The organization of influence on the EC's common agriculturalpolicy: A network approach

The common agricultural policy of the EC with its market regulations is decided at EC level by a multilevel system of government, in which the Commission and the parliamentary parties of the European Parliament play the supranational role and the national ministries of agriculture act as parts of the intergovernmental system of the Council of Ministers. National interest groups have thereby three major access routes to the EC system, first through their national governments, or second indirectly, transmitted by their European peak organizations, or third directly to the supranational EC actors. The network approach is applied to study empirically the densities of access through these various routes. The links between actors in the agricultural policy domain are conceptualized as links for the exchange of resources, the most important resource of a policy domain being the final control of policy decisions. The political actors of the governance system originally hold full control of this valuable resource which they exchange for influence resources possessed by the interest groups, as public support or expert knowledge. Empirically, answers to the network questions depend on the type of resource and the viewpoint of the interviewed actors. An index is developed which indicates the resource flows between actors and the distribution of equilibrium control of policy decisions. It is shown that the national ministers of agriculture depend very much on the support and expertise of their national farmers' lobby, whereas the Commission relies more on contacts within the political sector itself. Multilevel systems need a lot of political coordination, so that the political actors within such systems, especially at the supranational level, seem to deal first of all with each other and not so much with the demand side of politics, compared to the national ministers of agriculture.     

The organization of influence on the EC's common agricultural policy: A network approach

Abstract The common agricultural policy of the EC with its market regulations is decided at EC level by a multilevel system of government, in which the Commission and the parliamentary parties of the European Parliament play the supranational role and the national ministries of agriculture act as parts of the intergovernmental system of the Council of Ministers. National interest groups have thereby three major access routes to the EC system, first through their national governments, or second indirectly, transmitted by their European peak organizations, or third directly to the supranational EC actors. The network approach is applied to study empirically the densities of access through these various routes. The links between actors in the agricultural policy domain are conceptualized as links for the exchange of resources, the most important resource of a policy domain being the final control of policy decisions. The political actors of the governance system originally hold full control of this valuable resource which they exchange for influence resources possessed by the interest groups, as public support or expert knowledge. Empirically, answers to the network questions depend on the type of resource and the viewpoint of the interviewed actors. An index is developed which indicates the resource flows between actors and the distribution of equilibrium control of policy decisions. It is shown that the national ministers of agriculture depend very much on the support and expertise of their national farmers' lobby, whereas the Commission relies more on contacts within the political sector itself. Multilevel systems need a lot of political coordination, so that the political actors within such systems, especially at the supranational level, seem to deal first of all with each other and not so much with the demand side of politics, compared to the national ministers of agriculture.     

Transnational policy influence and the politics of legitimation

Many domains of transnational policy are now governed through dynamic, multilevel governance processes, encompassing transnational, national, and subnational scales. In such settings, both membership of policy communities and distributions of authority within them become more fluid and openly contested—increasing the importance of the politics of legitimation as a basis for distributing influence over policy processes and outcomes. Drawing on insights from theories of organizational and institutional legitimation, this article theorizes three distinctive strategies of policy influence exercised by transnational actors in multilevel governance settings, through which strategic efforts to legitimize transnational actors and forums are deployed as means of transnational policy influence. The three strategies involve: transnational field building, localized network building, and role adaptation. The effects of these influencing strategies on policy processes and outcomes are illustrated with reference to the case of Indonesian land governance, in which highly dynamic, contested, and multiscalar governance processes lend our theorized strategies particular salience.     

Gaining and seeking access: The European adaptation of domestic interest associations

Abstract. The multilevel governance literature on European politics argues that supranational governing arrangements have increased their autonomy vis–à–vis national governments. As private interests increasingly bypass national levels and become active in transnational Euro–level policy networks, national governments are no longer the sole interface between supranational and national levels. In contrast, the European Union might also be conceptualised as a two–level interstate negotiation system, an approach assuming that interests are formed and aggregated at the national level. Societal interests enter the fray of European negotiations via national executives, and private interests bypassing the national level are considered as a rather marginal, even irrelevant, phenomenon. In addition, both accounts expect different outcomes regarding which sorts of private interests – diffuse or specific – seek and gain access to both domestic and European public actors. By analysing the varying network strategies of domestic private actors, in particular interest associations, this article explores some propositions held by these two approaches. After a more comprehensive outline of some hypotheses, evidence collected among public and private actors at both the domestic (Belgian) and European levels will be analysed. In general, the results suggest that Euro–level networks of domestic interests are substantially related to their structural location within the domestic realm, that network strategies tend to be quite bureaucratic and that the sort of interest represented – diffuse or specific – has a considerable effect on gaining and seeking access.     

Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes toward Latinos

Rapid growth in the size of the Latino population has increased the ethnic diversity of urban neighborhoods, transforming the residential experiences of many black Americans. The competition for scarce resources is considered a central force in black-Latino relations and a source of anti-Latino sentiment among blacks. This article examines how the level and the distribution of economic resources within diverse areas affect black attitudes toward Latinos. Drawing on a multilevel dataset of individual racial attitudes and neighborhood characteristics, the analysis reveals that the relative economic status of racial groups is an important influence on black attitudes. In environments where Latinos are economically advantaged relative to their black neighbors, blacks are more likely to harbor negative stereotypes about Latinos, to be reluctant to extend to Latinos the same policy benefits they themselves enjoy, and to view black and Latino economic and political interests as incompatible. While the results suggest that diversity without conflict is possible, they make clear that the prospects for intergroup comity depend on some resolution of blacks' economic insecurities.     

The Institutionalization of Private Governance: How Business and Nonprofit Organizations Agree on Transnational Rules

This article assesses the recent trend of cooperation among antagonistic private actors that results in the creation and implementation of issue-specific transnational norms and rules and the subsequent shift from public to private forms of governance. Many political scientists agree that authority also exists outside of formal political structures. Private actors increasingly begin to make their own rules and standards that acquire authority beyond the international system. This observation is often referred to as private transnational governance as opposed to public or international governance. Although the concept of private governance gains prominence in academic debates, it is not clear how private governance on the global scale is constructed and maintained or what specific or general conditions are necessary for private governance to emerge. Based on the review of common theoretical propositions, this article develops an integrated model along which the necessary conditions for the emergence of private governance can be assessed and understood. As most research has hitherto focused on institutionalized cooperation between business actors (self-regulation), this article takes a closer look at those transnational systems of rule that result out of the enhanced cooperation between profit and nonprofit actors (coregulation).     

Party cues and incumbent assessments under multilevel governance

Politicians' party membership allows voters to overcome incomplete information issues. In this article, we maintain that such ‘party cues’ in multilevel governance structures also induce voters to incorporate their assessment of incumbents at one level of government into their assessment of incumbents at other levels of government. Moreover, we argue that these assessment ‘spillovers’ increase in magnitude with voters' level of political information. They become particularly prominent for voters with higher levels of political knowledge and interest as well as during election periods (when information is less costly and more readily available). Empirical analyses using survey data from Germany covering the period 1990 to 2018 corroborate our theoretical propositions.     

Measuring multi‐level regulatory governance: Organizational proliferation,coordination, and concentration of influence

As regulation increasingly results from the interplay of a wide array of different actors operating at different levels, it has become crucial to focus on how these constellations of regulatory actors operate. Although this research field presents huge potential for theoretical development, we still lack the measurement techniques to allow systematic comparative research. We contribute to filling this gap with four indices measuring crucial characteristics of multi‐actor regulatory arrangements: (i) the scope of organizational proliferation; (ii) the extent of coordination between regulatory actors; (iii) the amount of influence that each individual regulatory actor has on the sector regulation; and (iv) the extent to which the regulatory influence is concentrated in the hands of one or a few actors. We argue that our indices are sufficiently systematic, reliable, and flexible to be applied in a variety of research contexts relating to multi‐level and multi‐actor regulatory governance.     

The impact of state governance structures on management and performance of public organizations: A study of higher education institutions

Legislative statutes are passed by political majorities which support structures that insulate the implementing agency from its political opponents over time. Political actors also respond to different constituencies. Depending on the broad or narrow base of these constituencies, actors favor different kinds of governance structures. We apply this theoretical framework to the question of whether the state governance structures of boards of higher education affect the way university managers allocate resources, develop sources of revenue, and promote research and undergraduate education. Over the past two decades state governments have given considerable attention to state governance issues, resulting in many universities operating in a more regulated setting today. This paper develops a classification of higher education structures and shows the effects of differences in these structures on university management and performance using a data set that covers the period from 1987 to 1998. The analysis suggests that, for most of the measures, productivity and resources are higher at universities with a statewide board that is more decentralized and has fewer regulatory powers. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Get Out on Behalf of Your Group: Electoral Participation of Latinos and Asian Americans

With the continuous inflow of new immigrants, political participation of Latinos and Asian Americans has become increasingly important for understanding the American electoral politics. A few previous studies examining how political participation of Latinos and Asian Americans is contextually determined reported mixed empirical findings, and this paper re-examines the issue by considering how different features of racial contexts interact to influence the voting turnout of individual Latinos and Asian Americans. Theoretically, we present a model of turnout where a rational individual is motivated to participate, not only by individualistic benefits accrued to him- or herself, but also by perceptions of group-level benefits—concerns regarding the welfare of other members of the racial group. We argue that racial contexts provide distinctive (dis-)incentives to participate, by influencing their perception of participatory benefits at the group level. Empirically, we find that the size of the group exerts a significant effect on turnout decisions of Latino and Asian American individuals, and, particularly for Latinos, its effect interacts with the economic status of the group and the overall racial heterogeneity in the county of residence.     

Why Federalism Does Not Always Take Shape: the Cases of Italy and Nepal

Federalism has been discussed as a potential system of governance in many countries, but in some it has failed to take shape. This has been the case in Nepal and, to a certain extent, in Italy. In fact, in Italy the federal option was rejected at the time of Risorgimento, and constitutional reforms in the 2000s never transformed the country into a federation as desired by political actors such as the Northern League despite some decentralization. In Nepal, the 2007 interim constitution specified that the country would be federal, but the first Constituent Assembly elected to write a new constitution was unable to produce a federal map acceptable to the major political parties and the second is wrestling with the same issue. In both cases, federal structuring was attacked by political actors who argued that it could promote disunity, undermine solidarity, and possibly lead to disintegration. This article argues that the idea of federalism held by prominent political actors as promoting division and conflict played strongly against its implementation.     

Citizen Attributions of Blame in Third‐Party Governance

The authors use a survey experiment to examine how structural differences in governance arrangements affect citizens’ notions of who is culpable for poor service quality. More specifically, two questions are investigated: (1) When things go wrong, do citizens attribute more blame to political actors if the provider of government services is a public agency or a private contractor? (2) Does the length of the accountability chain linking political actors to service providers influence citizens’ attributions of blame? The authors hypothesize that provider sector and accountability chain length affect citizens’ perceptions of political actors’ control over service delivery, which, in turn, inform citizens’ attributions of blame. Mixed support is found for this theory.     

Security Sector Reform from a Policy Transfer Perspective: A Comparative Study of International Interventions in the Palestinian Territories,Liberia and Timor-Leste

Security sector reform (SSR), targeting security forces and their management and oversight institutions, has become a major feature of international peace- and statebuilding activities. The article draws on policy transfer research to assess substantive and procedural changes in how international actors intervene in the security governance of fragile or post-conflict states. By comparing transfer processes in Liberia, Timor-Leste and the Palestinian Territories, the article shows that despite variations across political, economic and strategic factors in each domestic context, external SSR interventions showed distinct similarities. SSR interventions expanded their substantive scope over time; less directly coercive mechanisms of persuasion and socialization increasingly replaced the direct imposition of external models of security governance; and the influence of domestic elite actors on transfer processes increased over the duration of interventions.     

Subnational participation in extra-national policy solutions: Kitakyushu City as an intermediate agent in policy coordination

The growing challenges of environment and sustainable development stretch across scales of geographic space and require action at multiple levels of jurisdictions, such as individual level, community level, national level, and global level. Multilevel governance and cross-scale coordination will open up opportunities for a variety of stakeholders to participate in decision-making. While potentially increasing the capacity of governance, the cross-scale and multilevel approaches may face a difficulty in policy coordination created by the plurality of stakeholders and be attended with organizational complexity. This article will examine the potential of subnational participation to make a policy choice, mediated by local governments, to be congruent with global strategies and national mandates in a consistent way. To this end, it will bring a new perspective to Kitakyushu City's experience in Japan as a heuristic test case study. My claim is that subnational actors occupy a strategic position to straddle the division between state and society, between the center and the periphery, and between the domestic and the foreign so they can act as an intermediate agent in reconnecting local action with national policy and turning global strategies into local action for problem solving.     

Private Actors and the State: Internationalization and Changing Patterns of Governance

This article investigates the implications of political and economic internationalization on patterns of governance from a statecentric perspective. The actual patterns of governance in internationalized environments can be related to the respective governance capacity of public and private actors, which hinges in turn on the strategic constellation underlying the provision of a public good. The specific strategic constellation varies in three dimensions: the congruence between the scope of the underlying problem and the organizational structures of the related actors, the type of problem, and the institutional context, all of which involve a number of factors. With this concept in mind, we identify four ideal-typed patterns of governance, enabled by different configurations of public and private capacities to formally or factually influence in various ways the social, economic, and political processes by which certain goods are provided.     

Governing beyond the Centre: A Critique of the Anglo-Governance School

One of the more intriguing theoretical discussions of recent years involves the concept of governance. There is now a substantial body of work concerning the way governance has affected the contribution of central government to the policy process. Possibly the most prominent and influential account of governance theory in British political science is offered by Rod Rhodes. His most recent writings have employed governance theory to explore the institutions, actors and processes of change within the core executive. His 'Anglo-governance' model has emerged as a prevalent and authoritative account of how new methods of governing have emerged in society. Significantly, it is maintained that a distinct shift has taken place in government, from a hierarchical organisation to a fragmented and decentralised entity that is heavily reliant on a range of complex and independent policy networks. There is undoubted evidence that government is a fractured institution that is dependent on state and non-state actors beyond the centre. This paper questions whether such features entail the emergence of a new form of governance. Central government is still highly resourced and has, at its disposal, a range of powers with which to retain influence over public sector agencies. Historical evidence also shows that the British polity has long been decentralised. Thus, it is difficult to see how recent developments have in any way transformed the capacities of the core executive. It seems that alternative ways of conceptualising the institutions, actors and processes of change in government are required. Recent efforts to develop 'organising perspectives', within the intellectual parameters of governance theory, offer a more 'conceptually cautious' treatment of the central state.     

The political nature of brand governance: a discourse analysis approach to a regional brand building process

The present paper takes the empirical phenomenon of place branding as an appropriate point of view to understand the communicative process of brand governance in the realm of the public. The paper explores the modalities through which a brand governance emerges as a negotiated and contested mechanism reproduced through language. By drawing on the analytical approach of interpretative repertoires, the analysis demonstrates that a process of governance can be seen as a ‘text’ in a constant state of negotiation in which the level of involvement in the brand building process can be discursively contested, with language illustrating the ways in which different actors express their positionalities (hegemonic or subalternate). The analysis suggests that this can be seen as a power political process in which politics of space and time are expressed linguistically by the different actors involved in brand governance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Managing Risk and Regulation in European Food Safety Governance

This article focuses on the state of European food safety governance and offers a view on possible future courses of regulatory policymaking. We begin by examining the deficiencies of the current multilevel governance system in European Union (EU) food safety policy, with an empirical focus on Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) systems. We then submit that a regulatory agency model (centralization) might perform better than multilevel governance or renationalization in terms of reducing business uncertainty, promoting food safety enhancing innovation, and improving consumer trust in the food supply. Hence it would make European food markets more resilient to recurrent food safety crises. We also argue that the EU's precautionary approach as applied to some areas of food safety risks is tied to legitimacy enhancing objectives of EU institutional actors. Assuming that supply‐side rents will change over time, we submit that emphasis of regulatory impact analysis (i.e., cost benefit considerations) is likely to increase.     

农村基层治理:科层制抑或反科层化?——基于桂南Q市“联镇包村”制度运作的调研分析

农村基层治理是国家治理体系的重要组成部分,也是各级政府提升社会治理能力的重要抓手。以“包发展、包党建、包稳定”为主导的联镇包村制度是地方政府回应国家加强农村基层治理的一项制度安排,在制度运行中显现出如下特点:组织高层依赖权威治理,化解政策执行阻力;委派单位依赖代理治理,缓和基层社会矛盾;驻村干部依赖指标治理,提高主体责任意识的科层制路径依赖特性。在压力型体制下,不同行动者的行动逻辑显现出差异化:组织高层由“权威动员”向“参与互动”转变;委派单位由“分利失序”向“合作共治”转变;驻村干部由“被动回应”向“主动服务”转变。这种反科层化的运作方式推动联镇包村制度运行,以此提升基层自治组织的治理能力,进而推动农村基层走向“善治”。     

Priming the Parish Pump

Abstract

In this article we argue that the almost exclusive focus of political communications research on national political actors and agencies has led to an inadequate understanding of the functioning, the relevance, and the influence of local political communications strategies. This paper seeks to redress this neglect through exploring political marketing strategies of national political actors and agencies which have implications for local political communications; and political marketing strategies of local political actors and agencies and their implications for local political communications, with specific reference to the local newspaper coverage of the local campaign in the 2001 UK General Election. Drawing on a unique and extensive analysis of local newspapers' election reporting, combined with detailed interviews with journalists, editors, politicians and their agents, we argue that news management strategies enacted at a local level were characterised by an exchange relationship in which, although parties traded information for editorial space, the local news media retained a dominant role. Thus, although parties were, to differing degrees, successful in securing coverage of their candidates and policies, this success was always achieved in the context of local newspapers setting the broader agenda.