Although there is substantial academic interest in new modes of governance, the dichotomy ‘old-new governance’ is not really useful to understand the long-term evolution of governance in international and EU direct taxation. More fruitful insights come from focussing on shifting modes of governance as dependent variable, using a continuum from formal to informal modes. Drawing on this continuum, we make three claims. First, informal governance is ‘old’ governance as far as direct taxation is concerned. Informal modes were institutionalized by the OECD with the model treaty convention and guidelines for transfer pricing between the 1960s and the 1980s. The OECD approach – based on informal governance was quite successful both in terms of diffusion and in terms of legitimacy. During these years, the European Commission tried to promote formal governance of direct tax policy, with ambitious plans for directives, but the achievement was limited. In the 1990s, the OECD launched more ambitious and multilateral plans aimed at cracking down harmful tax practices in member states and in non-OECD jurisdictions. At the EU level, the fight against harmful tax competition provided the opportunity to ‘discover’ informal governance with the code of conduct on business taxation. The code, however, was nested in a tax package containing a directive on savings – a classic example of formal governance. This leads to the second claim. Overall there is no linear pattern of informal governance. The OECD-promoted international tax order is more formal than in the past, but in the EU there is more interest in informal governance than in the past. The third claim is about legitimacy. The social legitimacy of international tax governance has declined over the last 80 years or so. The wider the scope and the range of actors targeted by informal governance, the larger the contestation of OECD and EU policy. This seems to lead to the paradoxical conclusion that legitimacy has been higher under conditions of close, technocratic governance networks – a point hard to reconcile with democratic theory. We explain this paradox by arguing that the questions about social legitimacy should be posed in terms of switch of logics, from technocratic to political. Finally, we answer the questions ‘Why does the EU select more informal governance solutions at a time when the OECD looks into harder forms of governance?’ and ‘Why does governance switch from technocratic to political?’
This chapter aims to detail the narrative policy framework (NPF) in an effort to provide a means by which policy researchers in a variety of contexts can advance scientific discoveries surrounding our central research question. Narrative strategies are used in an attempt to influence the policy process. The NPF identifies operational measures of policy beliefs through narrative elements such as characters and other symbolic, metaphorical, or contextual means by which collective understandings of the policy are generated. The NPF assumes that policy narratives operate simultaneously at three levels of analysis such as Microlevel NPF, Mesolevel NPF and Macrolevel NPF. The chapter addresses four new directions in NPF research, which include comparative public policy approaches, use of evidence, validation of digital media as a source of narrative data, and a new proposition regarding policy narrative learning in the context of policy change.
ABSTRACT This article reviews theoretically grounded empirical studies on committees in the European Union by focusing on research published from the late 1990s onwards. The aim is to report on the state of the art and to shed light on emerging puzzles, research gaps and promising venues for further research. We examine research questions, theoretical approaches, design, and the main empirical findings. The conclusions provide our critical remarks and suggestions for further research. Keywords: CommitteesEuropean Uniongovernanceidentitypublic administrationsocialization. Notes 1. Martin Marcussen, Jarle Trondal, Frode Veggeland and Torbjorn Larsson are exploring this dimension in their project ‘The Dynamics of International Executives: A Comparative Study of the European Commission, the OECD Secretariat and the WTO Secretariat’.
This article has three main objectives. Firstly, it seeks to re- formulate the debate on technocracy in the European Union by drawing upon the concept of the EU regulatory state as developed by Majone (1996). Secondly, it illustrates the limits and tensions of a once politicised technocratic policy-making process by tracing the formulation of media ownership regulation. Although media ownership policy has been presented by the European Commission as a typical regulatory policy, it has followed a more politicised path than previous EU regulatory policies. This implies that media ownership policy does not follow the model of technocratic regulation presented by Majone in his characterisation of the EU regulatory state. Thirdly, the paper contributes to the debate on EU regulation by suggesting a new typology of regulatory policies in the EU. In the conclusion, it is argued that politicisation (which includes inefficiency and prolonged conflict) may be the price that the EU is forced to pay in its progress toward a more democratic polity.
effectiveness of policy delivery and cut administrative burdens. While a good deal of analytical attention is given to these governance tools, we know much less about how regulators themselves understand and learn about them. This paper outlines presents a quasi-experiment to assess the effects of training on local government inspectors’ understandings of the Primary Authority (PA) scheme. Established by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills’ (BIS) Better Regulation Delivery Organisation (BRDO) in 2009, PA partnerships are legally binding agreements that provide businesses operating across England with a single point of regulatory contact. These PA inspectors provide advice and reduce duplication of inspections and paperwork. The scheme is a complex one, and marks a significant departure from the existing inspection framework. This study explores the impact of training on inspectors’ understandings of the scheme itself and its underlying rationale concerning regulatory burdens. The findings suggest that, regardless of training, regulatory innovations like the PA scheme, are well understood among local authority inspectors. But, where training may make a difference it is in aspects of regulatory reform which are contentious or could be taken as counter-intuitive to professional norms.
Abstract We compare the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT). Given the focus of this special issue on the NPF, we first theorize how the IGT can contribute to the development of NPF categories, but also how the former gains conceptual leverage from the latter. We argue that it is useful to consider jointly NPF and IGT as this expands the benefit of NPF usage for policy researchers—uncovering not only the stories policy actors tell but also what these stories mean in terms of institutional statements. We provide a demonstration of how the conversation between these two policy lenses may develop by analyzing original data on the design of consultation procedures in the European Union, Finland, Ireland, and Malta.
What is the causal relationship between crisis, learning and change? How did causality unfold in the key years of 2009–2010 when the European Union had to face the most formidable attacks to the single currency and responded with substantial reforms of the euro area? We question the conventional identification of the cause-and-effect relationship provided by theories of crisis management, integration and policy learning. Drawing on models of contingent learning developed within psychology and behavioural economics, we theorize that surprise produces behavioural change via a fast-paced associative mechanism and that policy learning follows change. We then run our exercise in causal identification through a plausibility probe. We show that our argument passes the plausibility probe. Our conclusions on cognition and situational effects on learning during crises suggest a new research agenda, more sensitive to how individuals behave in the real world and more robust in its micro-foundations.
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