Marleen Brans

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Public Governance Institute

The article investigates incumbent exit rates of women and men parliamentarians in the national chambers and European Parliament delegations of eight West European countries after elections. Relying on original data, the article uses a multi-level model to analyse the fixed effects of gender, type of delegation, and the politico-institutional conte...

Background: The COVID-19 policy context was characterised by high levels of uncertainty, imperfect knowledge and the need for immediate action. Therefore, governments in Europe tended to rely on expertise provided by advisory bodies to design their crisis response. Advisory bodies played a fundamental part in policy making during the crisis to opti...

Brans and Timmermans respond to Flinders' concerns about the potential irrelevance of political science due to the pressures of impact regimes. Based on a 2018 survey of 12,400 European political scientists, they show that 80% of political scientists actively engage in policy advising. They identify four advisory roles: Pure Academic, Expert, Opini...

The relevance and impact of political scientists’ professional activities outside of universities has become the focus of public attention, partly due to growing expectations that research should help address society’s grand challenges. One type of such activity is policy advising. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding the ext...

This paper develops and empirically tests the novel concept of ‘decabinetisation’, a type of depoliticisation reform that affects the advisory and support offices of executive politicians. Reforms that restrict and constrain the work of ministerial advisers and reduce the political resources of ministers are puzzling, even more so when pressure to...

Chiefs of Staff to heads of government hold a prominent position at the apex of the political executive. However, our knowledge of the personal and professional backgrounds of these unelected actors is surprisingly patchy. Not only is this an empirical gap, but it is also problematic as interactions between actors within political executives shape...

With speeding being a major factor in road traffic injuries and deaths, an important challenge lies in devising effective policy measures to influence drivers' speeding intentions. This paper investigates the effects of rational and emotional anti-speeding messages on self-reported speeding intentions of drivers who received a speeding ticket. Mess...

La recherche sur les systèmes de conseil stratégique dans le monde a montré que les sources de conseil historiquement dominantes, traditionnellement situées au sein du gouvernement, sont de plus en plus complétées par d’autres acteurs et des connaissances extérieures. Cependant, la grande majorité des recherches se sont concentrées sur le contexte...

Research on policy-advisory systems worldwide has shown that historically dominant sources of advice traditionally located in-house to the government have been increasingly supplemented by other actors and outside knowledge. However, the vast majority of research has concentrated on the anglophone context. Yet, countries with a consensus-seeking, n...

Political scientists in Europe are more extrovert in their behaviour as academics than is sometimes thought. They live outside the ‘ivory tower’ for part of their time and deliver knowledge and information to practitioners in the policy process. The majority takes a role as opinionating scholar; this happens more often than being an expert or a pur...

This chapter shows how Belgian political scientists are active players in the Belgian policy advisory system, particularly engaging with the civil service and civil society. Advisory bodies, even though there are many, are not the first of the political scientists’ targets, confirming that lay and representative interest-based expertise prevails in...

This chapter presents a theoretical perspective for studying the policy advisory roles of political scientists, drawing upon literature on knowledge utilization and policy advisory systems. It first proposes a locational model as a heuristic tool for mapping the advisory activities of academic political scientists in the academic, government and so...

This chapter presents the research design of the ProSEPS comparative project on advisory roles of political scientists. In order to operationalize the theoretical concepts on policy advice and policy advisory roles as introduced in Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-86005-9_2 , the project uses the questions included in a large scale comparative survey to Eur...

We explore the conditions critical for the enactment of ambitious local energy transition in a post-socialist renewable energy policy environment that constrains local initiatives. We analyse the island of Krk (Croatia) as a unique case of shared vision of 100 % renewable energy in post-socialist countries. We apply Kingdon’s multiple-streams appro...

This paper examines the influence of party change on party-level legislative turnover. Analyzing a novel dataset tracking 251 parties in eight West European democracies between 1945 and 2015, we assess how transformational party events affect the renewal of parties’ parliamentary delegations. Transformational party events refer to party changes res...

Policy evaluations can be set up for multiple purposes including accountability, policy learning and policy planning. The question is, however, how these purposes square with politics itself. To date, there is little knowledge on how government ministers present the rationale of evaluations. This article is the first to provide a diachronic study o...

In a context of the rising importance of ministerial advisers, this article provides empirical evidence about the nature of involvement of civil servants in policy work. Based on a survey of graduated civil servants in francophone Belgium, it shows that civil servants are much involved in policy work even in a politico-administrative system charact...

Comparative public administration studies the capacity of government and public actors to design and implement policies. This article in the JCPA anniversary issue discusses similarities and differences between comparative public administration and comparative public policy. It does so using the concept of policy capacity, a capacity that is suppli...

This chapter investigates patterns in the application of policy analytical techniques by government officials across different types of policy sectors in three subnational administrations in Belgium. Even when there is general consensus about the importance of policy analytical capacity, government officials’ deployment of policy analytical tools m...

This article explains legislative turnover in eight West European legislatures over 152 general elections in the period 1945–2015. Turnover is measured as the rate of individual membership change in unicameral or lower chambers. It is the outcome of a legislative recruitment process with a supply and a demand side. Decisions made by contenders affe...

The paper explores the causes of legislative turnover within individual parties (N=879) after 152 general elections in eight west European lower and unicameral chambers in the period 1945-2015. The focus is on political and institutional features of individual parties and the party system. The data is analysed using a simple OLS regression with cou...

We explore what factors play a critical role in a shift of a local energy system towards 100% renewable energy community by examining the case using a framework that highlights the role of key state and non state actors (investors, local officials, citizens and policy entrepreneurs) and the role of governance mode (horizontal “self steering”, partn...

L’analyse des politiques publiques ( policy analysis ) est un sujet peu exploré en Belgique. Lors de la conception du livre Policy analysis in Belgium , ses auteurs se sont rendu compte de la parcimonie et de la dispersion des sources scientifiques disponibles, surtout du côté francophone du pays. Il fut donc nécessaire de lancer plusieurs enquêtes...

The second wave of studies on political advisers defends a broad view of policy advisory systems where politicians rely on a multitude of knowledge and advice providers. Even if governance reforms enlarged the advisory system to a multitude of participants, mainly external (e.g. consultants, scientists, NGOs, or think tanks), public officials worki...

In the present paper we argue that the emergence of political advisers in the Westminster (and not only) administrative tradition can be understood as part of a process of ‘cabinetisation’, which started in the 1980s and continues till today. Given the lack of theory on this concept the main aim of the present paper is to develop cabinetisation fro...

The paper explores the causes of female legislative turnover. Female turnover refers to the number of new female legislators, expressed as a proportion of the total number of members of parliament (MPs) who enter the legislature after general elections. Do explanations of female turnover differ than those of male turnover? And what can we learn abo...

Scientific advisory systems take different forms in different countries, as do the contents, styles and methods of policy analysis. Bringing the two dimensions together, we find significant cross-country variances in the interface of policy analysis and policymaking. In this chapter, we explore these variances, thereby focusing on academic policy a...

In Belgium, policy analysts do not constitute a long established, identifiable corps of professionals. Neither have they attracted much interest as a research subject. Only recently has empirical research started to map who they are and what they do. This chapter presents the demography of policy analysts as professionals. It maps who policy analys...

Belgium, like Italy, is often considered a text book example of partitocracy. The dominance of political parties involves many functions and dysfunctions in a polity that is highly fragmented along linguistic and ideological lines. Political parties not only assert their institutional position as gate keepers to what demands and interests are aggre...

While in many Western-European countries the ascent of special advisors is a relatively recent phenomenon, Belgium has long engaged ministerial cabinets as structural interfaces between politics and administration. Relatively large by international standards, ministerial cabinets consist of political advisors who as “an extension of their minister”...

In Belgium, there are about 250 advisory bodies at the federal level and 46 at the regional level. These advisory bodies tend to be highly integrated into the policy-making cycle. They also seem to rely more on experience-based expertise than on academic expert opinion, which is not surprising in a consensus-based political system with neo-corporat...

Both academic and applied policy analysis are relatively young disciplines that have found their way into academic curricula of universities only towards the end of the previous century. This is surprising given that policy analytical models were disseminated in Belgium already in the late 1960s, as was the case in the Netherlands. While this spark...

This introductory chapter contextualizes and analyses the characteristics of the discipline and practice of policy analysis in Belgium. It first highlights the relatively young tradition of policy analysis in Belgium. Secondly, it identifies the characteristics of the Belgian political systems and their likely impact upon the nature of policy analy...

This chapter analyses the locus and modus of in-house policy work in the Belgian central and regional government. First, it describes and explains differences in the way in which policy analytical roles within the department and agencies are organized. Second, it reviews the structures and procedures through which in-house policy analytical informa...

Through their policy relevant research outputs and integration in policy networks, Belgian academics ‘speak truth to power’ (Wildavsky 1979) or ‘make sense together’ (Hoppe 1999) in political and public debates about policy problems and options. At the turn of the millennium, the federal and regional governments have moved to institutionalizing pol...

This book presents the first systematic overview of policy analysis activities in Belgium. Contributors from both sides of the Dutch-French language border use original empirical data to provide a comprehensive, comparative study of multi-level policy-making both within and outside government.

Belgium is often considered a textbook example of partitocracy (De Winter, 1998; Deschouwer, 2012). The dominance of political parties involves many functions and dysfunctions in a polity that is highly fragmented along linguistic and ideological lines. Political parties do not only aggregate citizens’ demands and preferences, participate in electi...

In Belgium, policy analysis is relatively young as an academic discipline. It found its way into the academic curricula of universities only towards the end of the last century (De Winter et al, 2007). This is surprising given that policy-analytical models were being disseminated in Belgium in the late 1960s, and only a little later in the Netherla...

This book provides the first comprehensive examination of policy analysis in Belgium. At the domestic level, the book integrates knowledge about the science, art and craft of policy analysis at different levels of government and by all relevant policy actors that bear on the analysis of problems and on the search for solutions. For comparative purp...

This book presents the first systematic overview of policy analysis activities in Belgium. Contributors from both sides of the Dutch-French language border use original empirical data to provide a comprehensive, comparative study of multi-level policy-making both within and outside government.

Policy analysis is the application of intellect to the definition of and solution to policy problems. Thus understood, policy analysis is a craft (Weimer, 1998), drawing on both specialist and generalist knowledge and skills (Colebatch and Radin, 2006). It draws on the application of more or less formalised policy-analytical skills, but also on the...

This book presents the first systematic overview of policy analysis activities in Belgium. Contributors from both sides of the Dutch-French language border use original empirical data to provide a comprehensive, comparative study of multi-level policy-making both within and outside government.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the practices of policy analysis in Belgium. It studies the professional practices that organisations and actors entertain to define a problem marked for government concern and to prescribe the measures to solve that problem by policy action or change. Rather than looking at the theories of the poli...

This book provides the first comprehensive examination of the practice of policy analysis in Belgium and its federated entities. The book integrates available and new knowledge about the science, art, and craft of policy analysis by all relevant policy actors at different levels of government. The book’s investigation of policy analysis in and outs...

Purpose This study of the impact of Belgian Court of Audit on Federal Administration for the 2005 to 2010 period aims to highlight the auditors’ influence on the management of governmental organizations through the performance audits they have been conducting since 1998. A set of ten variables allows us to measure the three types of uses of perform...

This unique book presents the first systematic overview of policy analysis activities in Belgium. Contributors from both sides of the Dutch-French language border (from research institutes in Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia) use original empirical data, through surveys and interviews with key players both within and outside government, to provide a...

The article investigates the substantive and dimensional aspect of advisers’ policy work in the cabinets of European Commissioners. Advisers’ roles are mapped using Connaughton's (2010a) typology of four adviser types and Maley's (2015) framework of three arenas. Using data collected via a survey and follow-up face-to-face interviews with European...

Despite several decades of the Europeanization of Higher Education there is no single European model for teaching Public Administration (PA). Neither is there a single model of public administration in practice, even if European countries have been witnessing an extension of the European policy and administrative space as well as pressures for publ...

This paper sheds lights on the experiences of MPA education in Europe concerning its key characteristics, major approaches, and the extent of convergence and divergence in the areas of MPA teaching, research and international cooperation. In a broad perspective, it gives an overview of the development of the European MPA education in the context of...

The paper focuses on the determinants of legislative turnover in 8 west European lower chambers after 150 general elections in the period from 1945 to 2015. Legislative turnover is seen as the outcome of a representative elite production process that includes four elements: electorates, which shape the demand for MPs, selectorates, which shape the...

In this article, the coproduction of local health plans in two heavily polluted “hot spots” in Belgium is explored. First, the results of the processes are examined, focusing on idea generation, policy impacts, participant relationships, support for the policy, and the strength of the partnership. Next, the process rules are analyzed, and the exten...

When the financial crisis hit the Eurozone, Belgium, along with several other countries, postponed its consolidation policies until after the general elections. What followed was the longest caretaker rule that any stable democracy had ever experienced. This article analyses the phenomenon of policy continuity and change during this double crisis....

Het nut en het potentieel van groenboeken, witboeken en conceptnota's wordt erkend door belangrijke actoren in het Vlaamse politiek-bestuurlijke landschap. Het gebruik van groen- en witboeken (en in mindere mate ook conceptnota's) is echter eerder nieuw in Vlaanderen en werd, met uitzondering van een analyse door de SERV in 2011, nog niet diepgaand...

Checklists for evaluation capacity builders include a wide range of building blocks for supporting evaluation activity. Yet, the relative importance of each building block is not clear. The purpose of this article is to identify the capacity related factors that are necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, for organisations that wish to instituti...

This report offers a review of the major works developed in the past fifteen years by the Forum on Stakeholder Confidence (FSC) of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). It presents the key drivers of public trust in Radioactive Waste Management (RWM), based on an in-depth document analysis of FSC flyers and reports. The FSC experience suggests that...

In Flanders, every political party has its own political foundation or study centre. Although their importance for the party organisation is widely recognised, a systematic and comparative analysis of these study centres is still lacking. This article is the first attempt to address this empirical void. Based on document analysis, interviews and su...

The growth in evaluation practice has not always gone hand in hand with an increase in the actual quality of these evaluations. This article addresses this concern, by examining the factors that explain organizational variety in the application of evaluation quality assurance measures. We present the results of an analysis of 18 Flemish (Belgian) p...

An evaluation can be conducted in-house or can be outsourced to an external party. Yet organizations do not always have full discretion to decide on the locus for evaluation implementation. Certain attributes often push the organization in one direction or another. Via a systematic pairwise comparison of attributes of 18 organizations in the Flemis...

This article approaches policy-oriented foresight as a particular kind of evidence aimed at supporting and developing policies. Through a comparative case study, the article investigates the different ways in which evidence from policy-oriented foresight is used by policy makers. In explaining the factors behind differences in use between the cases...

Policy-making in Flanders (Belgium) is traditionally characterized by a dense advisory system with a high number of advisory councils, firmly integrated into the policy-making process. Recently, the Flemish government has reshaped its strategic advisory council system, responding to concerns over growing advice competition. This reorganization was...