Europeanization and Domestic Employment Policy Change: Conceptual and Methodological Background

The article deals with the differential domestic employment policy adaptation to the European Employment Strategy that occurred over the past years in two European countries—Italy and France. Building on the Europeanization and welfare state change literature, the contribution operationalizes the “goodness of fit” hypothesis and develops a “policy structure” approach for the analysis of domestic employment policy change. The main argument is that domestic adaptation to the European Union depends primarily on the preferences of key institutional and social actors, and not on the specific design of domestic institutions. More in general, the article not only supports the validity of the misfit hypothesis but also shows how the nature and intensity of domestic preferences do explain differential patterns of adaptation to Europe (policy transformation in the Italian case, policy adjustment in the French case) in similar conditions of policy “misfit.”     

The Frugal City

The megacities arising around the planet are like the Internet where many events are taking place simultaneously. The urban scape today is becoming more a space of flows—migrants, trade, capital, information, microbes—than a space of places rooted in an historical identity. The megaurban condition today encompasses many realities, from the glittering generic city‐state of Singapore to the slums climbing up the hillsides around Mexico City or Sao Paulo. In these spaces we work, love and live out the intimate moments of our lives. In these spaces we consume and spew out climate warming gases. In this section, two of the world's “star architects”—Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry—the visionary “arcologist” Paolo Soleri and the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, grasp at chronicling the reality of where we live.     

ON IRON CAGES AND SUBOPTIMAL CHOICES: AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF THE MICRO-FOUNDATIONS OF ISOMORPHISM IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

This study integrates experimental and qualitative data from a sample of public employees to investigate the micro-foundations of the isomorphic pressures that may lead to suboptimal decision making in the context of public administration. When asked to choose between two equally performing systems, subjects in our sample were inclined to favor the alternative that was encouraged by either a coercive, a mimetic, or a normative pressure. Participants tended to give in to isomorphic pressures, even when informed that the encouraged option was inferior. However, letting subjects autonomously infer the inferiority of the encouraged option from numerical data—rather than through an explicit textual prompt—proved effective in neutralizing the risk of sub-optimal decisions under isomorphic pressures. A consequent qualitative inquiry revealed that trust in the recommending institution or group, speculation about alternative performance dimensions, and compatibility with existing standards were the main drivers of suboptimal decision making.     

Europeanisation and social movements: The case of the Stop TTIP campaign

Over the past years, the economic crisis has significantly challenged the ways through which social movements have conceptualised and interacted with European Union institutions and policies. Although valuable research on the Europeanisation of movements has already been conducted, finding moderate numbers of Europeanised protests and actors, more recent studies on the subject have been limited to austerity measures and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has been investigated more from a trade unions’ or an international relations perspective. In this article, the TTIP is used as a very promising case study to analyse social movements’ Europeanisation – that is, their capacity to mobilise referring to European issues, targets and identities. Furthermore, the TTIP is a crucial test case because it concerns a policy area (foreign trade) which falls under the exclusive competence of the EU. In addition, political opportunities for civil society actors are ‘closed’ in that negotiations are kept ‘secret’ and discussed mainly within the European Council, and it is difficult to mobilise a large public on such a technical issue. So why and how has this movement become ‘Europeanised’? This comparative study tests the Europeanisation hypothesis with a protest event analysis on anti‐TTIP mobilisation in six European countries (Italy, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria) at the EU level in the period 2014–2016 (for a total of 784 events) and uses semi‐structured interviews in Brussels with key representatives of the movement and policy makers. The findings show that there is strong adaptation of social movements to multilevel governance – with the growing presence of not only purely European actors, but also European targets, mobilisations and transnational movement networks – with a ‘differential Europeanisation’. Not only do the paths of Europeanisation vary from country to country (and type of actor), but they are also influenced by the interplay between the political opportunities at the EU and domestic levels.     

A stable popularity function? Cross‐national analysis

A considerable body of work explores the relationship between the economy and governmental popularity. These ‘popularity functions’ exhibit a good deal of instability in the economics coefficient, leading some to question its very existence. It is argued in this article that this instability is apparent, rather than inherent. Improvements in model specification, measurement, sample size and estimation reveal a strong and stable economic effect. In particular, fixed and random effects models on pooled time‐series (from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States) are estimated here. The impact of national economic perception on popularity emerges as statistically and substantively significant, across this sample of countries.     

Migration and the Global Crisis: New Prospects for Return? The Case of Ecuadorians in Europe

This article explores the impact of the current recession on Ecuadorian labour migration to Europe. Several factors affect the evolution of this migration system: receiving countries' policies, the labour market demand (and its deterioration) and the scope for the self‐maintenance of migrants' social networks. We especially focus on a relatively less studied issue: emigrant policies, symbolised, in Ecuador, by a pervasive emphasis on migrant return, somewhat echoed even in Spain, as a destination country. Still, a massive return scenario is implausible in the light of migrants' family stabilisation abroad, and of the uncertain prospects for development in their motherland. Even during a worldwide recession, the ‘hidden agendas' in migration policies, along with the distinct time‐scale and the self‐feeding potential of a long‐distance migration system, should be critically appreciated.     

Measuring and Promoting Budget Transparency: The Open Budget Index as a Research and Advocacy Tool

Transparency in public budgeting has been a recognized principle of sound governance for a long time. Yet, reliable measures of budget transparency are hard to come by. This article introduces the Open Budget Index (OBI), a new tool based on surveys by independent researchers that compares key budget information published by governments across the world. Data from the latest survey, published in 2010 and covering 94 countries, reveal that on average, the state of budget transparency around the world is poor. Countries with lower incomes, weaker democratic institutions, and higher dependency on foreign aid and hydrocarbon sales tend to be less transparent. However, a number of countries have improved the quantity and coverage of the budget information that they publish, in some cases following civil society pressure based on OBI findings. More generally, OBI data help identify easy steps that governments and other actors could take to further improve budget transparency.