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Public Policy and Institutions (SPS-REIMM-INS-23)

SPS-REIMM-INS-23

Purpose

It is fair to say that, since the new millennium, we’ve been living in period of “structural reform” accelerated by intrusive shocks, such as the Great Recession, and more recently, the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Major changes in pensions, labour markets, education, health, macroeconomic policy, and environmental regulation, have swept the European continent. In some cases, intrusive policy reform was accompanied by deep social and political conflict, while in other instances unpopular reforms eventually received broad societal and political consent. Alongside major retrenchment, there have been deliberate attempts – often given impetus by intensified European economic integration – to rebuild health and welfare programs, industrial and environmental policies in sync with the new economic, technological, demographic, and climate realities of the 21^st century.  Policy reform and institutional change, inescapably building on extant policy legacies across countries, is work in progress, leading to patchwork mixes of old and new policies and institutions on the lookout, perhaps, for greater coherence. Unsurprisingly, this political “search process” remains incomplete, resulting from the institutionally bounded and contingent adaptation to the challenges of the aftershocks of the global financial crisis and Covid-19 pandemic against the background of adverse demography, economic (de-)globalization, accelerating digital innovation, and climate change.

This seminar offers a comprehensive introduction into the political analysis of public policy and reform against the background of changing nature of economics, politics, and society in advanced European democracies. The aim is to introduce researchers to the state of the art in comparative public policy research, with a special emphasis on institutional change and policy reform. The course thus aims to provide researchers with advanced knowledge in the basic institutions and mechanisms that help to explaining policy and institutional continuity and change over time. Furthermore, the course provides skills in comparative cross-national and EU policymaking, with special attention given to competing theories on politics of policy change and continuity in terms of methodological strengths and weaknesses.
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