Steffen Hurka
Biographic Data
| ID | 3485602 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steffen Hurka |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steffen |
| FAMILY NAME | Hurka |
| SIGNATURE | HURKA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7735-522X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 336 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Unpacking the European Commission: Cabinet Composition and EU Policy‐Making
We examine bureaucratic politics within the European Commission, using novel data on the backgrounds of individual members of Commissioners' cabinets . Although cabinet composition has become increasingly regulated in recent decades, its selection remains a key area for personalised political appointments within an organisation more commonly known for its collective responsibility and lack of individual influence. Using data on the personal and p…
Laws as blades: A conceptual framework of legislative design
Legislation shapes every aspect of public life and stands at the core of governance. Despite sustained attention on a variety of aspects of legislation, we still lack a comprehensive and integrated framework of legislative design. To address this gap, we introduce a novel conceptual framework that analyzes legislative design along two dimensions— versatility and precision —using six indicators: objects, subjects, instruments, dilution, derogation…
Treated by the Treaty? How the expansion of co-decision affected the volume and complexity of EU legislation
Policy complexity and implementation performance in the European Union
This study examines the relationship between the complexity of EU directives and their successful implementation at the national level. Moving beyond the state‐of‐the‐art, we propose a comprehensive framework considering structural, linguistic, and relational dimensions of policy complexity. We argue that policy complexity entails higher transaction costs, hindering effective implementation. Using a novel dataset covering roughly 1000 directives …
Rules as policy data? Measuring and linking policy substance and legislative context
There is growing scholarly interest in analyzing changes in policies, laws, and regulations. Some concepts depart from the goal of identifying changes in policy substance. Other contributions have concentrated on the structural characteristics of laws and regulations containing these substantive changes. Extracting measures of policy substance from legislative texts is a challenging and time‐consuming endeavor as it requires the manual assessment…
Proposal complexity and report allocation in the European Parliament
Experience and loyalty have been identified as major explanations for why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are selected as committee rapporteurs in the European Parliament. Yet, existing research implicitly assumes that these explanations operate in isolation of what the report is about. In this article, we hypothesize that the effects of experience and loyalty on MEPs’ chances to become rapporteurs should be conditioned by the complexit…
The institutional and political roots of complex policies: Evidence from the European Union
The complexity of public policies has repeatedly been identified as a key challenge for modern democracies. Yet, we know only very little about the origins of this complexity. Controlling for functional and legal explanations, this article investigates whether complex policies have distinct institutional and political origins. The study builds on the assumption that complex policies are communicated in more complex language and uses textual data …
Policy complexity in the European Union, 1993-today: Introducing the Euplex dataset
Despite its importance for the sustainability of democratic governance, policy complexity is still an understudied phenomenon. What makes policies complex? Why are some policies more complex than others? And what are the consequences of this complexity for the political, economic and societal level? These questions still lack answers, which is both due to a lack of conceptual clarity and a lack of suitable data. In order to tackle these challenge…
Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory
In this article, we analyze dynamics of policy change from the perspective of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). In particular, we investigate how economic crises impact on patterns of policy change in policy areas that vary in terms of their proximity to economic matters: social, environmental, and morality policy. We make two contributions. First, we show that economic crises lead to more incrementalist patterns of policy change in crisis‐rem…
On democratic intelligence and failure: The vice and virtue of incrementalism under political fragmentation and policy accumulation
The vice and virtue of incrementalism have been the subject of a long‐standing academic debate. This debate, however, lacks a dynamic perspective that analyzes how the transformation of politics—mainly in the form of increasing levels of political fragmentation within decision‐making arenas and increasing complexity of policy‐mixes—affects the role of incrementalism. We argue that both of these trends make the virtues of incrementalism politicall…
Legal Instrument Choice in the European Union
Regulations and directives are the central legal instruments used by the EU. In some instances, the Commission is not legally required to choose a specific legal instrument, but can make this decision autonomously. However, we know surprisingly little about the factors that influence this decision. Based on an original dataset of all directives and regulations proposed by the European Commission in ordinary legislative procedures between 2009 and…
Are popular and powerful committees more representative? Evidence from the ninth European Parliament
The standing committees of the European Parliament perform crucial policy-making functions and, accordingly, the question of how they are composed assumes great relevance. Unlike previous studies, which primarily looked at committee assignments from the perspective of individual MEPs, we assess the representativeness of entire committees by comparing their preference distributions with those we find in the plenary on the left/right and pro/anti E…
Policy complexity and legislative duration in the European Union
This article investigates the impact of policy complexity on the duration of legislative negotiations in the European Union employing survival analysis. We conceptualize policy complexity as a three-dimensional construct encompassing structural, linguistic and relational components. Building on this conceptual framework, we measure the complexity of 889 Commission proposals published under the ordinary legislative procedure between 2009 and 2018.…
Does regulation matter? A cross‐national analysis of the impact of gun policies on homicide and suicide rates
In this contribution, we evaluate the effectiveness of firearm regulations in curbing the number of homicides and suicides committed both with and without firearms. We develop a gun control index that enables us to compare the restrictiveness of firearm regulations across time and space. We model the effects of gun control on figures of (gun) homicide and (gun) suicide gained from public health records in 16 West European countries between 1980 a…
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap
The responsiveness to societal demands is both the key virtue and the key problem of modern democracies. On the one hand, responsiveness is a central cornerstone of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, responsiveness inevitably entails policy accumulation. While policy accumulation often positively reflects modernisation and human progress, it also undermines democratic government in three main ways. First, policy accumulation renders policy…
Introducing Vertical Policy Coordination to Comparative Policy Analysis: The Missing Link between Policy Production and Implementation
The lack of effective vertical policy coordination between the policy makers at the “top” and the implementers at the “bottom” is an important source of deficits in both policy design and policy implementation. Yet while the link between policy production and implementation seems vital to explain and prevent policy failure, so far the conceptual tools to assess and compare systematically the barriers to effective vertical coordination are lacking…
Party group coordinators and rapporteurs: Discretion and agency loss along the European Parliament’s chains of delegation
The European Parliament organizes its legislative activities along two chains of delegation to the rapporteurs – one institutional, one partisan. We analyze discretion and agency loss along these chains of delegation from the perspective of party group coordinators who select the rapporteur on behalf of the party group. Do coordinators minimize agency loss towards their national party, their European party group, the committee median or the plena…
Determinants of moonlighting in the European Parliament
In recent years, several national parliaments have introduced stricter rules for the disclosure of additional sources of income earned by their legislators. In this context of better data availability, the phenomenon of ‘moonlighting’ politicians (legislators who pursue paid or unpaid jobs next to their political mandate) has attracted increased public and scientific attention. Since 2011, the European Parliament (EP) has required its parliamenta…
Four worlds of morality politics: The Impact of Institutional Venues and Party Cleavages
The most prominent theory accounting for variation of morality politics across Western Europe is the so-called Two Worlds framework. According to this approach, the presence or absence of a secular‒religious cleavage in national party systems strongly affects the degree of conflict intensity and the framing of morality policy issues. This article shows that the explanatory power of the Two Worlds model could be enhanced significantly by introduci…
When time is money: Sideline Jobs, Ancillary Income and Legislative Effort
Moonlighting, the pursuit of (paid or unpaid) sideline jobs by democratically elected politicians, regularly evokes public outcry. This study provides an empirical test of the claim that moonlighting goes hand-in-hand with a lower degree of parliamentary effort. The article draws upon original data on the number of outside jobs and the remuneration received by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) during the seventh legislative term (2009–201…
Partisan effects in morality policy making
Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostit…
Rampage Shootings and Gun Control: Politicization and Policy Change in Western Europe
While the causes of rampage violence have been analysed thoroughly in diverse academic disciplines, we hardly know anything about the factors that affect their consequences for public policy. This book addresses rampage shootings in Western Europe and their conditional impact on politicization and policy change in the area of gun control. The author sets out to unravel the factors that facilitate or impede the access of gun control to the politic…
Static and dynamic incentives for Twitter usage in the European Parliament
In this article, we examine the static and dynamic factors that explain the use of the Twitter social media platform by all active Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) during the Fall and Winter of 2015–2016. Our analysis demonstrates that MEPs have an incentive to take to Twitter that varies across the European Parliament's (EP) highly segmented legislative calendar, but that MEPs are also affected by more constant differences in their nati…
Rampage Shootings and Gun Control: Politicization and Policy Change in Western Europe
Is Morality Policy Different? Testing Sectoral and Institutional Explanations of Policy Change
We analyze morality policy change from the perspective of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to test whether reform dynamics in this policy sector follow a distinct pattern. First, we propose a new measurement scheme capturing changes in the intensity of morality policy output. Second, we demonstrate that morality policy change is strongly punctuated. Finally, and most importantly, we show that the degree of policy punctuations varies between di…
Policy complexity in the European Union, 1993-today: Introducing the Euplex dataset
Despite its importance for the sustainability of democratic governance, policy complexity is still an understudied phenomenon. What makes policies complex? Why are some policies more complex than others? And what are the consequences of this complexity for the political, economic and societal level? These questions still lack answers, which is both due to a lack of conceptual clarity and a lack of suitable data. In order to tackle these challenge…
Framing and policy change after shooting rampages: A Comparative Analysis of Discourse Networks
In this contribution, we comparatively analyse the discourse networks generated by three shooting rampages. We formulate hypotheses on the extent to which (a) the framing cohesion of the status quo coalition and (b) the perceived causal complexity of the event are associated with varying degrees of subsequent gun policy change. Drawing on news reports in major newspapers, we collect information on actors and frames and systematically analyse thos…
Policy complexity and legislative duration in the European Union
This article investigates the impact of policy complexity on the duration of legislative negotiations in the European Union employing survival analysis. We conceptualize policy complexity as a three-dimensional construct encompassing structural, linguistic and relational components. Building on this conceptual framework, we measure the complexity of 889 Commission proposals published under the ordinary legislative procedure between 2009 and 2018.…
Partisan effects in morality policy making
Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostit…
Learning on the Job? EU Enlargement and the Assignment of (Shadow) Rapporteurships in the European Parliament
This article investigates the determinants of assignments to European Parliament negotiating teams comprising both rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs. We re‐examine the argument that under‐representation of MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) from new Member States on these key posts after enlargement might have been due to a 'learning phase'. We find that MEPs from newer Member States remain considerably less likely to act as rapporteurs d…
Report allocation in the European Parliament after eastern enlargement
This article identifies factors that have influenced the chances for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to become rapporteurs in the European Parliament after the 2004 eastern enlargement. More specifically, it answers the question of how the MEPs from the new member states were integrated into the report allocation process under different legislative procedures. Controlling for a whole range of alternative explanations such as legislative…
Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory
In this article, we analyze dynamics of policy change from the perspective of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). In particular, we investigate how economic crises impact on patterns of policy change in policy areas that vary in terms of their proximity to economic matters: social, environmental, and morality policy. We make two contributions. First, we show that economic crises lead to more incrementalist patterns of policy change in crisis‐rem…
The institutional and political roots of complex policies: Evidence from the European Union
The complexity of public policies has repeatedly been identified as a key challenge for modern democracies. Yet, we know only very little about the origins of this complexity. Controlling for functional and legal explanations, this article investigates whether complex policies have distinct institutional and political origins. The study builds on the assumption that complex policies are communicated in more complex language and uses textual data …
Four worlds of morality politics: The Impact of Institutional Venues and Party Cleavages
The most prominent theory accounting for variation of morality politics across Western Europe is the so-called Two Worlds framework. According to this approach, the presence or absence of a secular‒religious cleavage in national party systems strongly affects the degree of conflict intensity and the framing of morality policy issues. This article shows that the explanatory power of the Two Worlds model could be enhanced significantly by introduci…
Static and dynamic incentives for Twitter usage in the European Parliament
In this article, we examine the static and dynamic factors that explain the use of the Twitter social media platform by all active Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) during the Fall and Winter of 2015–2016. Our analysis demonstrates that MEPs have an incentive to take to Twitter that varies across the European Parliament's (EP) highly segmented legislative calendar, but that MEPs are also affected by more constant differences in their nati…
Changing the output: The logic of amendment success in the European Parliament’s Envi Committee
This study tests three hypotheses on factors driving the success and failure of amendments in the European Parliament’s ENVI committee. The hypotheses, which are derived from different theories of legislative organization, are tested with an original dataset containing 550 amendments from 55 ENVI members. Contrary to existing empirical evidence on the structure of political conflict in plenary, the results suggest that a committee member’s genera…
Introducing Vertical Policy Coordination to Comparative Policy Analysis: The Missing Link between Policy Production and Implementation
The lack of effective vertical policy coordination between the policy makers at the “top” and the implementers at the “bottom” is an important source of deficits in both policy design and policy implementation. Yet while the link between policy production and implementation seems vital to explain and prevent policy failure, so far the conceptual tools to assess and compare systematically the barriers to effective vertical coordination are lacking…
Policy complexity and implementation performance in the European Union
This study examines the relationship between the complexity of EU directives and their successful implementation at the national level. Moving beyond the state‐of‐the‐art, we propose a comprehensive framework considering structural, linguistic, and relational dimensions of policy complexity. We argue that policy complexity entails higher transaction costs, hindering effective implementation. Using a novel dataset covering roughly 1000 directives …
Legal Instrument Choice in the European Union
Regulations and directives are the central legal instruments used by the EU. In some instances, the Commission is not legally required to choose a specific legal instrument, but can make this decision autonomously. However, we know surprisingly little about the factors that influence this decision. Based on an original dataset of all directives and regulations proposed by the European Commission in ordinary legislative procedures between 2009 and…
On democratic intelligence and failure: The vice and virtue of incrementalism under political fragmentation and policy accumulation
The vice and virtue of incrementalism have been the subject of a long‐standing academic debate. This debate, however, lacks a dynamic perspective that analyzes how the transformation of politics—mainly in the form of increasing levels of political fragmentation within decision‐making arenas and increasing complexity of policy‐mixes—affects the role of incrementalism. We argue that both of these trends make the virtues of incrementalism politicall…
Party group coordinators and rapporteurs: Discretion and agency loss along the European Parliament’s chains of delegation
The European Parliament organizes its legislative activities along two chains of delegation to the rapporteurs – one institutional, one partisan. We analyze discretion and agency loss along these chains of delegation from the perspective of party group coordinators who select the rapporteur on behalf of the party group. Do coordinators minimize agency loss towards their national party, their European party group, the committee median or the plena…
Is Morality Policy Different? Testing Sectoral and Institutional Explanations of Policy Change
We analyze morality policy change from the perspective of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to test whether reform dynamics in this policy sector follow a distinct pattern. First, we propose a new measurement scheme capturing changes in the intensity of morality policy output. Second, we demonstrate that morality policy change is strongly punctuated. Finally, and most importantly, we show that the degree of policy punctuations varies between di…
Rules as policy data? Measuring and linking policy substance and legislative context
There is growing scholarly interest in analyzing changes in policies, laws, and regulations. Some concepts depart from the goal of identifying changes in policy substance. Other contributions have concentrated on the structural characteristics of laws and regulations containing these substantive changes. Extracting measures of policy substance from legislative texts is a challenging and time‐consuming endeavor as it requires the manual assessment…
Determinants of moonlighting in the European Parliament
In recent years, several national parliaments have introduced stricter rules for the disclosure of additional sources of income earned by their legislators. In this context of better data availability, the phenomenon of ‘moonlighting’ politicians (legislators who pursue paid or unpaid jobs next to their political mandate) has attracted increased public and scientific attention. Since 2011, the European Parliament (EP) has required its parliamenta…
Does regulation matter? A cross‐national analysis of the impact of gun policies on homicide and suicide rates
In this contribution, we evaluate the effectiveness of firearm regulations in curbing the number of homicides and suicides committed both with and without firearms. We develop a gun control index that enables us to compare the restrictiveness of firearm regulations across time and space. We model the effects of gun control on figures of (gun) homicide and (gun) suicide gained from public health records in 16 West European countries between 1980 a…
Four Styles of Regulation and their Implications for Comparative Policy Analysis
Comparative research crucially depends on the availability of meaningful descriptive concepts capturing the essence of empirical phenomena. In policy analysis, the portfolio of classical concepts describing policy contents and procedures remains unmatched by a similar pool of concepts available for describing patterns of regulatory outputs. Starting from the premise that policy-makers not only create behavioral rules, but also define sanctions fo…
Opposite Trends in the Regulation of Pornography? Policy Differentiation and Policy Convergence Across 26 Countries Between 1960 and 2010
In recent decades, the regulation of pornography has been confronted with challenges emerging from cultural change, economic interests, and technological progress. As a result, the respective regulatory frameworks have changed substantially in many countries. These changes have been accompanied by fierce political struggles and societal value conflicts. However, there are few comparative studies on the reactions of national governments to these p…
When time is money: Sideline Jobs, Ancillary Income and Legislative Effort
Moonlighting, the pursuit of (paid or unpaid) sideline jobs by democratically elected politicians, regularly evokes public outcry. This study provides an empirical test of the claim that moonlighting goes hand-in-hand with a lower degree of parliamentary effort. The article draws upon original data on the number of outside jobs and the remuneration received by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) during the seventh legislative term (2009–201…
Treated by the Treaty? How the expansion of co-decision affected the volume and complexity of EU legislation
Proposal complexity and report allocation in the European Parliament
Experience and loyalty have been identified as major explanations for why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are selected as committee rapporteurs in the European Parliament. Yet, existing research implicitly assumes that these explanations operate in isolation of what the report is about. In this article, we hypothesize that the effects of experience and loyalty on MEPs’ chances to become rapporteurs should be conditioned by the complexit…
Report allocation in the European Parliament after eastern enlargement
This article identifies factors that have influenced the chances for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to become rapporteurs in the European Parliament after the 2004 eastern enlargement. More specifically, it answers the question of how the MEPs from the new member states were integrated into the report allocation process under different legislative procedures. Controlling for a whole range of alternative explanations such as legislative…
Changing the output: The logic of amendment success in the European Parliament’s Envi Committee
This study tests three hypotheses on factors driving the success and failure of amendments in the European Parliament’s ENVI committee. The hypotheses, which are derived from different theories of legislative organization, are tested with an original dataset containing 550 amendments from 55 ENVI members. Contrary to existing empirical evidence on the structure of political conflict in plenary, the results suggest that a committee member’s genera…
Framing and policy change after shooting rampages: A Comparative Analysis of Discourse Networks
In this contribution, we comparatively analyse the discourse networks generated by three shooting rampages. We formulate hypotheses on the extent to which (a) the framing cohesion of the status quo coalition and (b) the perceived causal complexity of the event are associated with varying degrees of subsequent gun policy change. Drawing on news reports in major newspapers, we collect information on actors and frames and systematically analyse thos…
Four Styles of Regulation and their Implications for Comparative Policy Analysis
Comparative research crucially depends on the availability of meaningful descriptive concepts capturing the essence of empirical phenomena. In policy analysis, the portfolio of classical concepts describing policy contents and procedures remains unmatched by a similar pool of concepts available for describing patterns of regulatory outputs. Starting from the premise that policy-makers not only create behavioral rules, but also define sanctions fo…
Opposite Trends in the Regulation of Pornography? Policy Differentiation and Policy Convergence Across 26 Countries Between 1960 and 2010
In recent decades, the regulation of pornography has been confronted with challenges emerging from cultural change, economic interests, and technological progress. As a result, the respective regulatory frameworks have changed substantially in many countries. These changes have been accompanied by fierce political struggles and societal value conflicts. However, there are few comparative studies on the reactions of national governments to these p…
Learning on the Job? EU Enlargement and the Assignment of (Shadow) Rapporteurships in the European Parliament
This article investigates the determinants of assignments to European Parliament negotiating teams comprising both rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs. We re‐examine the argument that under‐representation of MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) from new Member States on these key posts after enlargement might have been due to a 'learning phase'. We find that MEPs from newer Member States remain considerably less likely to act as rapporteurs d…
Rampage Shootings and Gun Control: Politicization and Policy Change in Western Europe
While the causes of rampage violence have been analysed thoroughly in diverse academic disciplines, we hardly know anything about the factors that affect their consequences for public policy. This book addresses rampage shootings in Western Europe and their conditional impact on politicization and policy change in the area of gun control. The author sets out to unravel the factors that facilitate or impede the access of gun control to the politic…
Static and dynamic incentives for Twitter usage in the European Parliament
In this article, we examine the static and dynamic factors that explain the use of the Twitter social media platform by all active Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) during the Fall and Winter of 2015–2016. Our analysis demonstrates that MEPs have an incentive to take to Twitter that varies across the European Parliament's (EP) highly segmented legislative calendar, but that MEPs are also affected by more constant differences in their nati…
Rampage Shootings and Gun Control: Politicization and Policy Change in Western Europe
Is Morality Policy Different? Testing Sectoral and Institutional Explanations of Policy Change
We analyze morality policy change from the perspective of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to test whether reform dynamics in this policy sector follow a distinct pattern. First, we propose a new measurement scheme capturing changes in the intensity of morality policy output. Second, we demonstrate that morality policy change is strongly punctuated. Finally, and most importantly, we show that the degree of policy punctuations varies between di…
Determinants of moonlighting in the European Parliament
In recent years, several national parliaments have introduced stricter rules for the disclosure of additional sources of income earned by their legislators. In this context of better data availability, the phenomenon of ‘moonlighting’ politicians (legislators who pursue paid or unpaid jobs next to their political mandate) has attracted increased public and scientific attention. Since 2011, the European Parliament (EP) has required its parliamenta…
Four worlds of morality politics: The Impact of Institutional Venues and Party Cleavages
The most prominent theory accounting for variation of morality politics across Western Europe is the so-called Two Worlds framework. According to this approach, the presence or absence of a secular‒religious cleavage in national party systems strongly affects the degree of conflict intensity and the framing of morality policy issues. This article shows that the explanatory power of the Two Worlds model could be enhanced significantly by introduci…
When time is money: Sideline Jobs, Ancillary Income and Legislative Effort
Moonlighting, the pursuit of (paid or unpaid) sideline jobs by democratically elected politicians, regularly evokes public outcry. This study provides an empirical test of the claim that moonlighting goes hand-in-hand with a lower degree of parliamentary effort. The article draws upon original data on the number of outside jobs and the remuneration received by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) during the seventh legislative term (2009–201…
Partisan effects in morality policy making
Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostit…
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap
The responsiveness to societal demands is both the key virtue and the key problem of modern democracies. On the one hand, responsiveness is a central cornerstone of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, responsiveness inevitably entails policy accumulation. While policy accumulation often positively reflects modernisation and human progress, it also undermines democratic government in three main ways. First, policy accumulation renders policy…
Introducing Vertical Policy Coordination to Comparative Policy Analysis: The Missing Link between Policy Production and Implementation
The lack of effective vertical policy coordination between the policy makers at the “top” and the implementers at the “bottom” is an important source of deficits in both policy design and policy implementation. Yet while the link between policy production and implementation seems vital to explain and prevent policy failure, so far the conceptual tools to assess and compare systematically the barriers to effective vertical coordination are lacking…
Party group coordinators and rapporteurs: Discretion and agency loss along the European Parliament’s chains of delegation
The European Parliament organizes its legislative activities along two chains of delegation to the rapporteurs – one institutional, one partisan. We analyze discretion and agency loss along these chains of delegation from the perspective of party group coordinators who select the rapporteur on behalf of the party group. Do coordinators minimize agency loss towards their national party, their European party group, the committee median or the plena…
Are popular and powerful committees more representative? Evidence from the ninth European Parliament
The standing committees of the European Parliament perform crucial policy-making functions and, accordingly, the question of how they are composed assumes great relevance. Unlike previous studies, which primarily looked at committee assignments from the perspective of individual MEPs, we assess the representativeness of entire committees by comparing their preference distributions with those we find in the plenary on the left/right and pro/anti E…
Policy complexity and legislative duration in the European Union
This article investigates the impact of policy complexity on the duration of legislative negotiations in the European Union employing survival analysis. We conceptualize policy complexity as a three-dimensional construct encompassing structural, linguistic and relational components. Building on this conceptual framework, we measure the complexity of 889 Commission proposals published under the ordinary legislative procedure between 2009 and 2018.…
Does regulation matter? A cross‐national analysis of the impact of gun policies on homicide and suicide rates
In this contribution, we evaluate the effectiveness of firearm regulations in curbing the number of homicides and suicides committed both with and without firearms. We develop a gun control index that enables us to compare the restrictiveness of firearm regulations across time and space. We model the effects of gun control on figures of (gun) homicide and (gun) suicide gained from public health records in 16 West European countries between 1980 a…
Legal Instrument Choice in the European Union
Regulations and directives are the central legal instruments used by the EU. In some instances, the Commission is not legally required to choose a specific legal instrument, but can make this decision autonomously. However, we know surprisingly little about the factors that influence this decision. Based on an original dataset of all directives and regulations proposed by the European Commission in ordinary legislative procedures between 2009 and…
Policy complexity in the European Union, 1993-today: Introducing the Euplex dataset
Despite its importance for the sustainability of democratic governance, policy complexity is still an understudied phenomenon. What makes policies complex? Why are some policies more complex than others? And what are the consequences of this complexity for the political, economic and societal level? These questions still lack answers, which is both due to a lack of conceptual clarity and a lack of suitable data. In order to tackle these challenge…
Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory
In this article, we analyze dynamics of policy change from the perspective of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). In particular, we investigate how economic crises impact on patterns of policy change in policy areas that vary in terms of their proximity to economic matters: social, environmental, and morality policy. We make two contributions. First, we show that economic crises lead to more incrementalist patterns of policy change in crisis‐rem…
On democratic intelligence and failure: The vice and virtue of incrementalism under political fragmentation and policy accumulation
The vice and virtue of incrementalism have been the subject of a long‐standing academic debate. This debate, however, lacks a dynamic perspective that analyzes how the transformation of politics—mainly in the form of increasing levels of political fragmentation within decision‐making arenas and increasing complexity of policy‐mixes—affects the role of incrementalism. We argue that both of these trends make the virtues of incrementalism politicall…
Proposal complexity and report allocation in the European Parliament
Experience and loyalty have been identified as major explanations for why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are selected as committee rapporteurs in the European Parliament. Yet, existing research implicitly assumes that these explanations operate in isolation of what the report is about. In this article, we hypothesize that the effects of experience and loyalty on MEPs’ chances to become rapporteurs should be conditioned by the complexit…
Political science (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Economics (22 works) · Politics (17 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (16 works) · Public Administration (13 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (12 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (12 works) · Public Administration (12 works)