Isabelle Engeli

The puzzle of permissiveness: understanding policy processes concerning morality issues

The growing interest in morality politics has spurred a large number of studies on individual morality issues and the gradual shift from restrictive to permissive regulation across Western Europe. Several studies have further pointed to the changing role of religion as the main cause of permissive policy shifts. However, seen in a comparative perspective across four countries and five morality issues, the move towards permissiveness poses more of a puzzle than a simple shift. Religion and secularization do not impact on regulation directly, but are filtered through a policy dynamic in which the essential factor is whether or not the party system contains a conflict line between secular and confessional parties. Countries without confessional parties, here the United Kingdom and Denmark, surprisingly end up less permissive than countries with strong confessional parties, here the Netherlands and Spain, because the former group lacks the conflict line necessary to politicize morality issues

Comparative Policy Studies: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

1. Conceptual and Methodological Challenges in Comparative Public Policy Christine Rothmayr and Isabelle Engeli PART I: TYPES OF COMPARISONS AND THEIR METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES 2. Conceptualizing Public Policy Michael Howlett and Ben Cashore 3. Selecting Research Cases and Inferential Types in Comparative Public Policy Research Jeroen van der Heijden PART II: COMPARATIVE DESIGNS 4. Case Studies and (Causal-) Process Tracing Joachim Blatter and Markus Haverland 5. Intermediate-N Comparison: Configurational Comparative Methods Isabelle Engeli, Benoit Rihoux, and Christine Rothmayr 6. Quantitative Methodologies in Public Policy Christian Breunig and John Ahlquist 7. Interpretive Analysis and Comparative Research Dvora Yanow PART III: NEW CHALLENGES IN COMPARATIVE DESIGNS 8. Comparing Beyond Europe and North America Joseph Wong 9. Methods for the Analysis of Policy Interdependence Fabrizio Gilardi 10. Gendering Comparative Policy Studies: Towards Better Sciencel Amy G. Mazur and Season Hoard 11. Mixed-Methods Designs in Comparative Public Policy: The Dismantling of Pension Policies Adrienne Heritier and Sophie Biesenbender

Policy Struggle on Reproduction: Doctors, Women, and Christians

How best to govern reproduction is the subject of heated controversies and policies on abortion and reproductive technologies present strong variations. Through fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, the article explores the interplay of institutional settings, Christian Democratic politics, women’s movement, and Christian opposition in France and Switzerland since the 1970s. If little evidence is found for any institutional impact on policies regarding abortion and reproductive technologies, the analysis confirms the growing influence of the medical profession over reproductive issues and shows that the success of the women’s movement has been fluctuating while prolife opposition seems to have gradually lost influence.

Diverging against all odds? Regulatory paths in embryonic stem cell research across Western Europe

An interest-driven account of embryonic stem cell research would, given the considerable financial and scientific concerns, likely predict regulations to converge towards permissive policies. However, across Western Europe, national regulations of embryonic stem cell research vary considerably, from general bans to permissive policies. There is a lack of systematic accounting for the non-convergence, and the sparse attempts at explanation are contradictory. Drawing on qualitative comparative analysis and configurational causality, we assess the interaction of a number of explanatory factors. Our empirical analysis reveals the importance of one factor in particular, path-dependence, insofar as prior policies on assisted reproduction exert a strong and systematic effect on the subsequent regulation of embryonic stem cell research.

The Profile of Gender Equality Issue Attention in Western Europe

This article investigates the factors which drive governments to pay attention to gender equality issues and place them upon executive agendas. In line with studies of the dynamics of issue attention, which demonstrate the importance of investigating variability in the attention policy makers give to issue demands across policy domains, this article argue that policy issues related to gender equality are multi dimensional and patterns in executive attention vary across the different types of gender issues. Multidimensionality of gender equality issues reflects different dynamics in agenda setting as different issues invoke contrasting constellations of political representation, institutional friction and veto points. To investigate this variation, this article proposes a two-fold distinction between Class based and Status based gender equality issues and assesses the validity of three sets of explanations for when gender issues succeed in reaching executive agendas: women in politics, party ideology and economic performance. Drawing on governmental attention datasets from the Comparative Agendas Project we conduct a systematic comparative quantitative analysis of the determinants of gender equality issue attention in five Western European countries. The main findings confirm that the mechanisms through which different types of gender equality issues gain executive attention differ according to the kind of the gender equality demand. Costly class based gender equality issues are more likely to receive executive attention when the economy is performing well, when there is a strong presence of Social Democrats and when there is a high proportion of female MPs. In contrast, economic performance, party politics and women’s parliamentary presence do not seems to exert any impact on status based issues. Instead, critical actors in the government seem to be the strongest driver for attention over this second type of gender equality issue. This study contributes a gendered dimension to the policy agendas scholarship, adding theoretical and empirical depth to the understanding of how non-core issues secure their place on full governmental agendas. By focusing on how to secure governmental attention for gender equality issues, we make a major contribution to understanding the initial genesis of gender equality policies.

Theoretical Perspectives on Morality Issues

Even though they have never been among the most studied policy issues, two strands of literature on morality issues do exist. One is a long-standing tradition of studying morality issues and morality politics in a US context (e.g. Meier 1994; Mooney 2001a; Tatalovich and Daynes 2011). The other strand is a comparative literature, which has only been emerging during the past few years, with a strong focus on explaining cross-national variation in policy choices on morality issues (e.g. Bleiklie et al. 2003; Monpetit et al. 2007; Fink 2008; Engeli 2009; Schiffino et al. 2009; Banchoff 2011). The findings of these two strands, especially on the politics of morality issues, provide the context for developing the theoretical framework of this book, including the idea of ‘the two worlds of morality politics’.

Policy Advocacy in Hard Times: The Impact of Economic Performance on Gendering Executive Attention

Securing executive attention for new policy demands is notoriously difficult as governmental agendas are crowded by established or ‘core’ policy issues. This article investigates whether it is harder for new and costly policy issues to reach the government agenda when the economy is performing badly. It examines whether, and the extent to which, costly gender equality issues regarding women’s access to the labour market, equal treatment at work and care activities, are more likely to achieve executive attention when the economy is performing well. Using the Comparative Policy Agendas database, a systematic, quantitative analysis is conducted of when and why policies promoting sex equality in the division of labour reach executive agendas. The findings confirm that advocacy for costly gender equality measures is easier to make in times of economic growth. It is also found that female representation in parliament strengthens advocacy for executive attention and reduces friction on policy agenda change.

Morality Politics in Switzerland: Politicization Through Direct Democracy

This chapter investigates the contrasting dynamics of Swiss morality politics and shows how the politicization of morality politics and the dynamics of the religious cleavage have been sharply shaped by the multi-venue features of the political system.1 Indeed, next to parliamentary politics, the instruments of direct democracy (i.e. popular initiative and optional referendum) constitute a crucial institutional venue for both politicization of morality issues and policy change. Direct democracy has encouraged greater participation by non-party actors such as feminists and religious groups who have struggled against each other in the religious conflict. At the initial stage of the process, several popular initiatives were launched that greatly contributed to placing morality issues on the political agenda and significantly increasing their politicization. At its final stage, the ultimate step of the decision-making process on morality issues also often took place through popular referendums on parliamentary decisions. In a nutshell, the Swiss case illustrates how party competition between Christian Democrats and their secular competitors, the great institutional openness of the political system and the late secularization of Swiss society interact to push morality issues onto the ‘high politics’ agenda.

Has Simeon's Vision Prevailed among Canadian Policy Scholars?

Concerned by the proliferation of idiosyncratic prescriptive case studies in the nascent subfield of policy studies, Richard Simeon, in his seminal 1976 article, asked scholars to produce more comparative policy research that aimed at explaining general events and contributing to theory building. The extent to which Simeons vision materialized remains debated. With a view to informing this debate, we conducted a systematic content analysis of the articles published in five major generalist public policy journals from 1980 to 2015. The analysis reveals that Canadian policy scholars took a comparative turn, publishing more territorial, sector and time comparisons than in the past. We also found evidence that theoretical knowledge accumulation is more important today for Canadian authors than it was when Simeon wrote his article.

Similar Regulatory Challenges but Contrasting Modes of Governance? The Puzzle of Governing Human Biotechnology across Western Europe

Human biotechnology is a fairly recent policy issue that emerged onto the political agenda in the 1980s and 1990s in most Western European countries. As an emerging policy area, human biotechnology was largely unstructured and the governance was mostly left to the medical and scientific communities. In the meantime, with the exception of Ireland, all Western European states have designed regulation, yet governance modes still vary considerably. Various governance modes have been developed. Some of these modes rely on traditional “command and control” governing arrangements, others operate with delegated or partial self-governance. While the government has taken a more pre-eminent role over time in the governance of the field, some striking variation remains. The challenge is to understand when, how and under what conditions modes of governance emerge and evolve over time. In this chapter, we shed light on the impact of the dynamics between stakeholders in building up modes of governance over time. We argue that the variation in the configuration of and the interactions between stakeholders, in particular medical and scientific stakeholders, impacts on the trajectory of governance modes over time. The continuous process of structuring a new policy problem is tightly linked to establishing modes of governance (Capano et al. 2012).