Diane Payne

Decision Context And Policy Effectuation : EU Structural Reform In Ireland

Abstract In 1988 the European Union reformed the allocation of its Structural Funds to effectuate broader participation of local and regional parties and institutions in the Member States. This might affect the corporative and sectoral oriented government structure in Ireland, which was chosen as a test case for this study, with decision issues for plan periods 1988–93 and 1994–99. In this paper we focus on the question whether actors with high effective power do also sustain relatively small utility losses with respect to decision outcomes. This is done in terms of a collective decision model simultaneously involving multiple actors as well as multiple issues, using linear models specifying the basic model variables of collective decision modelling. The results show that effective power does not have a direct effect in isolation, but shows strong effects in specific interaction with other factors, characterising the decision contexts as they evolve over time.

Trends, frames and discourse networks: analysing the coverage of climate change in Irish newspapers

This paper investigates how anthropogenic climate change is presented to the Irish public by three of Ireland’s most important national newspapers. We argue that Irish newspapers do not report climate change in an objective and unbiased way and illustrate how through the acts of agenda setting, news framing and in how they construct public discourse they present the issue in a narrow ideological form. Evidence is provided to support the argument that ecological modernisation is used by Irish newspapers to construct the issue of climate change. Our study uses three levels of analysis: (1) we calculate the trend in the coverage of climate change between 1997 and 2012 to uncover what events are correlated with peaks in coverage; (2) we conduct an in-depth frame analysis of a large sample of articles to determine how the issue is classified and categorised; and (3) we conduct a discourse network analysis to uncover which actors are given a voice, which policy measures they favour and with whom they share policy positions. The data we find support our theoretical arguments, leading us to the conclusion that Irish newspapers produce and reproduce a narrow ideological worldview that is articulated, shared and propagated by Ireland’s political and economic elites.

Conflicting Climate Change Frames in a Global Field of Media Discourse

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

Peer Effects in the Diffusion of Innovations: Theory and Simulation

This paper presents a theoretical framework for studying peer effects in the diffusion of innovations. The underlying mechanisms of peer effects are generally under-discussed in existing studies. By investigating diffusion processes in the real world and reviewing previous studies, we find that information transmission, experience sharing and externalities are the basic mechanisms through which peer effects occur. They are termed as information effect, experience effect and externality effect, respectively. The three effects could occur through different types of relationships in a social network. Each of them plays a different role at different stages of a diffusion process. A simulation model incorporating multiple effects in a multiplex network is developed to provide a theoretical study. We simulate the experience effect and the externality effect in a context of rural diffusion. It generates the widely acknowledged patterns of diffusion in various scenarios. The experiments conducted using the model show that peer effects as a whole can be substantially misestimated if the underlying mechanisms are ignored.

European Union power and regional involvement: A Case Study Of The Political Implications Of The Reform Of The Structural Funds For Ireland

In 1988, the Reform of the Structural Funds of the European Union introduced new political structures, where one of the main objectives was to encourage participation of a much broader range of actors in the decision making process. In the present research, we limit our analysis to just one Member state, Ireland. As Ireland is a centralized, unitary state with a centralized semi-corporatist bargaining structure, we investigate how the Structural Funds Reform has been applied in this Member state. Did the Reform and to what degree, shift power away from Ireland’s traditional national centralised elite over two time periods corresponding to the two rounds of Structural Funds: 1988–1993 and 1994–1999? If so we want to know whether this has resulted in an increased involvement of a broader range of actors from the national and European union levels as well as the sub-national levels in Ireland, and under which conditions this occurred.

Characteristics of Chinese Rural Network: Evidence from Villages in Central China

The structure of rural societies in China has been studied by many researchers. Several characteristics are widely viewed as the unique features of Chinese rural societies. However, the quantitative measure of these characteristics are not found. We measure and examine the structure of Chinese rural communities from the perspective of social networks. We collected solid data of four important social relationships, namely, the kinship, the house neighbourhood, the land plot neighbourhood and the political relationship from ten natural villages (which constitute an administrative village) in central China. We calculate the network statistics and topological properties of the networks in the villages. Several characteristics are found. (1) Kinship and geographical relationship are the two major relationships that constitute the social networks in Chinese villages. (2) Chinese villages exhibit prominent small-world property. (3) The villages are generally quite decentralised. (4) Relatives, especially close relatives tend to also live geographically close to each other.

The Effect of Political Disagreement on Discretion: Mechanisms and Conditions

Delegation models make contrasting assumptions about how political disagreement affects discretion and empirical research reports contradictory findings. The authors aim to shed new light on this puzzle by distinguishing the mechanisms that drive the effect of political disagreement on discretion. Four conditions influence the strength of each mechanism: (a) policy salience, (b) actors involved, (c) their capacity, and (d) decision rule. They explore this theoretical framework on the case of economic restructuring in the United Kingdom and show that political disagreement reduces discretion. There is no significant interaction effect between salience and political disagreement on discretion.

INTERREG III and cross‐border cooperation in the Island of Ireland

Abstract This article analyses the interaction and intersection between an EU policy instrument ‐ INTERREG ‐ and bottom‐up mobilisation of cross‐border groups on the Irish border The analysis involves an exploration of the interaction between the planning and negotiation of the INTERREG III programme for the border area between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the establishment of new political institutions arising from the Good Friday Agreement and the ‘bottom‐up’ mobilisation of new territorial actors on the border. Given that the Irish border is a contested one, it offers a useful lens to study the role of the EU in sustaining or mediating political conflict. The findings suggest that the EU, notably the Commission, plays an important role in altering the opportunity structure of domestic actors and in providing them with new policy models. However, the ability of sub‐state actors to take advantage of the new political space depends on developments in domestic politics.

The EU in the Domestic: Interreg III and the Good Friday Institutions

The focus of this article is on the role of the European programme for cross-border co-operation - Interreg - in developing and promoting cross-border co-operation in the context of the new institutions established for the implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The elaboration and negotiation of the third Interreg programme for the Irish border area took place in the context of a fluid and at times unstable institutional environment. The analysis proceeds in five stages: an overview of the analytical framework, examination of the preferences of the European Commission concerning Interreg III, analysis of the interaction between the establishment of the new institutions and the changing opportunity structures for those wishing to influence the content and implementation of Interreg III, examination of the manner in which the Interreg programme was elaborated, and analysis of the final stages of the negotiations of the programme and the negotiations on a role for the border regions.

Building rich social network data: a schema to assist in designing, collecting and evaluating social network data

Creating a social network dataset requires us to represent a set of empirical observations according to a specific conceptual understanding. This requires a number of design decisions for the conceptual framework, which is then implemented through a data structure. In this paper, we propose a standard schema to describe these decisions. A standard schema allows us to define the conceptual framework, structure, and content of a dataset. Social network datasets may contain many features. Beyond the definition of actors and relations, network data may include: actor or relation attributes; data for multiple observation periods (dynamic data); or parallel event data. The creation of a network dataset may also involve the application of specific boundary conditions, sampling approaches or may include missing data. Our proposed schema is designed to support a scientific approach to social network analysis by making these features and assumptions transparent and easy to communicate. We believe that this will facilitate researchers through the design, creation, communication, and evaluation of social network datasets. To develop this schema, we gathered and analysed the structure, content, and metadata of over 150 publicly available social network datasets drawing from multiple disciplines, including statistics, computer science, sociology, economics, and political science.