This article investigates legitimation processes in crisis situations, focusing on the European Union's Next Generation EU (NGEU) program and its core instrument, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). To access RRF funds, Member States must submit National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs), which integrate social and technical components. The article conceptualizes NRRPs as socio-technical governance instruments and examines how legitimation unfolds in Belgium, Italy, and Spain. Four distinct legitimation processes are highlighted: demonstrative (evidence-based), allusive (symbolic), functional (authority-endorsed), and representative (value-aligned), illustrating how different political systems construct legitimacy in times of crisis.
Research on the governance of digital platforms has concentrated on technology companies as intermediaries. This article analyzes the emergence of societal actors as new intermediaries in the governance of digital platforms in the European Union. What forms of intermediation evolve during the implementation of data access under the Digital Services Act? Based on semi-structured interviews, the article compares Germany and Ireland as key countries. It concludes that regulators in both countries rely on researchers as intermediaries in order to strengthen capacity for implementation. This research introduces new ways to capture and understand the role of the state and society in governance of digital platforms.
This article examines the institutionalization of policy sciences in Latin America from 1970 to 2020, identifying three phases in its development: early translation and adaptation of ideas, institutional consolidation, and later diversification and internationalization. Using a qualitative-historical approach combining documentary analysis, bibliometric data, and academic trajectories, it shows how Lasswell's legacy was reinterpreted and how mediating scholars - especially Luis F. Aguilar Villanueva - shaped a regional analytical grammar linking state reform, governance, and public policy. The findings indicate that the field evolved from fragmented, imported knowledge into a differentiated space with its own institutions, publications, and training programs, illuminating how global policy ideas are translated and recontextualized in the Global South.
This study examines the micro-dimensions of policy design in the digital transformation agenda across Brazilian states, focusing on the selection and combination of policy instruments. The empirical corpus comprises regulatory documents published between 2019 and 2025. The analysis reveals substantial variation across states; some prioritize substantive instruments linked to authority and organization, such as plans and digital platforms, while others emphasize procedural instruments. These configurations yield distinct implementation styles. Substantive arrangements tend to generate more technical, operationally driven policies, whereas procedural arrangements foster legitimacy, coordination, and adaptability. The study argues that balanced combinations of instruments are decisive for policy effectiveness.
Financial institutions are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to automate and augment compliance activities. This paper examines the financial sector's use of AI-based regulatory technology (RegTech) and argues that both AI-based RegTech programs and developers function as regulatory intermediaries. It explores how the increasing agency and competencies of these technologies create incentives to delegate and introduces delegation problems. Through a comparative study of financial regulators in the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong, the paper examines how regulators have converged in constructing systems of control to harness the competencies of these intermediaries and mitigate delegation problems.
Property tax is recognised as a crucial financial tool for local governments to support development initiatives. Its administration - that is, the identification, valuing, taxing, and collecting revenue from real property within a jurisdiction - however, remains problematic. Recently, some scholars have asserted that this problem can be resolved through the introduction of technology, which many governments have now adopted. Unfortunately, the problems of property tax administration (PTA) continue to persist. This persistence can be attributed to the relationship between central and local governments, where the former keeps constraining the latter's ability to function as the administrators of property tax through omissions and commissions. Using Ghana as a case study, the article asks: How does the central-local government relationship impact PTA in developing countries despite the introduction of technology in this endeavour? From a political economy perspective, the article argues that the persistence of this issue stems from the failure to examine tension in the central-local government relationship and how it affects PTA. It proposes ways to resolve the tension between the two levels of government.
As green finance expands globally, understanding how sustainability norms are translated across diverse political and institutional settings becomes crucial. This paper examines how two contrasting countries - Poland (an EU member) and Uzbekistan (a non-EU transitional state) - have converged toward similar policy outcomes under shared global norms. Using qualitative analysis of national strategies and policy documents (2017-2024), the study applies a policy diffusion framework focusing on four drivers: interests, rights, ideology, and recognition. Findings show that rights-driven diffusion dominates in both contexts, reflecting the influence of global governance frameworks in shaping legitimate reform. However, in Poland, compliance is reframed through ideological narratives of modernization and European belonging, while in Uzbekistan it aligns with recognition-driven efforts to enhance international legitimacy. These results reveal asymmetrical but convergent pathways of sustainability diffusion under global norms.
Causal studies on the impact of paid maternity leave on female employment outcomes in Africa are limited and no causal studies exist on the impact of adding paid paternity leave to paid maternity leave. This study built a novel longitudinal dataset of paid leave policies in all African countries merged with harmonized individual survey data on women's employment outcomes in 18 sub-Saharan African countries from 1998 to 2019. It used TWFE models to measure the impacts of extending paid maternity and paternity leave on the extent and nature of women's paid work, demonstrating how analyses can examine the impact of complementary policies across countries. It found that women in countries where both maternity and paternity leave were extended were 5 per cent more likely to be employed in paid work for each additional week of maternity leave. In contrast, in countries that only extended maternity leave, the effects were mixed.
This study examines Beijing's Jiesu Jiban reform to explain how centralized governance overcomes bureaucratic inertia. While existing literature often focuses on fragmentation, the article reframes this as a principal-agent problem under high monitoring costs. It identifies a sequenced causal logic where political embeddedness activates a regime of performance discipline enabled by algorithmic verification. This interaction drastically reduces the cost of verification, reconfiguring tiao-kuai relations from agency failure (buck-passing) to monitored cooperation. By conceptualizing digital platforms as "political technologies" - instruments designed to eliminate information asymmetry - this study reveals how data-driven responsiveness is strategically repurposed to enforce political compliance in developing contexts.
The increasing complexity of social systems has given rise to numerous wicked problems that must be addressed urgently by developing effective governance arrangements. Through its unique governance model, China has partially managed to cope with these wicked problems, but the underlying mechanisms of this coping remain underexplored. This study combines theories of orchestration governance and policy regime to develop an analytical framework. Using the maximum variation case study method, targeted poverty alleviation and COVID-19 prevention and control are taken as cases to examine the strategies and mechanisms China has used in addressing wicked problems. China's model is defined as an "orchestrating regime", in which orchestrators use both directive and facilitative steering mechanisms to construct and implement policy regime elements, thereby achieving unity and coordination within the system. This study extends existing policy regime theory by providing insights into the interactions and function mechanisms of regime elements, and it also offers a novel theoretical lens for examining models of governance of wicked problems.
This research examines the attributes of Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) and their association with accountability and good governance indicators across 189 countries. Drawing on data from INTOSAI members for 2022-2023, the study developed a global dataset and applied statistical models to identify distinct profiles of SAIs and countries based on their levels of accountability and good governance. The results reveal four institutional and three country-based profiles, highlighting significant heterogeneity among SAIs, shaped by their institutional models and state capacity. Although no single oversight model prevails, the findings underscore the key determinants of SAI performance and provide insights for strengthening accountability.
This study combines bibliometric meta-analysis with secondary literature and expert interviews to unveil a five-stage narrative of the development of policy sciences: (1) It has grown and globalised from a North American orientation towards European scholarship; (2) Lasswell's classical subfield provided an epistemic foundation up to the 1980s; (3) Three further subfields - change and power, institutions, and post-positivist epistemology - spearheaded diversification from the 1980s to the 2000s; (4) Since then, policy sciences has Europeanised and complexified; (5) Despite some fragmentation in the 1990s, policy sciences in the 2020s remains coherent and institutionalised. It may today be considered an "interdisciplinary discipline".
Migrant-sending countries are deliberately linking to their populations abroad and diaspora communities are also claiming rights and recognition from their home countries. In that context, this article examines the extent to which migrant-sending countries integrate an enabling environment for diaspora contributions into national development planning. It conducts a comparative analysis of key national development planning texts of sending countries with some of the largest diaspora globally: Egypt, India, Mexico, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Through a comparative analysis, the article finds that most sending countries foster an enabling environment for diaspora contributions through diaspora institutions and diplomatic/consular services. It also finds, however, that despite the growing attention to the migration-development nexus, an enabling environment articulated in national development planning is rather limited in the selected countries.
Do participants in funded occupational pension plans (OPPs) perceive them as legitimate? This study addresses that question by considering both input legitimacy - participants' satisfaction with OPPs' decision-making processes - and output legitimacy - participants' satisfaction with the benefits and financial returns of OPPs. It draws on an original survey conducted in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain in 2023. The analysis indicates moderate satisfaction with input and output legitimacy across all six countries. Moreover, behavioural factors - having gathered information about their OPP or engaged in OPP decision-making processes - are strong predictors of input and output legitimacy.
This study examines the Maputo Protocol's implementation impact on gender-based violence prevention in relation to mass atrocity prevention through comparative analysis of Ghana and Cameroon. Using Mazmanian and Sabatier's implementation framework, the research analyzes how political, institutional, and contextual factors influence the Protocol's effectiveness in addressing the gender-based violence-mass atrocity nexus. Document analysis reveals neither country effectively operationalized the Protocol as a mass atrocity prevention tool. Ghana's stable environment enabled systematic legal integration, while Cameroon's conflicts and reservations created implementation obstacles. Overall, both countries lack systematic approaches to monitoring conflict-related gender-based violence as early warning indicators, revealing critical coordination gaps between gender-focused institutions and security agencies.
This article examines the role of digital platforms as policy-relevant instruments in atrocity prevention through a comparative analysis of social media campaigns in Canada and Syria. It investigates how virtual spaces facilitate truth-telling and document human rights abuses in the contexts of both historical injustices and ongoing mass violence. By analyzing hashtag campaigns such as #SaveSyria and #TruthAndReconciliation, the article highlights how differences in temporal proximity to atrocities and audience focus shape digital activism strategies. While social media can amplify marginal voices, foster collective memory, and influence public discourse, its prevention potential is constrained by challenges such as stakeholder engagement, competing narratives, and the digital divide. The findings inform policymakers and practitioners on how to design and adapt digital tools within broader atrocity prevention frameworks, tailoring policy instruments to diverse governance settings.
This paper compares subnational responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, examining how differences in health policy capacity shaped the incorporation of expert advice into policy agendas. While prevailing literature on crisis-driven policymaking emphasizes reliance on expert knowledge, this article's findings nuance that relationship. Drawing on an original dataset of state-level measures and a mixed-methods design, the article demonstrates that higher-capacity states systematically integrated expert advice. In contrast, lower-capacity states resorted to heterogeneous informational sources. These patterns suggest that health policy capacity, shaped by prior trajectories of resource investment, plays a critical role in structuring policy agendas in response to complex crises.
