This book presents the first large-scale study of lobbying strategies and outcomes in the United States and the European Union, two of the most powerful political systems in the world. Every day, ...tens of thousands of lobbyists in Washington and Brussels are working to protect and promote their interests in the policymaking process. Policies emanating from these two spheres have global impacts-they set global standards, they influence global markets, and they determine global politics. Armed with extensive new data, Christine Mahoney challenges the conventional stereotypes that attribute any differences between the two systems to cultural ones-the American, a partisan and combative approach, and the European, a consensus-based one. Mahoney draws from 149 interviews involving 47 issues to detail how institutional structures, the nature of specific issues, and characteristics of the interest groups combine to determine decisions about how to approach a political fight, what arguments to use, and how to frame an issue. She looks at how lobbyists choose lobbying tactics, public relations strategies, and networking and coalition activities. Her analysis demonstrates that advocacy can be better understood when we study the lobbying of interest groups in their institutional and issue context. This book offers new insights into how the process of lobbying works on both sides of the Atlantic.
At a time when many observers question the EU's ability to achieve integration of any significance, and indeed Europeans themselves appear disillusioned, Mai'a K. Davis Cross argues that the EU has ...made remarkable advances in security integration, in both its external and internal dimensions. Moreover, internal security integration-such as dealing with terrorism, immigration, cross-border crime, and drug and human trafficking-has made even greater progress with dismantling certain barriers that previously stood at the core of traditional state sovereignty.
Such unprecedented collaboration has become possible thanks to knowledge-based transnational networks, or "epistemic communities," of ambassadors, military generals, scientists, and other experts who supersede national governments in the diplomacy of security decision making and are making headway at remarkable speed by virtue of their shared expertise, common culture, professional norms, and frequent meetings. Cross brings together nearly 80 personal interviews and a host of recent government documents over the course of five separate case studies to provide a microsociological account of how governance really works in today's EU and what future role it is likely to play in the international environment.
"This is an ambitious work which deals not only with European security and defense but also has much to say about the policy-making process of the EU in general."-Ezra Suleiman, Princeton University
The emergence of increasingly transnational geographies of governance presents a challenge to geographers. Geographical work on policy transfer, which links this process with the extension of the ...hegemonic ‘regimes of truth’ that define policy norms, has much to offer conceptions of emerging geographies of governance, particularly when linked to the production of governance structures, such as global policy networks. The paper argues that increased use of ethnographic methods in policy transfer studies enables a focus on how global policy networks are produced through the actors driving the transfers. This is illustrated through a discussion of policy consultants.
For different currents in policy analysis as policy networks and the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), identifying coalitions from policy beliefs and coordination between actors is crucial to a ...precise understanding of a policy process. Focusing particularly the relational dimension of ACF approaches linked with policy network analysis, determining policy subsystems from the actor collaborations and exchanges has recently begun offering fertile links with the network analysis. Studies in this way frequently apply Block Modeling and Community Detection (BMCD) strategies to define homogeneous political groups. However, the BMCD literature is growing quickly, using a wide variety of algorithms and interesting selection methods that are much more diverse than those used in the policy network analysis and particularly the ACF when this current focused on the collaboration networks before or after regarding the belief distance between actors. Identifying the best methodological option in a specific context can therefore be difficult and few ACF studies give an explicit justification. On the other hand, few BMCD publications offer a systematic comparison of real social networks and they are never applied to policy network datasets. This paper offers a new, relevant 5-Step selection method to reconcile advances in both the policy networks/ACF and BMCD. Using an application based on original African policy network data collected in Madagascar and Niger, we provide a useful set of practical recommendations for future ACF studies using policy network analysis: (i) the density and size of the policy network affect the identification process, (ii) the “best algorithm” can be rigorously determined by maximizing a novel indicator based on convergence and homogeneity between algorithm results, (iii) researchers need to be careful with missing data: they affect the results and imputation does not solve the problem.
•Identifying policy coalitions is fundamental to understand a policy network.•Studies apply different strategies but identifying the best option can be difficult.•We offer a relevant and consistent 5-Step method by maximizing a novel indicator.•Further research need to be careful with missing data.
The last decade has seen substantial advances in statistical techniques for the analysis of network data, as well as a major increase in the frequency with which these tools are used. These ...techniques are designed to accomplish the same broad goal, statistically valid inference in the presence of highly interdependent relationships, but important differences remain between them. We review three approaches commonly used for inferential network analysis—the quadratic assignment procedure, exponential random graph models, and latent space network models—highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques relative to one another. An illustrative example using climate change policy network data shows that all three network models outperform standard logit estimates on multiple criteria. This article introduces political scientists to a class of network techniques beyond simple descriptive measures of network structure, and it helps researchers choose which model to use in their own research.
The wide use of networks warrants a closer examination of network research in public administration. This article focuses on the methodological issues of network research and examines how social ...network analysis has been used and can be used to advance network research in public administration. Through a content analysis of 81 network articles, we found that the topics examined through network analysis have become more diverse in recent years. Yet relatively few articles have examined the intersection of policy networks, governance networks, and collaborative networks. The field needs more mixed-methods research designs and more research on the substructures of networks and multilevel networks.
Presidential election years attract attention to the rhetoric, personalities, and agendas of contending White House aspirants, but these headlines do not reflect the ongoing political shifts that ...will confront whoever moves into the White House in 2017. Earthquakes and erosions have remade the U.S. political terrain, reconfiguring the ground on which politicians and social groups must maneuver, and it is important to make sure that narrow and short-term analyses do not blind us to this shifting terrain. We draw from research on changes since 2000 in the organizational universes surrounding the Republican and Democratic parties to highlight a major emergent force in U.S. politics: the recently expanded “Koch network” that coordinates big money funders, idea producers, issue advocates, and innovative constituency-building efforts in an ongoing effort to pull the Republican Party and agendas of U.S. politics sharply to the right. We review the major components and evolution of the Koch network and explore how it has reshaped American politics and policy agendas, focusing especially on implications for right-tilted partisan polarization and rising economic inequality.
Thanks to its innovative supranational features, the European Coal and Steel Community is widely recognized as the cornerstone of the European integration process. This article offers an alternative ...history of the European Coal and Steel Community's origins by highlighting the role of transnational expertise and public diplomacy. More precisely, this study seeks to demonstrate that the policies carried out by Jean Monnet, the mastermind of European Coal and Steel Community's blueprint, originated from the plans elaborated by the New York-based think tank Council on Foreign Relations. While advising the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, the Council on Foreign Relations formed a policy network with European policymakers sharing similar political values and goals. Although the interactions between these figures have never been studied, new findings reveal that the Council on Foreign Relations–Monnet partnership proved instrumental in improving inter-Allied coordination, managing postwar recovery and framing the idea of European unity. Eventually, the Council on Foreign Relations helped Monnet to define, adjust and promote the European Coal and Steel Community Treaty draft. In this perspective, the foundation of the first European institution derived from a long-term strategic design rooted in wartime planning and transatlantic diplomatic exchanges.
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