Contenu du sommaire : Regular Issue

The article addresses the production of indicators as policy instruments in European public policy. It discusses the relevant literature on sociology of quantification and European public policy and applies this theoretical framework to the case of European judicial administration policy. Presenting the historical and institutional premises to the creation of two projects of judicial performance assessment by the Council of Europe and the European Commission, as well as their methodology, the article argues that the selection of indicators is a litmus test of debates over the strategies and institutional goals of the organisations proposing them. Connecting the previous analysis with the use of these instruments in the policy-making sphere, the article points out that evaluation tools in European policy, rather than serving merely as informative tools, produce empowerment side-effects in the policy arena for the organisations that developed them. In European judicial policy, indicators provide a sufficiently loose framework to solve vertical and horizontal cooperation problems at the international level, determine policy goals through the selection of areas of measurement and evaluation, and provide proof to influence local and national policy-makers over reforms either through lesson-drawing, persuasion or conditionality.

Educational systems around the world have undergone major reforms since the 1980s, with largely disappointing results. The objective of this paper is to understand the reasons behind the lackluster results with the purpose of devising ways to address them. Analysis in the paper is based on the understanding that the education sector is characterized by distinct functional imperatives that need to be addressed in policy responses that must involve a wide array of actors to be effective. In this view, education policy is fundamentally about establishing a governance structure to ensure that all the essential functions necessary to achieve the chosen policy goals are performed. Accordingly, the paper proposes a governance framework for education comprising political and operational functions, which it then applies to education policy reforms in the Philippines since the 1970s. The analysis finds that the reforms have focused on financing and decentralization issues while overlooking many other critical governance functions. The lackluster results are unsurprising given that the sector has been beset by many problems unrelated to centralized bureaucratic administration and which have been left unattended. The conclusions regarding the importance of comprehensive governance to emerge from this study are relevant not only for understanding education policy reforms in the Philippines and elsewhere but will also help develop a fuller understanding of the functioning of the education sector in general.

Vouchers as tools of provision of social and individual subsidies are rather marked politically as they have been promoted by economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Despite their controversial political sense, vouchers have spread widely in the 2000 among the French local governments to provide individual subsidy. While in the USA the debate is strong between supporters and opponents of voucher systems, in France, the apparent neutrality of vouchers permitted them to spread at a local and regional scale without particular political tension. Our research, based on 45 qualitative interviews and on a wide source research within the local governments and private actors, showed that this silent spread is mainly due to the marketing and lobbying action of voucher companies that have done a lot to neutralize the vouchers and avoid all political debate on its their strong liberal roots.

Vertical coordination is a significant problem in many if not most countries. These problems are exacerbated in policy implementation related to issues that cut across jurisdictional borders. This paper compares policy implementation in the field of climate change, a quintessential example of such cross-cutting issues. In the context of CO2 emissions reduction policies, the Peter Parker principle states that vertical coordination presupposes not just central government control but also its responsibility. Our contribution to that argument is that the divorce between regulatory authority and formal jurisdiction challenges the principle. The present paper studies how these issues play out in two different types of institutional contexts; those of Germany and Sweden.

Stakeholder engagement is often considered an essential component of regulatory policymaking and governance. Our main aim in this paper is to explain variation in stakeholder engagement across regulatory trajectories. More specifically we aim to assess why some regulatory policymaking processes attract a larger and more diverse set of stakeholders, while others attract much smaller and more homogenous regulatory crowds. We build on a newly established dataset of primary data regarding stakeholder engagement in EU regulatory governance to test our assumptions. We find that both the salience and the number of different consultation instruments affect the density and diversity of stakeholder engagement, whereas the complexity of regulations seems to mainly affect the density of stakeholder engagement. The combination of both institutional and regulation-specific drivers of stakeholder engagement in regulatory governance yields relevant implications for the study of responsive regulation and the role stakeholders can fulfill in regulatory decision-making.