Journal of European Public Policy

Journal of European Public Policy

Published by Taylor & Francis

Online ISSN: 1466-4429

Journal websiteAuthor guidelines

Top-read articles

61 reads in the past 30 days

Figure 2: Marginal effects of actors' electoral strategies, ideological preferences, and bargaining power on the predicted number of policy transfers. The dots represent predicted values, and the horizontal lines represent the 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3: Distribution of RDTs by policy area and policy-specific analyses.
The implementation of decentralisation reforms in multi-level systems

January 2025

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61 Reads

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Jorge M. Fernandes
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52 reads in the past 30 days

The comparative politics of just transition policies: building green-red winning coalitions in Spain and Ireland

January 2025

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56 Reads

Just transition policies can be useful measures to address the new social risks of industrial decarbonization. However, while these policies are growing empirically, they remain arguably undertheorized. Navigating a largely unexplored field, this article aims to strengthen our understanding of just transition policymaking with a theory-generating ambition. It does so by asking: what explains the adoption of just transition policies? Following a Most Different Systems Design, Spain and Ireland have been selected as comparative case studies to reconstruct the political trajectories behind national just transition policies. Drawing from coalition theories, empirical analysis maps the preferences of and interactions between political parties and organised interest groups. The article relies on outcome-explaining process tracing and qualitative methods, including the analysis of policy and press documents, and thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with policymakers and other informants. The core argument is that just transition policies emerge as the result of green-red winning coalitions steered by powerful entrepreneurs, who engage in political exchanges with other socio-political actors in order to trade political support for decarbonisation, in exchange for economic support to affected societal groups.

Aims and scope


Publishes leading research on European public policy and European politics, including public policy developments and political processes and policies.

  • The Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP) has established itself as one of the flagship journals in the study of public policy, European politics and the EU and aims to provide a comprehensive and definitive source of analytical, theoretical and methodological articles in these fields.
  • Focusing on the dynamics of public policy in Europe, the journal encourages a wide range of social science approaches, both qualitative and quantitative.
  • JEPP defines European public policy widely and welcomes innovative ideas and approaches. The main areas covered by the Journal are as follows: theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of public policy in Europe and elsewhere; national public policy developments and processes in Europe…

For a full list of the subject areas this journal covers, please visit the journal website.

Recent articles


A bitter aftertaste? The effects of privatisation reforms on evaluations of health systems across Europe
  • Article

February 2025

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1 Read

Tamara Popic

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Alexandru D. Moise



The soft hostage-taking of EU foreign policy: Hungary’s rule of law conflict with the EU and Russia’s war against Ukraine
  • Article
  • Full-text available

January 2025

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6 Reads



Language-bargaining in the Council of the European Union: meaning negotiations and the concept of gender equality

January 2025

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1 Read

How do states negotiate meaning? Building on the empirical case of the contestation of the term ‘gender equality’ in the Council of the European Union, I show that the scholarship has so far lacked precise tools for analysing negotiation over meaning. This gap is surprising given how ubiquitous and politically consequential are negotiations over definitions in the European Union and other international loci. Because of assumed contradiction between constructivism and bargaining in the EU literature, bargaining over language has not received enough scholarly attention. In this article, I propose an analytical framework for studying intentional meaning-making through negotiations and I introduce concepts of language-solving and language-bargaining. I show how the meaning ascribed to the term ‘gender equality’ in the EU is a result of language-bargaining between nationally-located understandings represented by EU member states. The negotiations led first to the open meaning of the term between 1990s and 2010s and then, following ‘gender crisis’, an explicit agreement by member states to attribute diverging meanings to the term ‘gender equality’ since 2021. The analysis shows the importance of partial separation of national processes of meaning-making for international negotiations.


Figure 2: Marginal effects of actors' electoral strategies, ideological preferences, and bargaining power on the predicted number of policy transfers. The dots represent predicted values, and the horizontal lines represent the 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3: Distribution of RDTs by policy area and policy-specific analyses.
The implementation of decentralisation reforms in multi-level systems

January 2025

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61 Reads

In countries with multi-level governance, the balance of power between centre and periphery results from complex bargaining processes. Existing literature equates decentralisation to its de jure dimension, which risks missing variation in the extent to which decentralisation reforms take place. In this paper, we argue that decentralisation is a two-stage process. In the first step, political elites bargain and agree on reforms to the legal framework to reflect the distribution of powers between the centre and the periphery. In the second step, which we analyze empirically in this paper, decentralisation agreements must be implemented. If implementation is incomplete, decentralisation fails. Drawing on the Spanish case (1980–2022), our paper makes several contributions. First, we show that decentralisation implementation is more successful when regional governments are co-partisan with the national government. Second, results suggest that implementation is more successful if the national government has ideological preferences for decentralisation. Further, we show that a change in the national government composition between the agreement and implementation stages creates attrition to decentralisation. Finally, results suggest that the strength of ethnoterritorial parties in the national legislatures does not have an impact in the process while single-party absolute majorities at the national level forestall decentralisation implementation.



The comparative politics of just transition policies: building green-red winning coalitions in Spain and Ireland

January 2025

·

56 Reads

Just transition policies can be useful measures to address the new social risks of industrial decarbonization. However, while these policies are growing empirically, they remain arguably undertheorized. Navigating a largely unexplored field, this article aims to strengthen our understanding of just transition policymaking with a theory-generating ambition. It does so by asking: what explains the adoption of just transition policies? Following a Most Different Systems Design, Spain and Ireland have been selected as comparative case studies to reconstruct the political trajectories behind national just transition policies. Drawing from coalition theories, empirical analysis maps the preferences of and interactions between political parties and organised interest groups. The article relies on outcome-explaining process tracing and qualitative methods, including the analysis of policy and press documents, and thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with policymakers and other informants. The core argument is that just transition policies emerge as the result of green-red winning coalitions steered by powerful entrepreneurs, who engage in political exchanges with other socio-political actors in order to trade political support for decarbonisation, in exchange for economic support to affected societal groups.


Can information, compensation and party cues increase mass support for green taxes?

December 2024

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50 Reads

The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy presents a major challenge, with green taxes often seen as an efficient policy to promote environmentally friendly behaviour. However, these taxes are difficult to implement due to public concerns about immediate costs versus future environmental benefits. To address this, we conducted a survey experiment in Switzerland to investigate whether information on green tax effectiveness, compensation through revenue recycling, and party cues can make green taxes more attractive to citizens. Our findings indicate that information about compensation mechanisms and party cues can enhance support for green taxes, while single instances of information on green tax effectiveness do not significantly affect beliefs or policy support. Green tax proposals are more popular when compensation strategies address climate change or mitigate social risks and when there is broad party consensus providing clear cues to citizens. However, our findings also underscore the potential trade-off associated with a broad coalition of parties supporting green tax reform, which may lead to diminished support from the left. These insights have important implications for designing and communicating green taxes, highlighting the role of informed beliefs and political signals in shaping public attitudes toward environmental policies.



Who deserves the spot? Attitudes towards priorities in access to subsidised childcare [open access]

December 2024

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29 Reads

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1 Citation

Research on perceptions of deservingness has so far mainly focused on cash benefits. We correct this imbalance by studying public attitudes towards access to social investment services, specifically, subsidised childcare. Based on the well-established corpus of deservingness research and recent work on varieties of social investment, we expect the traditional deservingness criteria to matter and for results to vary across countries. To test our argument, we rely on an original survey experiment conducted in 2021 in six Western countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the USA). We find that cross-national patterns of responses broadly reflect the categorisation of three types of social investments, that is, inclusive, stratified and targeted social investment. Further, we find that some of the well-known determinants of deservingness perceptions play an important role in the attribution of priorities of parents who need childcare: most clearly need and identity (operationalised with the parents’ nationality and their length of residency). This is true in all six countries covered. We conclude that patterns of deservingness perceptions to subsidised childcare services are determined by a mix of institutional factors (that differ across welfare regimes) and more fundamental attitudes towards helping those in need.





Figure 1. The historical development of maternity leave and family allowance in 19 welfare states, 1900-1975. Notes: The family allowance data for Spain and Portugal begins in 1953, corresponding with the SFB 1342's initiation of average wage data coding. For all other countries, the data starts in 1930, aligning with the onset of average wage records from the SCIP. Earlier observations (i.e., Australia from 1926 to 1929) are excluded. The vertical blue line marks the point at which suffrage was extended to the entire female population, indicating when the de facto female suffrage variable in the V-Dem project began to be coded as 100. Portuguese women attained voting rights in 1976.
Gender cleavage and political parties in 19 welfare states, 1900–1975

December 2024

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37 Reads

Cleavage theory posits that political parties have been a key channel for representing political interests, formulated by cleavage structures. Existing literature argues that gender differences are not strong enough to constitute a cleavage, as evidenced by early voting behavior among women. This article contends that the paradox of the traditional gender gap may arise from our lack of understanding about supply-side explanations, namely political parties’ positions on gender policies in early history. In the early and mid-twentieth centuries, women’s political interests stemmed from their role as homemakers and workers, advocating for family allowance and paid maternity leave. Using a novel historical database, I test whether parties’ positions aligned with women’s political interests in 19 welfare states between 1900 and 1975. My findings show that Christian democratic parties advocated for gender policies, albeit selectively, depending on the types of gender issues, while social democratic parties did not exhibit stronger support for gender policies more than other parties. This helps us understand why women did not predominantly vote for leftist parties. Instead, female representatives in parliaments across party affiliations functioned as agents of women’s interests and promoted welfare policies that supported the different roles of women.







Migration communication campaigns: towards a research agenda and open database

November 2024

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29 Reads

Every year, government agencies, international organisations, and civil society associations produce public communications campaigns designed to inform, persuade, and motivate behaviour regarding numerous facets of migration. Despite their increasing ubiquity, resources, and – possibly – impact, as well as the profound scientific relevance in understanding them, such campaigns remain relatively understudied and existing research is disjointed across various disciplines. This article takes three steps to propose and initiate a unified, interdisciplinary research agenda on migration communication campaigns (MCCs). First, we overview the need for a research agenda based on their increased substantive importance and scientific interest. Second, we outline what such a research agenda should look like, proposing six research themes. Third, we contribute to this proposed research agenda in two ways: with a typology of MCCs and by presenting our open-access, collaborative database to kick-start more systematic research in this field, including theoretical justifications for each variable. The database includes 301 MCCs conducted in 32 European countries between 2012 and 2022. We invite submissions of all types of MCCs globally to create a bridge between communities of academics, policymakers, and communicators.


Figure 1. Measurement of crisis response speed.
Examples of IO crisis recognition of the 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak.
Speed of IO financial aid packages in response to the 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak.
Speed of IO missions in response to the 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak.
Evaluating crisis response speed of international organisations: why it matters and how to achieve it

November 2024

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53 Reads

Armed conflicts, pandemics or natural disasters often necessitate rapid, coordinated responses by international organisations (IOs) to avoid escalation or loss of life. However, effective analytical tools to assess and compare the speed of these responses are lacking. This paper introduces a framework for evaluating IO crisis response speed, with the aim of better understanding which IOs are best equipped to offer rapid crisis responses and which are not. I propose a three-stage model that measures the time for IOs to (a) recognise a crisis, (b) decide on measures and (c) implement these measures, while also accounting for variations in levels of precision and obligation. Using empirical insights from the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, I demonstrate how this model can generate data that can improve our understanding of the performance of IOs as crisis managers and foster discussions on enhancing the speed and efficiency of multilateral responses during crises.


From the closet to spotlight: the rising tide of lesbian, gay and bisexual political candidacies

October 2024

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20 Reads

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1 Citation

Is there a positive sexuality gap in access to political candidacy and elected office, similar to those found in other forms of political engagement? We utilise validated data on same- and different-sex families from the Swedish administrative registry to descriptively examine long-term trends in access to political candidacy and elected office among Swedish lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons. With data covering twenty-four elections and a sample size of nearly seventy million individuals, our findings reveal a gradually emerging positive sexuality gap in access to political candidacy and a declining share of ‘sacrificial lambs’ among LGB candidates. We verify the robustness of these findings with the help of two original representative samples from the Swedish population. By shedding light on the existence and durability of a positive lavender gap in access to political candidacy, this study contributes to existing debates concerning the obstacles to minority political participation and descriptive representation and how they might be overcome.



Quotas or Parity? How the Framing of Positive Action Measures Affects Public Support and Backlash

September 2024

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7 Reads

While gender quota and parity laws are increasingly popular worldwide, their introduction often causes controversy. Thus far, we lack an understanding of how the framing of these measures affects public opinion. We conducted a survey experiment in the UK and France (combined N = 2677) to identify the causal effect of framing on levels of support for the policy and potential backlash against women candidates. Comparing (1) gender quotas to increase women’s underrepresentation and (2) gender parity laws to achieve gender balance, we find that overall levels of support are greater than opposition in both countries. Parity is more supported than quotas in France, but no such framing effects emerge in the UK. Respondents’ gender also matters, with men less supportive of both measures than women. We find no evidence that either type of positive action measure increases backlash in the form of reduced support for hypothetical women candidates running under such measures.


Journal metrics


4.6 (2023)

Journal Impact Factor™


26%

Acceptance rate


8.8 (2023)

CiteScore™


1 days

Submission to first decision


2.474 (2023)

SNIP


1.967 (2023)

SJR

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