Since the late 1980s, the rapid expansion of universities in Latin America has created a completely new situation. Compared to the traditional elite and middle-class public universities that ...portrayed higher education during the past century, nowadays there is a very different configuration. A large expansion of student numbers, particularly through the creation of either not-for-profit or for-profit private universities, has characterised higher education transformations of most countries in the region. A combination of neoliberal political winds blowing for reducing the scope and size of the state, and rising expectations about participation in higher education, paved the way for these changes in the 1990s, in parallel with a freezing of public funding of universities. Unfortunately, for many years Latin American governments did not react seriously, and most higher education policies remained largely unchanged, while private initiatives mushroomed in feebly regulated environments.
The emergence of trans-governmental policy regimes in Europe has fundamentally changed the role of National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs). Here we move away from the idea that there is a meaningful ...divide between the domestic and the European levels of governance and suggest that a different logic has emerged in recent decades, combining multiple chains of delegation and innovative coordination schemes. NRAs have come to occupy a 'broker' or intermediary position between domestic and European polities, that is no longer adequately described by the prevailing, mainly dyadic models of bureaucratic autonomy conceived just for national states. In this paper, we build the concept of entangled agencies to make sense of the linkages between NRAs and European Agencies (EAs) and provide some preliminary empirical evidence to show how they effectively articulate various levels of government, presenting empirical findings on the connections that ties NRAs representatives with EAs management boards.
The regulatory governance literature has shown a rising interest in the development of the regulatory agencies in developing countries. We now have a relatively good number of studies on Latin ...America and Asia. However, there is, to date, very scarce knowledge about regulatory governance in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA countries), where regulatory agencies diffused less systematically and more slowly. This paper makes a first step towards filling this gap and, in doing so, it raises a general question about the role of oil and gas revenues in restraining the propensity for agency creation by national states. Making use of a cross-sectoral database about the creation of regulatory agencies in MENA countries, we discuss the relevance of states' oil and gas revenue to explain their lower levels of agencification compared to other regions. A case study focused on electricity regulation in Algeria is also included for this purpose. We place several hypotheses considering variations in agencification over time and across countries, in order to strengthen our argument about the constraining impact of oil and gas rent on the process of regulatory agency diffusion that occurred worldwide in the previous decades.
We analyse the politics of unilateral secession in the European Union (EU), focusing on the Catalan secessionist conflict. Building on a triangulation strategy, within which primary data are ...cross-checked through semi-structured expert interviews, we examine how the involved central state and secessionist sub-state actor fought for the support of the supranational party within the EU's multilevel framework. We make two entrenched contributions. We find that the Spanish government succeeded in securing the status quo, not only because of its relations within the bigger European party groups and the benevolent support of EU member states, but also because of the secessionist-restraining nature of the EU. The EU switched from the position of non-intervention towards one of open support for the central state government, and as a result it has developed an informal framework which could deter future unilateral secession intentions.
To put this into perspective, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have legal powers and cover a greater range of public health areas through bodies such as the National Institute ...for Occupational Safety and Health or the National Center for Health Statistics. The ECDC was established within a context that involved inconsistent national laws on pandemic planning across the EU member states, which already had their own institutes and agencies of public health.6 In fact, it has been noted that the protectiveness of member states concerning their national privileges sometimes blocks agreement on practical and collective measures.7 In our research on the role of EU agencies in crisis episodes, we described how the low cooperation in public health issues within Europe severely hampered the involvement of the ECDC in the European response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak.8 Although the massive dimensions of the current crisis are not comparable to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the restrictive political mechanism at play previously shows what might be standing in the way of a coherent response to the COVID-19 pandemic. ...the creation of a strategic EU medical stockpile was approved by the Commission in March, 2019.10 However, it was only implemented after WHO declared the outbreak a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, and several member states had difficulties in purchasing medical equipment.11 We have found that only when key actors in the EU polity agree on a common response that is less politically costly than disagreement can European-wide public health mechanisms such as the ECDC adopt a more active role.
This article provides an encompassing analysis of how economic crises affect social regulation. The analysis is based on an innovative dataset that covers policy output changes in 13 European ...countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013) in the areas of pensions, unemployment, and child benefits. By performing a negative binomial regression analysis, we show that economic crises do matter for social policymaking. Our main empirical finding is that crises impinge on social regulation by opening a window of opportunity that facilitates the dismantling of social policy standards. Yet crisis‐induced policy dismantling is restricted to adjustments based on existing policy instruments. We do not find significant variation in policymaking patterns across different macroeconomic conditions for the more structural elements of social policy portfolios, such as the envisaged social policy targets or the policy instruments applied. This suggests that economic crises do not lead to a profound transformation of the welfare state but to austerity.
EU agencies have emerged as entities offering technical coordination to member states and support to the European Commission in different policy areas. Their expertise may play a role in responding ...to unexpected crises. Against this backdrop, we examine under which circumstances EU agencies, through their specialized expertise, are involved in transboundary crisis responses, and when they acquire a leading position in coordinating those responses. To do so, we study four agencies which faced crises: the EBA and the 2012 banking crisis; the ECDC and the 2014 Ebola outbreak; EFSA and the 2011 E. coli outbreak; and Frontex and the 2015 refugee crisis. Our findings discuss to what extent agencies' involvement in transboundary crises is related to functional (sector characteristics) and institutional (delegation of authority) variables. We also identify that under certain political conditions EU agencies' coordination capacity is activated, allowing them to emerge as leading institutions in transboundary crisis resolution.
State structures have experienced significant transformation with the spread of globalization. This paper examines how to measure one major change that has occurred in recent decades: the worldwide ...proliferation of public agencies with regulatory tasks. It remains unclear how their configurations vary across countries and sectors, and what can be learned from these variations. To better identify these agencies worldwide, we introduce a new dataset on the institutional features of 799 agencies in 115 countries and 17 policy sectors. The dataset contains variables from their institutional profiles, covering a broad range of formal characteristics. To examine the diverse faces the regulatory state has adopted along its globalization path in depth, our variables are grouped into four blocs: regulatory responsibilities, managerial autonomy, political independence, and public accountability. As such, we depart from the view that a single dimension does capture the actual diversity of institutional forms regulatory agencies may exhibit. We also use factor and cluster analyses to assess their various forms, and suggest a typology of agency institutional models to facilitate more precise studies on the regulatory state. Results confirm that the regulatory state shows greater variety than usually expected.
The European Union (EU) has actively promoted the establishment of national regulatory agencies (NRAs) in its member states since the 1990s. In parallel, the EU has supported the establishment of ...trans-governmental regulatory networks (TRNs) to facilitate the harmonization of regulatory frameworks within the EU. In most cases, these TRNs had a very light organization but allowed an intense interaction and collaboration among officials from the different national regulatory agencies. In this paper, we examine the involvement of EU institutions and NRAs in trans-governmental regulatory networks in Europe and beyond. Based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches, we corroborate the extensive use of TRNs on the European continent beyond the EU in many fields, often supported by EU institutions or emerging as bottom-up initiatives of NRAs. We can only document some occasional attempts beyond the European neighborhood. Among possible reasons, we examine the institutionalization of global governance in many sectors, geographical considerations, and EU strategies to support TRNs development.
Independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) have a significant capability to choose how to implement their decisions to be effective, given the mix of managerial autonomy, supervisory powers and political ...independence that most of these agencies enjoy. As such, traditional approaches which focus on their institutional characteristics or their reputational problems do not fully capture the variation in IRAs’ behavior. This paper suggests a complementary approach to interpreting IRAs’ autonomous behavior, focusing on the possibilities that the practice of accountability offers to these public agencies to make relevant choices for the agency itself and the policy environment. To that end, we identify a key background variable that affects the practice of IRAs, namely, the varying power configurations existing among the regulatees and focus on how this factor shapes their voluntary accountability in different contexts. Lastly, we examine several cases of IRA accountability behavior to discuss whether the patterns we submit might constitute a starting point for a theoretical development on the use of accountability by IRAs.
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