Occupy the semantic space! Opening up the language of better regulation

Policy agendas are often cast in semantic constructions that portray them as universally desirable outcomes. These semantic constructions protect and reinforce the power of dominant coalitions and make it hard to pursue alternatives. The semantic space is entirely occupied by the dominant concepts. At the same time, within the dominant coalition, ideational conflict is muted by decontesting concepts. Drawing on political theory, I show the presence of this double act of reducing the semantic space and decontesting concepts with the case of ‘better regulation’. Then I briefly extend the argument to other terms such as policy coherence, agile governance, smart cities and social value judgements. The critical discussion of the implications of dominant language brings in transparency, allows other coalitions to articulate their vision in a discursive level-playing-field, and offers citizens the possibility to discuss what is really ‘better’ and ‘for whom’

What's nonviolence to do with the European Union?

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from UACES via the link in this record.Nonviolence has an established tradition in several disciplines, including political theory, international relations and political science. We explore the potential of nonviolence as analytical and normative framework for the study of European integration and European Union (EU) politics. At the outset, we introduce the basics of nonviolence and define our approach to this concept. We then apply it to three critical issues concerning the nature of EU power, the democratic deficit and the narrative of integration. We find that our framework re-defines the core dimensions of the problems of power and democracy, assists in imagining the EU in non state-morphic ways, and provides innovative ways to put praxis at the roots of the integration process and its narrative

If Evaluation is the Solution, What is the Problem?

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the link in this record.Over the years, there has been a proliferation of initiatives, methods and tools for evaluation in the European Union (EU). In 2015, the Commission produced a set of integrated guidelines and a single toolbox for better regulation, with the ambitious aim of closing the policy cycle, that is, to draw on evaluation methods systematically from the stage of policy formulation to (a) the end of a project or (b) the moment of ex-post regulatory review. The idea of ‘closing the policy cycle’ is intuitively attractive, but in practice it raises issues of who is exercising control and oversight of different evaluation approaches and tools inside the Commission, the relationship between the Member States and the Commission, and the inter-institutional relations that define power within ‘better regulation’. We examine across time the emergence of different types of evaluation (ex ante and ex post, regulatory evaluations and more traditional approaches to expenditure evaluation) as ‘solutions’, and associate them to problems. We find that the goal of closing the policy cycle is a very tall order for the Commission and the EU more generally, given the historical development of different problems-solutions combinations. The rise of ‘better regulation’ provides the ideational cement for this re-configuration of evaluation ‘to close the policy cycle’ but there are critical issues with tools, methods and scope of evaluation. In the end, today the pieces do not fall into place and the puzzle of ‘evaluation for whom and for what purposes’ has not been solved yet. This less-than-Cartesian puzzle, with its odd de-coupled pieces of different evaluations is not efficient if the problem is to close the policy cycle. But ambiguity is organizationally acceptable if the problem is to generate local power equilibria that can be exploited within the Commission and externally. Evaluation, in fact, is also a frame of reference and praxis where the Member States, the Sec Gen, the DGs of the Commission, the European Parliament test and constantly re-define the question of who has control over EU policy

The lessons of policy learning: types, triggers, hindrances and pathologies (article)

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Policy Press via the DOI in this record.Policy learning is an attractive proposition, but who learns and for what purposes? Can we learn the wrong lesson? And why do so many attempts to learn what works often fail? In this article, we provide three lessons. First, there are four different modes in which constellations of actors learn. Hence our propositions about learning are conditional on which of the four contexts we refer to. Second, policy learning does not just happen; there are specific hindrances and triggers. Thus, learning can be facilitated by knowing the mechanisms to activate and the likely obstacles. Third, learning itself is a conditional final aim: although the official aspiration of public organizations and politicians is to improve on public policy, policy learning can also be dysfunctional – for an organization, a policy, a constellation of actors or even democracy.The conceptual work was informed by two European Research Council (ERC) projects: Analysis of Learning in Regulatory Governance (ALREG) (grant # 230267) and Procedural Tools for Effective Governance (PROTEGO) (grant # 694632)

Policy Learning in Comparative Policy Analysis

This article explores how policy learning can improve comparative policy analysis by focusing on causality in learning processes. After summarizing the comparative credentials of the policy learning literature, the article outlines a framework of four learning modes, relating it to three approaches of causality: deterministic, probabilistic, and set-theoretic. It then builds on this to explore different approaches to causation and learning in relation to: policy change, political contexts, and, finally, the temporal and spatial dimensions of comparative policy analysis. The article concludes by showing how these challenges are addressed and suggesting implications for further research

Unity in fragility: Nonviolence and COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic witnessed extreme forms of biopolitics, as well as the urgency to reconsider our relationship with the planet. Although biopolitics draws attention to the technologies of domination by public authorities, we cast the concepts of bios and politics in the wider framework of nonviolence. In this framework, bios is the set of practices (praxis) of ordinary citizens. And politics is power created by harm reduction, or actions in daily life that testimony the desire not to harm others or the planet. We leverage nonviolence at three levels, scaling up from the individual to social behaviour and to the planet. The first level concerns nonviolence as self-sufferance and as praxis to claim back the sovereignty of the body. In the second level, nonviolence is collective mobilization - building social capital, self-governance, and solidarity. The third level provides the vision of a diverse ecological citizenship with a sustainable relationship between human beings and the planet

What did I leave out? Omitted variables in regression and qualitative comparative analysis

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Palgrave Macmillan for European Consortium for Political Research via the DOI in this record.Social scientists often face a fundamental problem: Did I leave something causally important out of my explanation? How do I diagnose this? Where do I look for solutions to this problem? We build bridges between regression models and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) by comparing diagnostics and solutions to the problem of omitted variables and conditions. We then discuss various approaches and tackle the theoretical issues around causality which must be addressed before attending to technical fixes. In the conclusions we reflect on the bridges built between the two traditions and draw more general lessons about the logic of social science research.Research for this project was funded by the ERC project 694632 Protego – Procedural Tools for Effective Governance and by the Goethe University of Frankfur

Regulation and Corruption: Claims, Evidence and Explanations

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Edward Elgar via the DOI in this record.Does regulation cause corruption? In a field dominated by economics, the public administration literature has opened the peripheral view of social scientists by bringing evidence to bear on three different claims: that regulation causes corruption but under certain conditions; that it is the quality of regulation to hinder corruption; and, that anti-corruption regulation can aggravate the problem of corruption. After having reviewed and discussed the claims, we turn to recent advances in the literature and make suggestions for future research. We make the case for drawing more attention to regulatory policy instruments and point to the crucial stage of rulemaking. Next, we introduce novel ways to model causality and identify how regulation may explain corruption, contrasting the statistical worldview with set-theoretic explanations. Finally, we critically discuss the state of play with measures of corruption and how to improve.European Commissio

Can’t Get No Learning: The Brexit Fiasco through the Lens of Policy Learning

This is the final version. Available on open access from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordIt seems paradoxical to suggest that theories of learning might be used to explain policy failure. Yet the Brexit fiasco connects with recent approaches linking four varieties of policy learning to policy pathologies (Dunlop, 2017; Dunlop and Radaelli, 2013, 2018). This article sets out to explain the UK government’s (mis)management of the Brexit process from June 2016 to May 2019. Drawing on interviews with UK policy makers and stakeholders, we ask how did the UK government seek to learn during the Brexit negotiations? We consider four modes of learning: reflexivity, epistemic, hierarchical, and bargaining. By empirically tracing the policy process and scope conditions for each of these, we argue that learning through the first three modes proved highly dysfunctional. This forced the government to rely on bargaining between competing factions, producing a highly short-termist form of learning which stymied the development of a coherent Brexit strategy. We argue that the analysis of Brexit as a policy process (rather than a political event) reveals how policy dynamics play an important role in shaping the political context within which they are located. The article concludes that public policy analysis can therefore serve to endogenise existing accounts of macro political developments like Brexit.European Commissio