Change as "Appropriate Adaptation": Administrative Adjustment to European Environmental Policy in Britain and Germany

This paper is looking at European environmental policy from the "second image reversed" perspective. Specifically, it investigates the conditions under which we see administrative change in the EU member states as a consequence of the implementation of EU environmental policies. We adopt a comparative research design analyzing the impact of four environmental policies in Britain and Germany to trace the conditions for adaptation in the context of different administrative structures and traditions. As a starting hypothesis we adopt the institutionalist expectation that administrative adaptation depends on the "goodness of fit" between European policy requirements and existing national structures and procedures. On the basis of our empirical evidence we further refine the notion of "goodness of fit" by looking at the level of embeddedness of national structures in the overall administrative tradition from a static and dynamic perspective. Furthermore, we develop an explanatory framework that links sociological and rational choice variants of institutional analysis

What has happened and what has not happened due to the coronavirus disease pandemic: a systemic perspective on policy change

The societal and policy transformations associated with the coronavirus disease pandemic are currently subject of intense academic debate. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by adopting a systemic perspective on policy change, shedding light on the hidden and indirect crisis effects. Based on a comprehensive analysis of policy agenda developments in Germany, we find that the pandemic led to profound shifts in political attention across policy areas. We demonstrate that these agenda gains and losses per policy area vary by the extent to which the respective areas can be presented as relevant in managing the coronavirus disease crisis and its repercussions. Moreover, relying on the analysis of past four economic crises, we also find that there is limited potential for catching up dynamics after the crisis is over. Policy areas that lost agenda share during crisis are unlikely to make up for these losses by strong attention gains once the crisis is over. Crises have hence substantial, long-term and so far, neglected effects on policymaking in modern democracies

Competition, cooperation and communication: a theoretical analysis of different sources of environmental policy convergence and their interaction

'Vergleichende Studien zu Politiktransfer und Politikdiffusion haben für viele Bereiche eine beträchtliche Konvergenz von Politiken festgestellt. Das gilt insbesondere für die Umweltpolitik. Es ist jedoch noch wenig über die Mechanismen bekannt, die dieses Phänomen verursachen. In diesem theoretischen Beitrag werden drei Faktoren analysiert, die als wichtige internationale Antriebskräfte der zwischenstaatlichen Politikkonvergenz gelten: Regulierungswettbewerb, internationale Kooperation und Harmonisierung sowie transnationale Kommunikation und Policy-Lernen. Wir betrachten dabei nicht nur die jeweiligen isolierten Wirkungen der einzelnen Faktoren, sondern auch die Effekte ihrer Interaktion. Es wird gezeigt, dass die empirisch recht wahrscheinliche Interaktion dieser Mechanismen eine plausible Erklärung bietet für die Kluft zwischen der theoretischen Vorhersage eines 'race to the bottom' der umweltpolitischen Standards und dem Mangel an empirischen Belegen für ein solches Ergebnis.' (Autorenreferat)'Comparative studies on cross-national policy transfer and diffusion emphasize an impressing degree of policy convergence in many areas. This holds true, in particular, for the environmental field. However, we are still confronted with limited knowledge about the mechanisms accounting for this phenomenon. Against this backdrop, we theoretically investigate the impact of three different convergence mechanisms that are generally seen as central sources of cross-national policy convergence: regulatory competition, international cooperation and transnational communication. We focus not only on the isolated effects of each mechanism, but also on the effects of their interaction. As will be shown, the empirically rather likely interaction of different mechanisms constitutes a plausible explanation for the still puzzling gap between the theoretical prediction of a race to the bottom through regulatory competition and the lacking empirical support for this hypothesis.' (author's abstract)

‘It’s the Bureaucracy, Stupid’: the implementation of the Acquis Communautaire in EU candidate countries; 1999-2003

The Central and East European (CEE) countries that had applied for membership in the European Union were confronted with far-reaching requirements in order to bring domestic policies in line with EU standards. Notwithstanding these rather uniform pressures emerging from conditionality, there is considerable variety in alignment performance across the candidate countries and over time. To account for this, we use time series cross-sectional data on the implementation performance of 13 EU candidate countries between 1999 and 2003. Our results indicate that the bureaucratic strength and effectiveness of a country positively influence its ability to adjust domestic arrangements to EU requirements. By contrast, we find no support for veto-player theories of political constraints on legislative change. We hence conclude that the implementation of the acquis communautaire in candidate countries prior to accession has been a question of bureaucratic problems rather than of political veto-manoeuvres

Balancing Trade‐Offs between Policy Responsiveness and Effectiveness: The Impact of Vertical Policy‐Process Integration on Policy Accumulation

In modern democracies, policy stocks pile up over time. In many ways policy accumulation reflects societal modernization and progress. However, if policy accumulation is not matched by corresponding expansions in administrative capacities necessary for policy implementation, a negative trade‐off between responsiveness and policy effectiveness evolves. We argue that aligning policy formulation and implementation activities through vertical policy‐process integration (VPI) may curb policy accumulation towards a more sustainable level. Our conceptualization of VPI builds upon the distinction of two dimensions: (1) bottom‐up integration affecting policy design and improving policies’ effectiveness and (2) top‐down integration concerning the allocation of implementation costs and, hence, constraining responsiveness incentives. It is the central aim of this viewpoint to raise awareness about the importance of VPI as a potential way out of the responsiveness trap that threatens modern democracies

Sustaining statehood: A comparative analysis of vertical policy‐process integration in Denmark and Italy

In response to societal demands, democratic governments constantly adopt new policies. As existing policies are rarely abandoned, policies accumulate over time. Policy accumulation bears the challenge of overburdening implementation bodies, hence undermining policy effectiveness. Any escape from this situation requires democratic governments to strike a balance between policy responsiveness and effectiveness. We posit that the extent to which countries are able to achieve this depends on the vertical integration of processes of policy formulation and implementation. We provide a novel conceptualization of vertical policy‐process integration (VPI) that is based on two channels. While bottom‐up integration captures the extent to which policy implementers can communicate reasons for potential policy failure from the bottom up, top‐down integration indicates the degree to which the policy formulation level has to cover the implementation costs of the policies they produce. We illustrate our argument by an empirical analysis of VPI patterns in Denmark and Italy

Condemned to complexity? Growing state activity and complex policy systems

Does growing state activity inevitably lead to more complex policy systems? In this article, we offer a new, comprehensive approach that systematically differentiates between the size and the complexity of policy portfolios to answer this question. Looking at data from 21 OECD countries over more than three decades (1980–2015) in the areas of social and environmental policy, we find substantial variation in the size and complexity of policy portfolios. While larger state activity is generally associated with growing complexity, this relation still varies both between countries and over time. Our finding suggests that increasing policy complexity is not a “natural given” but that two of the major trends of the last decades—growing state activity and global political integration—provided a very fertile ground that fosters policy complexity. These findings have important implications for analyzing macro patterns of state activity in the 21st century

Autocracies and policy accumulation

The tendency of vote-seeking politicians to produce ever-more policies in response to the citizens’ demands has been identified as a central driver of the process of “policy accumulation.” If we accept this premise, policy accumulation should be a central feature of modern democracies but overall be less pronounced in autocracies. Due to its highly ambivalent nature, policy accumulation and its implications may thus constitute an important but so far neglected facets of the new system competition between democracies and autocracies. In this article, we test this argument in the context of the authoritarian regime of Singapore. Singapore is one of the very few autocracies that display elements of political competition and has a level of socio-economic development that is comparable to advanced democracies. Singapore thus constitutes a least-likely case for low levels of policy accumulation. By studying changes in Singapore’s environmental policy over a period of more than four decades (1976 to 2020) and by contrasting the patterns observed with the policy developments in 21 OECD democracies, we find that autocratic regimes do indeed tend to accumulate less than democratic regimes. More precisely, we find that Singapore (1) has only produced about one-fourth of the environmental policy measures of an “average” democracy and (2) is constantly the country with the lowest level of policy accumulation in our sample. These findings hold even when controlling for alternative explanations, such as the effectiveness of the administration and the government’s ability to opt for stricter and more hierarchical forms of intervention

Liberalisierung und Umweltschutz

Im Zusammenhang mit der Globalisierung von Märkten wird vielfach die Befürchtung eines umweltpolitischen "race to the bottom" geäußert. Der europäische Fall zeigt jedoch, daß ökonomische Integration und Umweltschutz keineswegs unvereinbare Ziele sein müssen, sofern eine geeignete Dynamik supranationaler Kooperation entsteht