What has happened and what has not happened due to the coronavirus disease pandemic: a systemic perspective on policy change

The societal and policy transformations associated with the coronavirus disease pandemic are currently subject of intense academic debate. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by adopting a systemic perspective on policy change, shedding light on the hidden and indirect crisis effects. Based on a comprehensive analysis of policy agenda developments in Germany, we find that the pandemic led to profound shifts in political attention across policy areas. We demonstrate that these agenda gains and losses per policy area vary by the extent to which the respective areas can be presented as relevant in managing the coronavirus disease crisis and its repercussions. Moreover, relying on the analysis of past four economic crises, we also find that there is limited potential for catching up dynamics after the crisis is over. Policy areas that lost agenda share during crisis are unlikely to make up for these losses by strong attention gains once the crisis is over. Crises have hence substantial, long-term and so far, neglected effects on policymaking in modern democracies.

EU ANTI-COVID POLICY IN THE WESTERN BALKANS

The pandemic generated by COVID-19 has brought new challenges for global politics. For this reason, the EU has been changing its policy towards the Western Balkans. The entire region is known to be engaged in the European integration process, which has received new issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the «Team Europe» package was launched on April 2020 to support EU partner countries in response to coronavirus and its consequences. This programme includes the most vulnerable countries of the European Neighborhood Policy, Africa and the Western Balkans. The core task was to back the health system and the socio-economic recovery of the partner states. In addition, the distribution of vaccines against COVID-19, called as «vaccine diplomacy», has become a peculiar policy area. The EU is vigorously involved in this process, especially allocating funds to the COVAX program and its internal distribution mechanisms. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of the EU anti-crisis policy in the Western Balkans. The article deals with the initial measures implemented by the EU to aid the countries of the region. Moreover, the author touches upon the issue of the launching of the EU’s vaccine distribution process.

Straight to the (Revenue) Source: Contextual and Individual-Level Determinants of Attitudes Toward Local Taxes

In this article, we investigate the relative roles of local tax policies and respondent attitudes and characteristics in shaping support for local taxes. Using a unique set of survey data collected across dozens of cities over several years, combined with contextual data on local tax systems, we can offer a comprehensive picture of who supports, and who opposes local taxes. The contributions of our approach are three-fold: We use measures of satisfaction with local taxes, using data gathered across dozens of localities; we incorporate measures of the local tax systems to help account for city-to-city variation in local tax attitudes; and we incorporate measures of racial attitudes to account for an important non-material element heretofore not incorporated in studies of local tax attitudes. Integrating these factors into an explanation of local tax policies rounds out and offers a more realistic understanding of attitudes in this critical policy area.

Philosophical foundation of the peculiarities of social technologies in a social policy area

Socio-philosophical content of the term “social policy”, its difference from the definition of “political economics” and also some features of technologies in a social area are described and analyzed in the article. The author distinguishes between the concepts of “labor” and “social labor activity” (deiatel’nost’). Using the concept of philosophy of a name developed by A. F. Losev, the definition of the "ideal" (“ideal’noe”) considered by E. V. Il’enkov, and A. V. Dakhin’s definition of “socio-historical memory” the author gives the definition of social policy that is understood as social labor activity (deiatel’nost’) of a man. This definition is focused on the ideas of safety and the development of essential forces of a personality-and-society, which relates to a name of a personality, to a name of a social community, to a name of a man as the complete form of social being, that contains concrete knowledge, experience, attitudes etc. as forms of social existence. The author shows that some aspects of technologies analysis in the social area give reasons to conclude: as distinct from more popular deserted technologies of commodity industry, the social policy area is in need to use another type of algorithms of social labor activity, – these are people intensive (chelovekoеmkie) technologies, the main peculiarities of which are described in the article. Main fields of social labor activity (deiatel’nost’) where people intensive technologies are reasonable to be used include pedagogical, medical, organizational ones etc.

Visualising policy responses during health emergencies. Learning from the COVID-19 policy trackers

Data visualisations are intimately connected to the emergence of public health as a discipline and policy area. Besides the mapping of cases and deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen an explosion of attempts to track policy responses. They have come from actors sometimes initially unfamiliar with public and global health. In this paper, we analyse seven of the most successful tracker initiatives that have sought to map governments’ reactions to COVID-19 and reflect on our own. When not led by international organisations, the trackers primarily rely on networks of volunteer country expert contributors (who need to be incentivised in the medium term). The vertical crowdsourcing approach means that, despite good intentions, contributors have a relatively limited agency in shaping the trackers. Maps and timelines comparing countries are the most popular visualisations; they suggest that (some) policy solutions can be found abroad and rely on policy taxonomies established by the trackers’ core teams. We contend that such taxonomies, which compete with each other, constitute attempts to frame the complex issue of which policies matter in responding to COVID-19. All the projects are large and complex and often without a well-defined intended audience. We hypothesise that the popularity (in terms of backlinks) of the most successful tracker arises from the fact that it sums up COVID-19 policies in one easily visualisable indicator. We suggest that the trackers are a more helpful emergency policy tool when they provide contextual information, keep policy details or refer to them (rather than only reduce them to categories), and suggest ways to link different elements—including the relationship between health or societal outcomes and policies.

LAND USE POLICY AREA (LUPA) CONCEPT MODEL

The paper presents a Land Use Policy Area (LUPA) Concept Model adding the three basic elements: (i) ecosystem-based land use regarded as the intersection of the ecosystem and land use elements, (ii) subwatershed-based land use as the intersection of the subwatershed and land use elements, and (iii) integrated environmental management is the intersection of the subwatershed and ecosystem elements regarded as the Integrated Ecosystem Development Planning Unit (IE-DPU). The basic (spatial) elements are mathematically expressed as the paired sets of the three main variables, namely: ecosystem (dependent), watershed (dependent) and land use (independent) variables. The challenging work in this study was the development of a geospatial information model for use in policy areas LUPA applying these variables. There are four steps applied to answer the research objective, these are: ecological zone assessment, ridge-to-reef watershed delineation, land and water use heads-up mapping, ecosystem-based land use overlay analysis, watershed-based land use overlay analysis, integrated environmental management overlay analysis, and LUPA overlay analysis. The concept model analysis steers the geospatial information modeling for LUPA which carried the intersections of the paired variables: ecosystem-based land use, subwatershed-based land use and integrated environmental management as variating inputs to process by extracting the science-based information (overlay output) which practically highlighted the LUPA classification: (i) Protection with 49.1% or 3858.2 Ha of mangrove forest reserve and water use, (ii) Production areas with 46.5% or 3631.7 Ha mostly agricultural and aquacultural areas, (iii) Settlement with 2.7% or 209.2 Ha of urban and urban uses, and (iv) Infrastructure with 1.5% or 116.7 Ha of development. The authors concluded that land use policy areas will relatively change as land use changes which is also seen reliant on the impacts of climate change.

Minority Actorness Through a Non-Europeanised Policy Area

By bringing together the literatures on Europeanisation and minority studies, this article illustrates the centrality of actors representing national minorities as a key to understand Europeanisation of minority politics today. Minority politics is becoming Europeanised indeed, however, not in the ways commonly expected. And although the EU repeatedly fails to develop a clear minority policy, an actor-centred approach adopted in this study helps to reveal how minority actors extend their political strategies to the European level through different channels and how they exploit various opportunities stemming from European-level politics. Jacquot and Woll’s concept of ‘usages of Europe’ not only enables us to trace how actors multiply channels and arenas of participation, but it also helps to spot the emergence of tactics of experimentation with European-level norms and rules, contributing to an acquisition of new roles among minority actors and supporting an actorness formation among those active. As the actors engage in criticising EU institutions, they develop tactics of responsibilising which in turn affects their minority agendas and the actors themselves. In this respect, this study contributes to developing the weakly studied literature about minority agency and Europeanisation.

A Conceptual Framework to Map Responses to Hate Crime, Hate Incidents and Hate Speech: The Case of Australia

Responses to hate crimes, hate incidents and hate speech are characterised by an exceptional fragmentation in terminology and lack of coordination among governmental and non-governmental organisations. This article proposes a new conceptual framework to map the diversity of responses to hate crime, hate incidents and hate speech, with the aim of assessing gaps and needs in this important policy area. Using Australia as a case study, we create and analyse a database of 222 organisations running activities focusing on tackling hate against different target groups. The results highlight an uneven distribution of efforts across different geographical areas, types of activities and target groups. The majority of anti-hate efforts, especially by government organisations, focus on awareness raising and education rather than victim support and data collection. Racial and religious hate are the main foci of anti-hate efforts, compared to other forms of hate, such as anti-LGBTIQ+ and disablist hate.

Institutions and Arguments: Simulating the US Policy-Making Process

ABSTRACT In US government courses, simulations have been shown to increase students’ engagement and knowledge retention. We present an original simulation that focuses on both the interactions between political institutions that contribute to policy making and the normative ideas underlying politics. By exploring a civil rights or liberties policy area, students learn about the importance of both political institutions and foundational political ideas such as liberty and equality. Students role-play members of Congress, lobbyists for a pro- or anti-natural gas pipeline group, and Supreme Court justices. Although the goal of simulations in many US government courses is to teach students about the ways that institutions shape policy, this is the first (to our knowledge) that also integrates normative reflection on the ideas behind political arguments. Assessment indicates that the simulation was effective in increasing students’ knowledge of and/or interest in American political institutions and eminent domain.