Search results

Stakeholders and their organizations are increasingly involved in governance of higher education, not only within institutions or at system level, but also in various supra-national and intergovernmental processes. For these, as well as pragmatic reasons (ease of access and relatively simple methods for analysis), this chapter advocates for a more systematic approach to studying stakeholder organizations, their participation in and impact on governance of higher education. Specifically, the chapter: (1) provides a three-fold nested conceptualization of policy positions of stakeholder organizations, comprising issues, preferences concerning these issues, and the normative basis utilized to legitimize said preferences; (2) presents advantages and disadvantages of different methodological approaches to analyzing policy positions of stakeholder organizations, including qualitative and quantitative content analysis, employing either human coding or computer-assisted coding of policy documents; and (3) highlights different insights one can gain from analyzing policy positions of stakeholder organizations. It combines (thus far limited) insights from higher education studies with the more generic literature on interest groups, and uses examples from European level stakeholder organizations to illustrate its points.

The chapter aims to compare public, private and non-profit working citizens’ preferences for cross-sectoral relations in England and Finland. Its main contribution is in identifying preferences in the delivery of services in the respective countries in which citizen choice has become an issue in times of public sector austerity. Challenges arise because in these two similarly institutionalized healthcare systems but pluralistic societies people have contrasting perspectives on the values that should guide policy decisions. The survey data was therefore collected in both England (N = 2,000) and Finland (N = 1,973) in 2013 from cities in which citizens have choices regarding health service delivery. Our informants in England anticipated more potential for better ‘privatized driven public interest’ than did those in Finland. Surprisingly, over 60% of public sector employees in England would like for-profit healthcare to carry main responsibility, and almost 55% of all employees agree with this. Almost 20% of respondents in both countries did not care who the service provider is if only services are available. Thus, the research has pioneering relevance for policymaking, public strategic management and the comparative empirical study of managing people’s preferences in cross-sectoral relations. We conclude that identifying working citizens’ preferences is crucial for effective utilization of current welfare services because the preferences derive from both service and work experience. In sum, strategically, this identification lets public managers balance biased images of the cross-sectoral differences and reconstruct functional hybridity of services.

Given the growing interest in social movements as policy agenda setters, this paper investigates the contexts within which movement groups and actors work with political elites to promote their common goals for policy change. In asking how and why so-called outsiders gain access to elites and to the policymaking process, I address several contemporary theoretical and empirical concerns associated with policy change as a social movement goal. I examine the claim that movements use a multipronged, long-term strategy by working with and targeting policymakers and political institutions on the one hand, while shaping public preferences – hearts and minds – on the other; that these efforts are not mutually exclusive. In addition, I look at how social movement organizations and actors are critical in expanding issue conflict outside narrow policy networks, often encouraged to do so by political elites with similar policy objectives. And, I discuss actors’ mobility in transitioning from institutional activists to movement and organizational leaders, and even to protesters, and vice versa. The interchangeability of roles among actors promoting social change in strategic action fields points to the porous and fluid boundaries between state and nonstate actors and organizations.

What role do people's attitudes toward social policies play for the politics of welfare state reform? This chapter contributes to a growing scholarship on policy responsiveness in welfare state research with a longitudinal comparative case study of the Bismarckian welfare states of France and Germany. Quantitative analyses of changes in mean attitudes as well as polarization and inequalities of attitudes based on the 1996, 2006, and 2016 waves of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) Role of Government module are triangulated with a thick description of social policy changes. While recommodifying and defamilializing reforms in Germany transformed the welfare state fundamentally, there was more continuity in the French welfare state, in spite of a stronger focus on labor market activation policies. The quantitative results suggest that lower attitudinal stability toward the welfare state in Germany and lower polarization evoked a higher willingness for reform than in France, where more polarized attitudes and overall marginal changes in attitudes gave French governments less maneuverability in adopting reforms. In both countries, I find no evidence for an upper-class bias in policy responsiveness. In sum, my research supports the claim that change in public opinion toward the welfare state and diverging attitudes within societies play a role for the timing and direction of reforms.

This analysis of the Japanese textile sector illustrates how intra-industry cleavages are becoming an integral feature of Japanese trade policymaking. In the past, a pattern of cross-sectoral variation in trade policy could be observed, as the government protected declining industries at home and sought to open foreign markets for the competitive export sector. The internationalization of Japanese firms, however, has radically affected the articulation of corporate trade policy preferences. There is an ongoing breakdown in solidarity among industry members based on their degree of multinationality and/or their reverse importing strategies. These clashes put contradictory pressures on the Japanese government, making it more difficult to predict the course of trade liberalization in Japan.

We analyze a newly available dataset of migration policy decisions reported by governments to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs between 1976 and 2007. We find evidence indicating that most governments have policies aimed at either maintaining the status quo or at lowering the level of migration. We also document variation in migration policy over time and across countries of different regions and income levels. Finally, we examine patterns in various aspects of destination countries' migration policies (policies toward family reunification, temporary vs. permanent migration, high-skilled migration). This analysis leads us to empirically investigate the determinants of destination countries' migration policies. In particular, we examine the link between public opinion toward immigrants and governments' policy decisions. While we find evidence broadly consistent with the median voter model, we conclude that this framework is not sufficient to understand governments' migration policies. We discuss evidence that suggests that interest-groups dynamics may play a very important role.