Over 40% people suffering from enteric diseases caused by contaminated food were children aged under five years. Highly industrialized livestock production processes have brought along antibiotic resistances that could soon result in an era in which common infections and minor injuries that have been treatable for decades can once again kill. Unsafe food also poses major economic risks. For example, Germany’s E. coli outbreak in 2011 reportedly caused US$1.3 billion in losses for farmers and industries. Food safety policy ensures that food does not endanger human health—along the entire food chain through which food is produced, stored, transported, processed, and prepared. In an interdependent world of globalized trade and health risks, food safety is an extraordinarily complex policy issue situated at the intersection of trade, agricultural, and health policies. Although traditionally considered a domestic issue, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and other major food safety crises before and around the turn of the millennium highlighted the need for transnational regulation and coordination to ensure food safety in regional and global markets. As a result, food safety has received ample scholarly attention as a critical case of the transboundary regulation of often uncertain risks. The global architecture of food production also gives food safety policy an international and interactive character. Some countries or regions, for example, the European Union, act as standard setters, whereas newly industrialized countries, such as China, struggle to “do their homework,” and the poorest regions of the world strive for market access. Although national regulatory approaches differ considerably in the degree to which they rely on self-regulation by the market, overall, the sheer extent of the underlying policy problem makes it impossible to tackle food safety solely through public regulation. Therefore, private regulation and co-regulation play an influential role in the standard setting, implementation, and enforcement of food safety policy. The entanglement of several interrelated policy sectors, the need for coordination and action at multiple—global, regional, national, local—levels, and the involvement of actors from the public and private, for-profit and nonprofit fields, are the reasons why the governance of food safety policy is characterized by considerable hybridity and also requires both vertical and horizontal policy integration. Scholarship has increasingly scrutinized how the resulting multiple, sometimes conflicting, actor rationalities and the overlap of several regulatory roles affect effectiveness and legitimacy in the decision-making and implementation of food safety policy. By highlighting issues such as regulatory capture and deficient enforcement systems, this research suggests another implication of the hybridization of food safety governance, namely, that the latter increasingly shares the characteristics of a wicked problem. Next to complexity and both high and notoriously uncertain risks, the multiple actors involved often diverge in their very definitions of the problem and strategic intentions. The major task ahead lies in designing recipes for integrated, context-sensitive, and resilient policy responses

Toward a better understanding of implementation performance in the EU multi-level system

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge)via the DOI in this record.The results of this collection allow for preliminary conclusions about the nuanced interplay between Europeanization and domestication forces in European Union (EU) implementation, which await testing in different contexts. Some policies lend themselves more to a strategy allowing for extensive domestication than others; but to be effective, decentralized implementing actors need both power and capabilities. Europeanization dynamics strongly influence the direction of domestication of EU policy, but if EU requirements are incompatible with national political preferences domestication trumps Europeanization. Domestication equally prevails if the relationship between EU and national policy is ambiguous and frontline implementers have high discretion. The trend toward the Europeanization of direct EU enforcement challenges its legitimacy. This has implications for EU researchers and practitioners, and suggests methodological challenges and future research trajectories for a performance perspective on EU implementation. More comparative research is needed about the trade-offs between conformance, diversity, and performance in EU multilevel governance

Moving beyond legal compliance: Innovative approaches to EU multilevel implementation

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Research on implementation in the European Union (EU) is characterized by a strong focus on legal conformance with EU policy. However, this focus has been criticized for insufficiently accounting for the implications of the EU’s multilevel governance structure, thus providing an incomplete picture of EU implementation, its diversity and practice. The contributions of this collection represent a shift toward a more performance-oriented perspective on EU implementation as problem-solving. They approach implementation fundamentally as a process of interpretation of superordinate law by actors who are embedded within multiple contexts arising from the coexistence of dynamics of Europeanization, on the one hand, and what has been termed ‘domestication’, on the other. Moving beyond legal compliance, the contributions provide new evidence on the diversity of domestic responses to EU policy, the roles and motivations of actors implementing EU policy, and the ‘black box’ of EU law in action and its enforcement.Eva Thomann gratefully acknowledges financial support by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [grant numbers P2BEP1-162077 and P300P1_171479]

Who Deserves Solidarity? Unequal Treatment of Immigrants in Swiss Welfare Policy Delivery

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.There is another ORE record for this publication: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/33174Rising immigration rates in Western Europe concur with increasing anti-immigrant attitudes. While assessments of welfare eligibility in the United States demonstrably hinge on how public servants perceive different racial groups as deserving, we know less about ethnically motivated discrimination in the European context. This paper argues that Switzerland is a critical case for studying such developments. It combines social construction theory and the deservingness heuristic to analyze how social constructions of Swiss natives and immigrants influence 90 disability benefits insurance procedures. Findings reveal that immigrants are perceived as less deserving and less powerful than Swiss applicants. Thus, Swiss welfare workers do not allocate welfare benefits independently of an applicant's nationality. Our results raise fundamental questions about the equal treatment of welfare applicants in times of rising immigration and anti-immigrant attitudes. The feed-forward effects of social constructions imply longer-term consequences for good administrative practices and society that require scholarly attention

Asymptotic results for renewal risk models with risky investments

We consider a renewal jump-diffusion process, more specifically a renewal insurance risk model with investments in a stock whose price is modeled by a geometric Brownian motion. Using Laplace transforms and regular variation theory, we introduce a transparent and unifying analytic method for investigating the asymptotic behavior of ruin probabilities and related quantities, in models with light- or heavy-tailed jumps, whenever the distribution of the time between jumps has rational Laplace transform

I Now Feel More Comfortable Advocating for People: Student Reflections on Service Learning

To provide meaningful experiential learning activities for students outside of the classroom, many social work programs are including service learning as a curricular component. Indeed, research shows that service learning is a widespread practice in higher education across academic majors. This study uses qualitative data from from 34 students in two sections of a master’s-level social work course to explore student experiences with service learning. Major themes from the students’ data are presented here. Students reported both liking and being challenged by the freedom to tailor their own experiences, described developing new skills, reported being able to apply course content/learn about the field through hands-on learning, and felt that they contributed to a community organization/agency through their service learning projects. There are often challenges to implementing service learning projects. This paper presents semi-structured service learning as an alternate model to the traditionally arranged project, giving students the opportunity to develop their own projects tailored to their interests. Instructors looking to provide educational opportunities through real world experiences will gain insight into this process and the outcomes of such a project