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Many government responses to the coronavirus-pandemic have been marked by attempts at expertization and scientization. Particularly, politico-epistemological authority is being given to the behavioural science community consulting government. This article critically scrutinizes this most recent wave of behavioural expertization. Taking developments in the UK and the Netherlands as our case-studies, we shed light on the disparate ways in which behavioural expertise is being (re)shaped during COVID-19. Some of these ways point at processes of behavioural expertise ‘drift', in which the applicability and robustness of this knowledge source gets overstated. Other ways instead point at processes of behavioural expertise ‘thrift' or ‘shift', where the knowledge is used only minimally or taken in wholly new and norm-breaking directions. Doing so, we seek to demonstrate the importance of institutional context in understanding how behavioural expertise is currently shaping public policy: underpinning institutional configurations determine whether the expertise is gauged and applied effectively.

Policy narratives are deliberative tools used to influence public opinion and shape the policy agenda. This work examines policy narratives and the policy actors who tell them by exploring the stories surrounding air and climate issues in Delhi, India, using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). As a proof-of-concept exercise that explores the potential validity and reliability of the ego-alter dyadic approach to dissecting narratives, we aim to enhance theory regarding narrativity by focusing on the narrator. We find distinct patterns of narrators in this set of narratives and several key trends are identified. There is an overall tendency towards hero-centric narratives and some distinct proliferation of specific groups as the receivers of actions. In addition, we find that there is a relationship between the magnitude of stories produced and a tendency to use traditional characterization in those narratives. This work has implications for future scholarship interested in empirical applications of discursive power in the policy process.

Scholarship suggests that much of the success of the FDI-led economic growth policies of Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) is due to investment incentives that national governments made available to multinational corporations, particularly in the form of state aid. Less attention has been given to how inward FDI policy among CEECs is affected by the policy trade-offs that the use of different state aid tools entails. This article builds on insights from qualitative case studies to argue that not all state aid is the same. It tests this proposition against those quantitative studies that failed to find a consistent effect of government incentive policy on the host country's openness to – or reliance on – FDI on a sample of 11 CEECs between 2000 and 2018. The findings support the claim that those measures aimed at promoting regional development are associated with more openness to FDI, but also that this relationship has started to falter following changes in state aid control policy. The key policy implication is that the contradictions between the different levels of governance at which state aid is regulated affect the host countries' use of this measure as a tool of investment attraction for economic growth policy.

This article analyzes the link between compliance and policy learning. It argues that member states that tend to comply with EU regulations are also more prone to learn from EU soft law instruments, such as the Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC). To empirically demonstrate this argument, the article offers evidence from two illustrative case studies, Greece and Spain, based on insights from semi-structured interviews conducted with EU and national experts. The evidence shows that in Greece, compliance is problematic and learning – via EU soft law – remains mostly blocked. In Spain, where compliance is stronger, learning is more instrumental and political in nature. By focusing on the critical period before and right after the 2008 financial crisis, the article explains the different trajectories of these two Southern European countries with respect to their EU obligations through the lens of policy learning.