Contenu du sommaire

The fourth industrial revolution, brought about by technological innovations including artificial intelligence, automation, and advanced robotics, is already shaping many economies around the world. International Organizations (IOs) and Global Management Consulting Firms (GMCFs) are key sources of information for how domestic economies can respond to these anticipated disruptions and “future proof” their economies. But do domestic policy makers pay attention to IO and GMCF advice to inform policy making and to what extent are their ideas considered authoritative and influence domestic policy agendas? This article examines these organizations' informational and agenda setting power in domestic policy formulation, focusing on the case of Canada's future skills policy making community. Using qualitative research methods including thematic analysis of 26 interviews within the policy community and citation analysis of policy documents, the study reveals mixed findings. IOs and GMCFs were important sources of information, among many, for domestic policy actors in the future skills policy community. Contrary to the expectation of selective uptake of their advice based on their perceived authoritativeness, however, we find much more evidence of more comprehensive learning amongst domestic policy actors, with variation observed based on the domestic actors' roles within their organizations.

Despite ample attention to bureaucratic politicization in the public administration literature, most research remains siloed, focusing on individual forms of politicization (formal, functional, or administrative) and limited to single-country analyses. When a comparative stance is adopted, it often concentrates on comparing countries with the same administrative tradition (e.g., Westminster countries). This paper advocates for a comprehensive comparative research approach that integrates all forms and spans administrative traditions, treating the three forms of politicization as analytically distinct but empirically interdependent. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with senior civil servants (n=27) in four countries with distinct administrative tradition - Ireland (Westminster), the Netherlands (Germanic), Norway (Scandinavian), and Spain (Napoleonic) – the study introduces an integrated typology and applies it to demonstrate how politicization manifests across various administrative contexts. The findings reveal that politicization is best understood as a composite phenomenon shaped by institutional rules, organizational practices, and civil servants' interpretive behaviors. This study provides a cross-dimensional, comparative lens that not only bridges conceptual silos, but also offers a more nuanced, context-sensitive understanding of how politicization unfolds in practice.

Against the background of increased reliance on private contractors in European regulatory governance, this article explores how the European Commission justifies the hiring of external consultants for policy formulation purposes, particularly for organizing and analyzing the results of consultations with stakeholders and the general public. We focus on Jean-Claude Juncker's term of office (2014-2019), a period marked by the multiplication and systematization of public consultation opportunities across the policy cycle due to the introduction of the so-called Better Regulation Agenda. The article presents and tests a novel typology of legitimation claims regarding the involvement of external consultants in regulatory policymaking, focusing on both the official institutional discourse of the European Commission and its existing administrative practice. We find that consultants are legitimized using procedural arguments. They are expected to implement the Better Regulation methodology for public consultations in an accurate and cost-effective manner, but not to innovate, adapt, or optimize the process. In other words, the purpose of hiring consultants is not to bring in external expertise unavailable in-house but rather to replace European Commission civil servants with cheaper private sector workers. In the long run, this carries the risk of eroding institutional memory and public knowledge and capabilities.

Policy reforms are often unique, in the sense that it is hard to find comparable changes and circumstances that would make it possible to clearly identify their net consequences and thus unambiguously support causality attributions. Without the appropriate counterfactuals, there is no way scholars can avoid the uncertainty of their estimates. However, we should accept the causal complexity that characterizes social science, give up on the idea of a model's precision, and increase the robustness of our empirical evidence through multiple testing. This is the research strategy that we adopted in evaluating a reform in the mobility policy of the municipality of Milan, in Italy, which cannot easily be compared to other policy changes. Overall, we found evidence of the direct and indirect effects of the policy reform. However, the research design helped us refine some of our original expectations and fine-tune the underlying mechanisms. This project uses the proposed case study to emphasize the methodological importance of evaluating any policy change using redundant and robust empirical evidence – even accepting some degree of indeterminacy –rather than relying on isolated positive findings.

The increasing political power of social media companies over the last two decades has sparked significant policy debates in the EU. We analyse the emerging regulatory struggle by focusing on one specific dimension: disinformation. The most influential initiative took place within the Digital Services Act (DSA), approved in 2022. This approach, characterised as ‘co-regulation', breaks away from the EU's previously dominant approach of self-regulation for digital platforms by trying to regulate with these platforms rather than leaving them to set their own policies. The best illustration of this approach is the second version of the Code of Practice on disinformation, which has been ultimately included within the DSA as a Code of Conduct in 2025. We ask: How did the European Commission come to adopt a co-regulatory approach to disinformation? Using data from public consultations, meetings with the Commission, and interviews, we conduct a process-tracing to uncover the genealogy of the EU's co-regulatory framework from the 2018 High Level Expert Group on Fake News and Disinformation (HLEG) until 2025. We conclude that preemptive cooperation by the platforms, as expressed in the HLEG and the Code of Conduct, has sidelined regulatory alternatives.