The Islamic Republic of Iran and the European Union (EU) have not yet established formal diplomatic relations, but since 1979 the Union and its member states have had various strong if often conflictual interactions. The relationship has been marked by distinct phases that reflect the emerging character of the partners, a theocratic republic on the one hand and a Union of interdependent democratic states on the other. While mutual economic interests have formed the basis for substantial interactions, relations with member states and the EU itself have been colored by a long and sometimes hurtful history of European states’ role in Iranian politics, including the Russian and British imperial influence over Persia in the late 19th and early 20th century, the British (and American) involvement in the coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953, and the French hosting of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an avowed critic of the Pahlavi dynasty, prior to the anti-authoritarian revolution in 1979. Over time, the relationship has substantially shaped the character and direction of the politics of the EU’s common foreign and security policy, resulting in more policy coherence between member states and the EU, more policy autonomy, particularly vis-á-vis the United States, and more proactive behavior, such as during the nuclear negotiations leading to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (in 2015). By engaging with a problematic member of the nonproliferation treaty, the EU not only specified and thus strengthened the treaty, but it also grew into an international nonproliferation actor to reckon with.
Article
Iran and European Union Politics
Sebastian Harnisch
Article
Justice and Home Affairs in the European Union
Florian Trauner and Ariadna Ripoll Servent
Justice and home affairs (JHA) is one of the most salient policy fields at European Union (EU) level. It deals with issues closely related to the sovereignty of member states including immigration, borders, and internal security. This article takes stock of the policy’s development and current academic debates. It argues that EU justice and home affairs is at a crossroads. Most EU actors underline the value added of European cooperation to tackle transnational threats such as terrorism and organized crime as well as the challenge of international migration. Indeed, the EU has increased its operational cooperation, data-sharing and legislative activities. The EU home affairs agencies, notably the European Police Office (Europol) and European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), have been substantially empowered. Yet JHA has also become a playing field for those attempting to politicize the European integration process. Therefore, recent years have seen major conflicts emerge that risk fragmenting the EU. These include controversies over the distribution of asylum seekers within the EU and the upholding of rule of law standards in some Eastern European states. Scholars have followed these developments with interest, contributing to a multifaceted and rich literature on aspects such as the dynamics of EU decision-making and the policy’s impact on the member states’ respect for fundamental rights and civil liberties. Promising avenues of further research include the implications of the politicization of the field and the consequences of ever more interconnected internal security databases and technologies.
Article
Key Actors in the Management of Crises: European Union
Arya Honarmand and Mark Rhinard
In Europe, the management of severe, cross-border crises is shared increasingly among actors and institutions at local, national, and supranational governance levels. The supranational political system of the European Union (EU) allows for substantial delegation of collective powers for public policymaking—and that delegation extends to crisis-management-related policies. Those policies and the crisis management “capacities” they lead to, however, are diverse and fragmented. They span the EU’s institutions, cover multiple sectors, and reflect different degrees of EU legal competence. The European Commission and its agencies house and manage most crisis-related policies, while the Council of Ministers of the European Union has its own capacities and provides a degree of political direction. EU agencies, and the European External Action Service (since 2010), contain yet more crisis-management-related capacities. These developments have grown mainly through crisis-driven expansion, albeit in an incremental and dispersed way, followed by consolidation. Scholars from the fields of international relations, public administration, and security studies have been slow to identify these developments. New research is needed on the subtle dynamics driving policy growth, the effectiveness and efficiency of these arrangements, and the comparative dimension with other regional crisis management systems in the world.
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Key Actors in the Management of Crises: International and Regional Organizations
Eva-Karin Gardell and Bertjan Verbeek
In crisis-ridden times, when events like the COVID-19 pandemic, acts of terrorism, and climate change-induced crises are making constant headlines, states, businesses, and individuals alike look to international organizations (IOs) to help them weather the storm. How can the role of IOs be better understood in the context of crisis and crisis management? For a start, it requires a distinction between objective and subjective crisis perspectives in studying IOs. From an objective perspective, IOs are examined as unitary actors that have the aim of contributing to the stability of the international political system. On the other hand, in a subjectivistic approach, IOs’ actual crisis management is the focus. In this perspective, the emphasis is on an IO’s internal life, that is, its perceptions, bureau politics, and decision-making. In the exploration of these issues, IOs can no longer by studied as entities but have to be unwrapped into small groups and individuals, such as members of secretariats or member state’s top politicians. As borne out by theories developed by scholars of crisis management and foreign-policy analysis, centralization and cognitive bias are of special interest in the study of IOs. IOs’ crisis management has four crisis phases and tasks: sense-making, decision-making, meaning-making, and crisis termination. Finally, crises may prove a threat to, or an opportunity for, IOs. Transnational crises may usher in IOs’ foundation and flourishing, or they may contribute to IOs’ demise.
Article
Leadership and Change in the Public Sector
Jose Luis Mendez
The nature and evolution of the field of studies of public sector leadership can be understood by focusing on four theoretical orientations: institutional, transformational, collaborative, and contingent. The first one argues that, within a democracy, public sector executives do not exercise—or should not exercise—a strong leadership. The second one, on the contrary, stresses their “transformational” role. The third orientation favors more horizontal leading styles, while the last one argues that all the previous types of leadership could emerge depending on the specific conditions. Each of these four orientations takes a specific position toward change and has led to a considerable number of books and articles. This clearly shows that leadership is an important issue in the study of the public sector. It also shows the theoretical fragmentation present in this field and that there is not a fit-all type of leadership. Paradoxically, there is still a noticeable lack of research on some topics, such as the causes and effects of leadership. Thus, there is not a clear understanding yet of the extent to which leading within government makes a positive difference and, in case it does, of how to make it happen. Filling these voids would certainly help this field to gain greater relevance within the wider field of leadership studies as well as in the social sciences in general.
Article
Learning and Crisis
Edward Deverell
Crises shake societies and organizations to their foundation. Public authorities, private companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and members of the general public all have a role to play in managing crises. From a public administration perspective, however, responsibility clearly falls on politicians and strategic decision makers in public authorities. The task to manage crises is getting increasingly challenging, with more actors and sectors involved, unclear lines of accountability, and close connections between risks, organizations, networks, and interests. This means that the fundamental opportunity to improve structures for crisis management and preparedness, which requires learning from previous experiences, is increasing in salience. Previous research into the political dimensions of crisis management holds that learning is a key part of crisis management and a fundamental challenge to crisis leadership. The criteria that set crises apart from day-to-day work—that is, core values at stake, time pressure, and substantial uncertainty—also challenge the learning parts of crisis management. Learning in relation to crisis is essential for earnest investigation into what went wrong and why the crisis occurred, and, moreover, to make sure that it does not happen again. As organizations play a key role in crisis management, organizational learning is a useful concept to explore learning in relation to crises. Furthermore, the concept of crisis-induced learning has proven salient in bridging the literatures of crisis management and learning. Crisis-induced learning is understood as purposeful efforts, triggered by a perceived crisis and carried out by members of an organization working within a community of inquiry. These efforts, in turn, lead to new understanding and behavior on the basis of that understanding. The concept of crisis-induced learning can help add clarity to what learning is in relation to crises and who the learning agents are in these processes. Other important theorizing efforts in bridging crisis and learning include categorizing learning into its cognitive and behavioral aspects as well as its temporal aspects including inter- and intra-crisis learning. Finally, relating to issues of methodology, it is useful to distil ways to measure and analyze learning and to explain how crisis-induced learning is distinguished from other types of experiential learning.
Article
The Legitimacy of Civil Services in the 21st Century
Christoph Demmke
For a lengthy period, governments worldwide believed that civil servants should be linked to the authority of the state and could not be compared to employees in the private sector. This group of public employees were perceived as agents of the “Leviathan” (Hobbes), intended to uphold the rule of law and to implement government policies. In this conception, where the state was separated from society and citizens, it was inconceivable that civil servants could be compared to other employees.
Towards the end of the 20th century, in almost all countries worldwide, reform measures have encouraged the change, deconstruction and decentralization of the civil service on all fronts. In the meantime, there are now as many different categories of public employees as there are different public functions, organizations, and tasks. Overall, the number of civil servants has decreased and some countries have abolished traditional civil service features. Moreover, working conditions and working life have changed. Thus, whereas for a long time, civil servants were very different from the employees of private companies, this distinction is much less clear in the early 21st century. Such a situation had been unthinkable 10 years earlier.
Consequently, the traditional concept of the civil service as a distinct employment group and status is slowly disappearing.
In addition, current organizational reform trends have made public administration as such into a somewhat heterogeneous body. In the early 21st century, civil services have become more diverse, less hierarchical and standardized, more flexible, diverse, representative and less separated from the citizenry than they were traditionally. Whereas the term “bureaucracy” had represented clear values (hierarchy, formalism, standardization, rationality, obedience etc.), new reforms have brought with them new values, but also more conflicting ones, and value dilemmas. Whereas most governments still agree that human resource management (HRM) policies should continue to be based on rational principles such as the rule of law, equity, and equality, the increasing popularity of behavioral economics and behavioral ethics and the trend toward the delegation of responsibilities to employees through different concepts such as engagement, lifelong learning, and competency development, illustrate that current trends run counter to classical bureaucratic styles. Moreover, digitalization and flexibilization trends are changing work systems and leading to an individualization of HR practices by facilitating the monitoring and measuring of individual efforts and engagement practices.
Thus, the problem with this description of administration in the 21st century is obvious. Whereas the terms “bureaucracy” or “civil service” can be defined and broken down into concrete definitions, this is much less the case with the new civil service systems and new administrative models.
However, stereotypes around public organizations and civil servants continue to survive, even though they were shaped in a world that no longer exists. Even in the early 21st century, many people still have the perception that civil servants work in an environment that is clearly separated from the private sector. Also, most public-service motivation theories start from the assumption that civil servants are different because they are civil servants.
Article
LGBT Military Service Policies in the United States
Andrew Goodhart and Jami K. Taylor
For most of its history, the U.S. military has maintained a policy of exclusion toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people serving in uniform. The justifications for these exclusions have included the view that being homosexual or transgender is a psychological disorder, that it undermines military morale and effectiveness, and a fear that LGBT people would be vulnerable to foreign espionage. Explicit policies banning consensual homosexual sex—and excluding from service those who engage in it—date to the period between World Wars I and II, but de facto efforts at exclusion have existed since the early days of the republic.
Regulations governing homosexuals in the military came under pressure in the 1970s and 1980s as societal views toward lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people changed, and those LGB service members discharged under the policy increasingly challenged their treatment in court. (Public pressure to change regulations governing transgender people in the military arose mostly in the 2000s, though litigation efforts date to the 1970s.) In addition to general shifts in public and legal opinion, the debate over LGB people serving in the U.S. military was affected by the experience of foreign militaries that allow LGB people to serve. United States law began to loosen formal restrictions on LBG people serving in uniform with the passage of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) in 1994, but it still required LGB people to serve in secret. Changing public perceptions of LGB people and problems implementing the ban galvanized support for eliminating such restrictions. In 2010, President Obama signed legislation repealing DADT and removing all restrictions on LGB people serving in the military. However, transgender people do not enjoy the same rights. The Trump administration has revised Obama-era rules on transgender service members to enable greater exclusion. The issue is being contested in the courts and appears ripe for further political and legal dispute.
Article
Mainline Protestants and Divestment as International Economic Activism
Maia Hallward
Mainline Protestant denominations in the United States have a history of using divestment as an economic form of nonviolent moral activism. While such activism can have a domestic focus, at times church divestment efforts have emphasized foreign policy issues as an extension of church activism in the areas of social justice and moral reform. Churches have used economic activism such as divestment from apartheid South Africa and investment screens to prevent church pension and other funds from being used for products and services—such as alcohol, tobacco and munitions—deemed “immoral” by church bodies. The case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict illustrates the broader themes and tensions involved in church divestment debates, given the media coverage that has been generated by the topic due to the special relationship between Christians and the holy land and the troubled history of Christianity and anti-Semitism. Some Protestant denominations, particularly those with a history of engagement in Israel/Palestine, have responded to the Palestinians’ call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to advance their freedom and human rights. However, such responses have not been immune from debate and controversy. Some mainline Protestant denominations, including the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), the United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church have debated resolutions dealing with church divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Such resolutions have resulted in pushback from some parties, including efforts to criminalize boycott of Israel.
Article
Multi-Level Governance and Public Administration
Edoardo Ongaro
The literature on multi-level governance (MLG) and the field of the administrative sciences and public administration (PA) can be fruitfully integrated in order to generate knowledge about “the administrative dimension of MLG.” MLG may be defined by Piattoni as “the simultaneous activation of governmental and non-governmental actors at various jurisdictional levels” and perspectives derived from MLG may be applied to a wide set of issues spanning from political mobilization (politics), to policymaking (policy), to state restructuring (polity). It is along each of these sets of issues that it is possible to delineate the contribution that the field of PA can provide to the development of MLG. To MLG as political mobilization, the PA literature brings insights about participatory approaches and collaborative governance. To MLG as policy in multi-level settings, the PA literature brings insights about the functioning of multi-level administration and the role of a multi-level bureaucracy in policymaking processes occurring in compound political systems; the PA literature also contributes insights on public accountability in systems where decision responsibility is blurred, and issues of legitimacy arise. To MLG as polity restructuring, the PA literature offers insights on the administrative dimension of polity restructuring processes, as well as on the dynamics of systemic change and the change management of public governance arrangements. The study of MLG may benefit from drawing from a range of conceptual tools and models developed in the field of PA. Complementarily, PA as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship may benefit from the perspective of MLG, which provides it with a platform to expand the application of concepts like those of collaborative governance; bureaucratic influence on policymaking; public accountability in multi-actor, multi-level settings; or systemic-level change management. In this sense, the generation of knowledge about the administrative dimension of MLG is an addition to both MLG studies and to the field of PA.
Article
Network Management in Public Administration: The Essence of Network and Collaborative Governance
Erik-Hans Klijn
Governments operate more and more in networks and collaborative settings that require more horizontal forms of steering. This mostly is called network management and refers to all deliberative attempts to guide processes in collaborative and network settings. Empirical research has shown that network management is crucial for the performance of network and collaborative processes. But the importance of network management also means that the accountability of network managers must be organized properly.
Article
The Ordinary Legislative Procedure
Maja Kluger Dionigi and Anne Rasmussen
The ordinary legislative procedure (OLP), previously known as co-decision, has marked a significant milestone in the development of the European Union (EU) and transformed the way its institutions interact. What was initially seen as a cumbersome decision-making procedure subject to considerable criticism ended up being quite successful. The workings of the OLP have gradually developed, including both informal and formal rule changes to ensure a smoother functioning of the procedure. While the EU Council is still seen as the strongest body in the interinstitutional balance, the European Parliament (EP) is a co-legislator in most policy areas. After introducing the option to conclude legislation at first reading, so-called early agreements have become the norm in the OLP. The increase in early agreements by means of trilogues has speeded up decision-making but has not come without costs. Concerns have been raised about the transparency of trilogues and the accountability of the actors involved. Not surprisingly, these concerns have led to a shift in the research of the OLP from an emphasis on the powers of the different EU institutions to early agreements and their consequences for democratic legitimacy. Our careful review of the EU institutions’ own rules and practices governing trilogue negotiations shows that the rules and procedures for the conduct of negotiations have been adapted significantly over time. While there is a continued need for the EU to keep enforcing openness in its procedures, OLP interinstitutional bargaining does not operate in a rule-free environment. Yet most democratic scrutiny has been directed at the internal decision-making processes in the EP rather than at maximizing openness on the Council side or with respect to input from interest groups in the negotiation processes.
Article
Organization Theory and Public Administration
Tom Christensen
Organizational theories can be classified into three types—structural, cultural, and mythical. The structural perspective is based in “bounded rationality” and focuses on how formal structures influence the thoughts and actions of public actors. According to this perspective, leaders are central in decision-making processes and are scoring high on rational calculation and control, achieving public goals using the formal structure as a tool. The leaders could either hierarchical dominate decisions or there could be negotiations among them. The cultural perspective focuses on the role of informal norms and values in public organizations; how they develop and their impact. Gradual institutional development by adapting to internal and external pressure is creating unique or distinct cultural identities. Concepts like path dependency and cultural compatibility are central. The mythical perspective focuses on the social construction of reality and how symbols have importance in public organizations. Political and administrative leaders often talk in one way and act in another, meaning that it’s a loose coupling between talk and action. Symbols may be important in supporting instrumental actions. The dynamics between the theories in explaining public decision-making theory is discussed. It’s argued that these theories in combination with democratic theories are needed to develop a specific set of theories for studying public organizations, because the public sector is distinct from the private sector. The theories can be used to analyze decision-making in public organizations, whether related to agenda-setting, policy-making, negotiations, regulation, implementation, public reforms, and so forth. It’s discussed a research agenda where the potential of the theories for researching public decision-making is discussed and examples given.
Article
Pandemic Preparedness and Responses to the 2009 H1N1 Influenza: Crisis Management and Public Policy Insights
Erik Baekkeskov
From the 1990s and onward, governments and global health actors have dedicated resources and policy attention to threats from emerging infectious diseases, particularly those with pandemic (i.e., global epidemic) potential. Between April 2009 and August 2010, the world experienced the first pandemic in this new era of global preparedness, the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. In line with expectations generated during preparedness efforts in the preceding years, the 2009 H1N1 outbreak consisted of the rapid spread of a novel influenza virus. At the urging of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the years prior to 2009, governments had written pandemic plans for what to do if a pandemic influenza occurred. Some had also taken costly steps to improve response capacity by stockpiling antiviral drugs developed against influenza viruses, pre-purchasing vaccines (which, in turn, led pharmaceutical companies to develop pandemic influenza vaccine models and production capacity), asking domestic healthcare institutions and other organizations to write their own specific pandemic plans, and running live exercises based on constructed scenarios. Aside from departments and agencies of national governments, these preparations involved international organizations, private companies, local governments, hospitals, and healthcare professionals.
How can social science scholarship make use of policies and actions related to pandemic preparedness and response, and 2009 H1N1 responses in particular, to generate new insights? The existing literatures on pandemic preparedness and responses to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic illustrate that sites of similarity and difference in pandemic preparedness and response offer opportunities for practical guidance and theory development about crisis management and public policy, as well as policy learning between jurisdictions. Because many jurisdictions and governmental actors were involved, pandemic preparations during the early 2000s and responses to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic offer rich grounds for comparative social science as well as transboundary crisis management research. This includes opportunities to identify whether and how crises involve unique or relatively ordinary political dynamics. It also involves unusual opportunities for learning between jurisdictions that dealt with related issues. Government preparations and responses were often informed by biomedical experts and officials who were networked with each other, as well as by international public health organizations, such as WHO. Yet the loci of preparedness and response were national governments, and implementation relied on local hospitals and healthcare professionals. Hence, the intense period of pandemic preparedness and response between about 2000 and 2010 pitted the isomorphic forces of uniform biology and international collaboration against the differentiating forces of human societies.
Social scientific accounts of biosecuritization have charted the emerging awareness of new and untreatable infectious diseases and the pandemic preparedness efforts that followed. First, since about 1990, public health scholars and agencies have been increasingly concerned with general biosecurity linked to numerous disease threats, both natural and man-made. This informed a turn from public health science and policy practice that relied on actuarial statistics about existing diseases to use of scenarios and simulations with projected (or imagined) threats. Second, new disease-fighting prospects presented opportunities for entrepreneurial political and public administrative bodies to “securitize” infectious disease threats in the late 1990s and early 2000s, implying greater empowerment of some agencies and groups within policy systems. Finally, influenza gained a particularly prominent role as a “natural” biosecurity threat as major powers dedicated significant resources to managing the risks of bioterror after September 2001. In subsequent pandemic preparedness efforts, potentially very deadly and contagious influenza became the world community’s primary focus.
In turn, the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic occurred in the wake of this historic surge in global and national pandemic and, more broadly, biosecurity preparedness efforts. The pandemic led to responses from almost every government in the world throughout 2009 and into 2010, as well as international organizations for public health and medicines. In the wake of the pandemic, formal and scholarly reviews of “lessons learned” sought to inform and influence next steps in pandemic preparedness using the rich panoply of 2009 H1N1 response successes and failures. These generally show that many of the problems often identified in crisis response were repeated in pandemic response. But they also suggest that the rich and varied pandemic experiences offer potential to spread good crisis management practice between jurisdictions, rather than just between events within one jurisdiction.
Finally, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic experience allowed careful and in-depth studies of policymaking dynamics relevant to political science, public policy, and public administration theory. Interest-based politics (“politics as usual”) offers partial explanations of the 2009 H1N1 responses, as it does for many public policies. However, the studies of 2009 H1N1 response-making reveal that science and scientific advice (“unusual” politics because scientists are often sidelined in day-to-day policymaking) strongly shaped 2009 H1N1 responses in some contexts. Hence, some of the pandemic response experiences offer insights that are otherwise hard to empirically verify into how sciences (or scientific advisors and networks) become powerful and use power when they have it. As mentioned, the numerous national pandemic response processes during 2009 generated sharply differing pandemic responses. Notably, this was true even among relatively similar countries (e.g., EU member states) and, indeed, subnational regions (e.g., U.S. states). It was also true even when policymaking was dominated by epidemiological and medical experts (e.g., countries in Northwestern Europe). The studies show that global and national scientific leaders, and the pandemic response guidance or policies they made, relied mostly on pre-pandemic established ideas and practices (national ideational trajectories, or paradigms) in their pandemic response decisions. While data about 2009 H1N1 were generated and shared internationally, and government agencies and experts in numerous settings engaged in intense deliberation and sensemaking about 2009 H1N1, such emerging information and knowledge only affected global and national responses slowly (if ever), and, at most, as course alterations.
Article
Patronage and Public Administration
Francisco Panizza, B. Guy Peters, and Conrado Ramos Larraburu
The concept of patronage refers to the power of political actors to appoint trusted individuals by discretion to nonelective positions in the public sector. This proposed new definition avoids an exclusive association with less developed countries and recognizes the presence of patronage in modern democracies, drawing a distinction with broader terms such as clientelism and politicization. Patronage differs from clientelism because the reasons for providing patronage include a list of other motives beyond the classic particularistic allocation of public resources. At the same time, patronage is not strictly equal to politicization, as this definition reduces the influence that politicians exert on the administrative machinery to a distribution of posts. In specifying what patronage is in narrower terms, this definition merges two different literatures, one associated with institutions and political parties, and another with bureaucracies, public policy, and governance issues. Even though the meritocratic civil service is a hallmark of modern democracies, the presence of political appointees in these societies is universal. Patronage provides some benefits for governance, and any normative assessment of this type of appointment should consider the costs and benefits of this practice within each particular political and cultural context.
Article
Policy Instruments and Administrative Capacities
Kai Wegrich
Administrative capacities are required to give effect to policy instruments. While seemingly obvious, policy research has, as yet, not systematically linked these two perspectives. The policy instrument perspective emerged in the context of implementation research and the wider debate about changing modes of governance. Administrative capacities and resources always played a role in this research, but cumulative empirical exploration or theory building has remained underdeveloped. A stronger integration of administrative capacity perspectives into research on policy instruments is essential so as to progress our understanding regarding the choice, design, and operation of policy instruments. A stronger policy orientation in research on administrative capacities can help to address limitations of indicator-based studies of capacity, which currently dominate empirical research on administrative capacities. The design and choice of policy instruments has an effect on administrative capacities: Capacity-reinforcing policies can be distinguished from capacity-undermining ones. A challenge for future research is under which conditions will politicians invest in administrative capacities, an investment that will only yield (uncertain) positive outcomes in the medium term.
Article
Policy Integration: Challenges for Public Administration
Christoph Knill, Christina Steinbacher, and Yves Steinebach
Modern policymaking becomes an ever more complex and fragmented endeavor: Across countries, the pile of public policies is continuously growing. The risk of unintended interactions and ineffective policies increases. New and cross-cutting challenges strain the organizational setup of policymaking systems. Against this background, policy integration is assumed to present an antidote by improving the coherence, consistency, and coordination of public policies as well as of the processes that produce these policy outputs.
Although various research attempts focus on policy integration, common concepts and theories are largely missing. The different facets of the phenomenon have only been covered disproportionally and empirical analyses remained fragmented. On these grounds, a more comprehensive and systematic view on policy integration is needed: To cope with complexity, governments are required to streamline and reconcile their products of policymaking (i.e., every single policy). Here, policymakers need to check for interactions with policies already adopted on the same level as well as with policies put in place by other levels of government (e.g., subnational). Moreover, policy integration also implies the creation and development of policymaking processes that systematically link political and administrative actors across various policy arenas, sectors, and levels. By elaborating on these process and product components of policy integration as well as on their horizontal and vertical manifestations, the different perspectives on policy integration are synthesized and embedded into a systematic framework.
On the basis of this scheme of identifying four policy integration categories, it becomes clear that there are still loopholes in the literature. As these blind spots culminate in the absence of almost any concept on vertical policy process integration, a way of capturing the phenomenon is introduced through arguing that vertical policy process integration depends on the structural linkages between the policy formulation at the “top” and the implementation level at the “bottom.” More precisely, it is necessary to take account of the extent to which the policy producers have to carry the burden of implementation, and the degree to which the implementers can influence the policy design over the course of formulation.
The proposed framework on policy integration is intended to serve as a guide for future research and to help to identify those aspects of policy integration in which further research efforts are required. Only in this way can policy integration as a theoretical and empirical concept be applied systematically across policy contexts—covering different countries, levels, and sectors— and serve as a stimulus for better policymaking.
Article
Political Parties in the European Union
Karl Magnus Johansson and Tapio Raunio
Media often portrays European Union (EU) decision-making as a battleground for national governments that defend the interests of their member states. Yet even the most powerful individuals, such as the German chancellor, the French president, or the Commission president, are party politicians. At the same time the consistent empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) means that the party groups of European-level “Europarties”—political parties at European level—are in a key position to shape EU legislation. The Parliament has also become more directly involved in the appointment of the Commission, with the results of EP elections thus influencing the composition of the Commission.
Examining the “partyness” of European integration, this article argues that scholarly understanding of the role of parties in the EU political system has taken great strides forward since the turn of the millennium. This applies especially to the EP party groups, with research focusing particularly on voting patterns in the plenary. This body of work has become considerably more sophisticated and detailed over the years; it shows that the main EP groups do achieve even surprisingly high levels of cohesion and that the left–right dimension is the primary axis of contestation in the chamber. It nonetheless also emphasizes the continuing relevance of national parties that control candidate selection in EP elections. Considering that most votes in the Parliament are based on cooperation between the two largest groups, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the center-left Party of the European Socialists (PES), future research should analyze in more detail how these groups build compromises.
Actual Europarties, however, remain relatively unexplored. Case studies of treaty reforms or particular policy sectors reveal how individual Europarties have often wielded decisive influence on key integration decisions or key appointments to EU institutions. The Europarty meetings held in conjunction with European Council summits are particularly important in this respect. The regular, day-to-day activities of Europarties deserve more attention, both regarding decision-making and vertical links between national parties and their Europarties. Overall, it is probably more accurate to characterize Europarties as networks of like-minded national parties or as loose federations of member parties, especially when compared with the often centralized and strongly disciplined parties found in the member states.
Article
The Politics of Crisis Terminology
Allan McConnell
The politics of crisis terminology is rarely examined directly. Crisis is an “umbrella,” under which resides a multitude of terms such as accidents, emergencies, fiascos, disasters, and catastrophes, as well as variations such as natural disasters, transboundary crises, and mega-crises. Yet the sheer diversity and frequent ambiguity among terms reflects the “politics” of how societies and political actors seek to cope with and address extreme events, which often pose a mixture of threat and opportunity. Central to an understanding is how (a) different terms are means of framing issues such as the scale and causes of the crisis, (b) crisis terms are part of governing strategies, and (c) nongovernmental actors (opposition parties, media, lobby groups, social movements, and citizens) can seek to influence government. A pivotal point in developing an understanding of crisis terminology is that rather bemoaning the lack of singular meanings for crisis and associated terms, or criticizing actors for “abuse” of the terms, one should recognize and accept that complex and contested crisis language and definitions are in themselves manifestations of politics in political societies.
Article
The Politics of Fires and Haze in Southern Southeast Asia
Helena Varkkey
Transboundary haze pollution originating from fires in Southern Southeast Asia affects about half of the countries in Southeast Asia with varied intensities on an almost annual basis. Haze not only affects visibility but also causes widespread health problems, transportation disruptions, and other socioeconomic issues. This haze and the fires that cause it have been a key topic for environmental politics research in the region since the late 1990s. This has largely been driven by one overarching objective: how to prevent haze from returning in the following years. However, conditions on the ground (mostly in Indonesia and in the larger Southeast Asian region) have been changing and evolving drastically, which has resulted in a dynamic research agenda that has to keep up.
Within the context of environmental politics, fires and haze can be viewed through the broad lens of national interest. There is a strong link between the severity of haze and the burgeoning agribusiness sector in the region: that of oil palm in particular. Oil palm is a very important crop in the region, with Indonesia and Malaysia generating almost 90% of total global palm oil output. Hence, national and business interest theories have often been used as a framework for research in this area, with commercial oil palm plantations often being the unit of analysis. However, this has been called to question lately as these plantations face increasing market pressure to act more sustainably. A new group of actors that have since been highlighted are smallholders, either independent or in contract with larger plantations. There is potentially much to be uncovered with regard to the relationships between smallholders and commercial plantations and how they affect patterns of fire use and global sustainability issues.
Related to this is the ever-evolving collection of local, regional, and national policies (and related enforcement issues) on land and fire use in Indonesia. One key area of contention is the use of peatlands. Fires on peat produce the thick, sooty smoke that travels across national boundaries, and they are notoriously hard to put out. Political research in this area is heavily framed by a tough debate between the scientific community and socioeconomic concerns. While peatlands play an important role in the global climate change balance, they also face immense pressure for development fueled by the scarcity of land.
The regional context has also been an important theme for haze research. Haze primarily affects the Southern Southeast Asian subregion, and the major players of the palm oil sector come from this area. The Indonesian palm oil sector is a vibrant combination of Malaysian, Singaporean, and local companies. And the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been the hub of cooperation and mitigation activities over haze. Hence, many scholars have searched for answers at the regional level. However, new national developments, such as Singapore’s Transboundary Haze Pollution Act, suggest that countries may be losing confidence in regional efforts.
