Category: Journal News

How do governments convince profit-oriented banks to provide liquidity to firms in need? To shed light on that question, Elsa Clara Massoc analyzes the elaboration and implementation of state-guaranteed credit programs (SGCPs) during the COVID-19 crisis in her article “Having banks ‘play along’ state-bank coordination and state-guaranteed credit programs during the COVID-19 crisis in France and Germany”. The COVID-19 crisis constitutes a particularly puzzling case as no bank would, from a commercial point of view, willfully grant cheap and copious credit to struggling firms in the context of a global pandemic. SGCPs were specifically designed to make banks do so, nevertheless. Building on a comparative process analysis of SGCPs in France and Germany, Elsa shows that it has been less costly for the French government to convince their banks to provide liquidity as German banks obtained better terms for their participation in their national SCGP. The variation stems from differences in the institutionalized state-bank modes of coordination: In France, state-bank coordination is characterized by mutual trust among a small number of socially homogeneous groups used to close cooperation. By contrast, state-bank coordination is weaker in Germany. As a consequence, state officials have to resort to monetary incentives to persuade banks. State-led credit allocation may prove an essential tool in maintaining modern states’ capacity to govern in economic crises, and different modes of coordination between states and banks are instructive for how states are able to meet that challenge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do EU’s citizens think about the notion of differentiated EU integration? In their recent article, “Public support for differentiated integration: individual liberal values and concerns about member state discrimination” Dirk Leuffen, Julian Schuessler & Jana Gómez Díaz argue that individuals which support values, such as the freedom of choice and tolerance of unequal outcomes are more likely to appreciate a ‘two-speed Europe’. Both, individual political attitudes concerning economic liberalism, as well as national sociotropic concerns are hypothesized to shape the support for differentiated integration. Using Eurobarometer survey data, the authors show that proponents of a EU of varying speeds do, indeed, display liberal-conservative dispositions, while strong supporters of the equality principle are less supportive of differentiated integration. Furthermore, the analysis sheds light on the role of the national context: citizens in the Southern European member states are more strongly opposed to the concept than citizens in the North and the East – most likely because of the prevalent negative consequences of the Eurozone crisis in these countries. The findings have far-reaching implications for policy makers. If large parts of EU citizens view a ‘two-speed Europe’ as discriminatory and non-solidary, it will be increasingly difficult to promote it as a legitimate tool for future European integration.

 

 

A year that turned our lives upside down draws to a close, and we want to take a moment to thank everyone who kept JEPP’s machine humming despite the circumstances! Our reviewers, who continued to take time out of busy schedules to offer useful advice on manuscripts, our authors, who kept firing off quality submissions, and our readers, who continued to pick up our latest issues after tiring days in their home offices. We hope everyone gets a well-deserved break over the holidays and are looking forward to seeing you in the next year!

We are ringing the new year in by welcoming a new member to the team! Sarah Dingler, Assistant Professor at the University of Innsbruck, will take over the reins of JEPP’s social media presence and strengthen the Alpine flair in the editorial office.

Stay tuned for our upcoming issues, debate sections and special issues. Follow us on Twitter (@jepp_journal), read and subscribe to our newsletter.

Season’s greetings and all good wishes,
Your JEPP team

PS: And if you’re keen to know how JEPP’s editorial team will spend their holidays, go ahead and scroll down!

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In the absence of Christmas markets, Michi is already working towards ensuring “strategic autonomy” for his holiday break: large-scale production of own cookies has started, Christmas decoration massively expanded and Glühwein stocks refilled. Apart from this, he will follow his only sustainable strategy throughout 2020: no plans whatsoever! The picture was taken during the carefree month of August, but already then, he was very much looking forward to leaving this year behind and a bit more “old normal” in 2021.

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For the first time, Sarah will spend Christmas together with Alex in Innsbruck this year. She will swap large family gatherings with (hopefully) solitary ski tours in the Austrian Alps. Instead of the usual Christmas presents, all she asks for is snow fall and good weather conditions for nice powder days. After some time of tranquility, she can’t wait for new endeavors in 2021 and looks very much forward to joining the JEPP’sters as Social Media editor.

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Berthold and Jess will spend the holiday season in their digs near the Chiemsee. Pandemic-life and the end-of-the-year lockdown turn remaining travel options, such as the nearby farm to fetch fresh eggs, into a welcome change from online-teaching, online-researching, online-administrating and online-interacting. Funnily enough, pandemic-life has had zero impact on the workings of the JEPP editorial office. As always, just good old email at a dozen exchanged between down under and the deep Bavarian south. Pandemic-life has brought us a fur-pal from Istanbul. His name is Semih. He liked books when he joined our family in the summer. Now he is more into normal cat-like behavior, such as walking across computer keyboards and the unsolicited sending of half-finished emails. He will need some more training before he turns editorial assistant.

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I am the odd one out on the team, living in NZ where there are currently (02/12/20)  no significant COVID-19 restrictions (things can change rapidly, as we all know). However, we plan to repeat our now well established Kiwi tradition of  heading for the Akaroa beach, ready for the Christmas BBQ. The ‘we’ is the usual ‘we’, namely me Sonia, Tess, Molly, and Murphy the dog. I am minded to have just one more go at standing up on a bloody paddle board as I noticed that some of them have sort of bike handlebars that one can hold on to. I showed one to Sonia the other weekend. My hunch is that I will not get beyond ‘I am minded…’.  I take this dirigiste attitude on the part of my wife to be an act of  true love, bearing in mind that the insurance payout from my death by drowning would be sufficient for her to buy a couple of new BMWs and have money to spare!

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It’s been an odd year, to say the least. I spent most of the year cooped up in shoebox-sized flats in Northern London and Northern Sweden, seeing time fly by while seemingly nothing gets done. But looking back there is still not much to complain about, all the loved ones are healthy and happy, and at least the earlier parts of the year had some highlights (including a trip to the subarctic, eating Swedish pastries surrounded by plenty of snow). Plus, although the annual end-of-year visit to the parents in Munich is cancelled, I get to spend a few cosy days over Christmas with my significant other near Hampstead Heath (living in proximity to an open, green space was extra valuable throughout the year). In keeping with the things unusual this year, this post is also somewhat unusual: It’s the last post I write as JEPP’s Social Media Editor, as it’s time to pass the torch on and leave JEPP’s social media presence in very capable hands. I did the job for more than five years, usually too late in the evening, and it’s been very nice to meet so many of JEPP’s authors along the way. It’s been a pleasure, here’s to a more joyful new year for all of us!

 

2020 hasn’t exactly been littered with moments to celebrate, so one more reason to cherish them when they do come around: The 2019 Journal Citation Reports release by Clarivate Analytics sees JEPP’s impact factor increase from 3.457 in 2018 to 4.177 in 2019, the journal’s highest score in its 27-year history! JEPP is now ranked 7/180 in the Political Science category and 3/48 in the Public Administration category.

JEPP was also able to hold on to its third place in the 2020 Google Scholar Metrics ranking for Political Science, with an h-index of 55, up from 51 (only APSR and AJPS have higher scores).

To top off the good news, JEPP is also doing very well on CiteScore provided by Scopus, with a score of 7.7, which implies that JEPP is ranked 2/157 in Public Administration and 16/1243 in Sociology and Political Science.

We won’t tire of thanking our family of authors who have chosen JEPP as the venue to publish their research, our board members and reviewers for their outstanding and continuing support, and our readers without whom JEPP would have never made it this far!

The JEPP Reviewer Prize provides special recognition to our colleagues for their selfless investment as peer-reviewers, offering guidance to authors to improve their work, to us as editors to take well-informed decisions on manuscripts, and hence to ensure that JEPP’s standards continue to be high. This year we have the pleasure to award the prize to two cherished colleagues who have supported JEPP for decades: They have rarely declined our review requests, and always provided submitting authors and us editors with detailed and constructive comments.

We are thus very happy to award the reviewer prizes to:

Rachel Epstein (University of Denver),

R. Daniel Kelemen (Rutgers University).

Congratulations to our prize winners!

Call for Papers Proposals

Allan McConnell, University of Sydney; Alastair Stark, University of Queensland (Special Issue Guest Editors)

For a special edition of the Journal of European Public Policy, we invite proposals for papers that explore the policy responses that have addressed the COVID-19 crisis. This special issue will seek to deliver insights into the nature and the effectiveness of national and/or international crisis responses to the disease through the application of public policy, governance and crisis management perspectives.

COVID-19 is a highly transmittable and potentially fatal coronavirus. The virus originated in Wuhan in China in December 2019. By late March 2020, there were over 720,000 cases world-wide in 177 countries and regions, with the number of cases escalating on a daily basis. In this short time span, the virus has created a global public health crisis that is unprecedented in living memory. Governments throughout the world have transformed rapidly into a ‘war time-like’ crisis-mode, attempting to diagnose, mitigate and suppress the virus, as well as moderate the cascading effects of disease control on the economy, healthcare systems and vulnerable populations. For millions of individual citizens, particularly those who are highly vulnerable physically, economically, and socially, we are witnessing extraordinary levels of public fear and anxiety. Response measures by governments facing unprecedented stress, have included travel bans, curfews, lock-downs, school closures and emergency budget stimuli and financial aid packages.

The scope of potential contributions is enormous, but we particularly welcome contributions which address responses to COVID-19 using theories, concepts and frameworks that are embedded within the discipline of public policy. Possible areas for empirical analysis are identified below, but we would welcome proposals that seek to examine any aspect of governmental responses to COVID-19 either in individual countries, or via comparative analysis/multi-country illustrations. Response includes pre-emptive responses, as well as responses in the acute stage. Potential themes include but are not limited to:

• Warning signs, anticipation and pandemic preparedness e.g. agenda/institutional/political biases filtering out potential threat of COVID-19, contingency planning based on prior experience (SARS, MERS, Ebola), training/exercises, early interventions or lack thereof) and strategic approaches (such as Singapore/South Korea, US).

• The nature of COVID-19 as a policy challenge e.g. sensemaking of the threat(s) involved in the crisis; ramping up of resources; addressing transboundary threats and spill-over effects across a variety of policy sub-systems; COVID-19 as a super wicked policy problem.

• Policy design and decision making under crisis conditions e.g. decision making under high threat conditions and extreme uncertainty; moral and ethical issues in decision making; the nature of policy tools for COVID-19 crisis management.

• Policy implementation and street-level behaviour e.g. the gap between central policy objectives and local reality; the effectiveness of policy tools on the ground; contingent policy formulation at the front-line.

• Evaluation, learning and accountability e.g. historical lessons ignored/used in COVID-19; intra-crisis learning during the emergency; inter-country learning and mimicry across borders; evaluating response measures prospectively and retrospectively; the politics of post-crisis accountability.

• Narratives, language and symbolic policy output e.g. crisis communication and the role of persuasion in relation to policy measures such as social distancing and panic buying; the role or narratives and metaphors – from war and identity to trajectories and resilience.

• Institutions and governance e.g. the role of emergency powers, inter-governmental and inter-organisational coordination; national policy styles and crisis behaviour; the role of governance traditions during crises.

• Political leadership e.g. leadership personality types and behaviour (such as Trump, Johnson, Merkel, Varadkar); crisis leadership challenges; leadership strategies and their effectiveness.

Expressions of interest consisting of a title, author(s) names and affiliation, and a short abstract (no more than 300 words) should be sent to allan.mcconnell@sydney.edu.au and alastair.stark@uq.edu.au by 1st June 2020. Successful authors should have a full article draft by 18 September 2020 with final submissions expected by 27 November 2020 (8,000 words maximum, including all figures, tables and references). All other inquiries ashould be sent to allan.mcconnell@sydney.edu.au and alastair.stark@uq.edu.au.

With the year coming to an end, we want to take a moment to thank all of you – our reviewers, authors and readers – for your continued support! It’s been another busy but very successful year for the journal, and you played no small part in that (both the ‘busy’ and ‘successful’ bits). We hope everyone gets a well-deserved break over the holidays and are looking forward to seeing you in the next year!

Stay tuned for our upcoming issues, debate sections and special issues. Follow us on Twitter (@jepp_journal), read and subscribe to our newsletter.

Seasons’ greetings and all good wishes,
Your JEPP team

PS: And if you’re keen to know how JEPP’s editorial team will spend their holidays, go ahead and scroll down!

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As usual, we will have a family Christmas at our seaside house in Akaroa, NZ. If the summer weather is true to form, Tessa and Molly will have a swim, though Sonia and I will sit on the beach with Murphy. As you can see from the photo, Murphy, despite his size, thinks he is a ‘lap dog’. He is not keen on swimming and prefers a good cuddle. Sensible chap!  However, he loves long walks through the woods and along the coastal path, so our family Christmas will involve at least some much needed exercise for me. He and I do three short  walks each day in our Christchurch suburb, and so he has adjusted to my slowing  pace quite well. I discovered recently that I am known locally  as  ‘the man with a dog’. So, here is a lesson for you all from this wise old man. Bugger chasing cites. If you want fame, just get yourself a dog!

PS. I showed Murphy a draft of my most recent bit of writing and he wagged his tail. He is a very loving dog (as you can see from the photo), but is none too bright. So, don’t just get any dog, get a dumb dog. If the referees say your work is shit, the dog will tell you it is just fine. The ideal referee in fact!

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Berthold and Jess will spend the second Christmas holiday in a row not under Florida’s palm trees, but in comparatively foul weather in their upper Bavarian home, eager to pursue every cue for a bit of sun with utmost determination (see picture). While Jeremy seems to have found the ideal referee in Murphy, Franzl – a very opinionated cat – never took much interest in Berthold’s academic musings, but showed great interest in the couch, watching Game of Thrones with glee. He can’t really be blamed.

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Michi is looking forward to the holiday break with his family even more desperately this year than usual. He has given up the idea of significantly reducing the gap between books bought and books read, and will focus on his son’s soccer career instead. Dribbling, diving and straddling already work quite well, but the next lesson will be difficult: teaching Kolja not to shout “Bull’s Eye” anymore when he scores.

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Philipp will celebrate the end of an eventful year, which included a finished PhD and a move from London to the Swedish Subarctic, with family and Yesmean in Munich. Despite now living in regions where you might expect to come across them in the wild, ironically Philipp recently met a few “wolves” in a hotel in Shoreditch (the highlight of this year’s Christmas seasons!).

Dear colleagues:

We are happy to announce two calls for proposals for special issues of the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP).

1. Call for Special Issue proposals – deadline: 30 November 2019

This is our regular call for Special Issues. Twice every year, in the spring and in the fall, we invite proposals for Special Issues and select up to two proposals. The fall-deadline for submitting your proposal is 30 November 2019. Make sure to consult the JEPP webpage for further particulars: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/journal-european-public-policy-special-issues/

2. Call for Special Issue proposal on ‘Public Policy Responses to Climate Change’ – deadline: 15 December 2019

JEPP invites proposals for a Special Issue on public policy responses to the challenges of climate change. We are open to innovative ideas on the shape and content of the SI, but wish to emphasise that we hope for a Special Issue that both draws on state-of-the-art academic scholarship, in the JEPP tradition, but also speaks to a much wider audience concerned with how to deal with the climate crisis facing the world today. In a nutshell, what do we academics know and how might it be of use? When preparing your proposal, please follow the regular Special Issue guidelines: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/journal-european-public-policy-special-issues/

Note that the deadline for this particular call is 15 December 2019.

Please feel free to get in touch with us, the journal editors, Jeremy Richardson and Berthold Rittberger, if you have any queries.

The annual Journal Citation Report published by Clarivate Analytics is out and we are proud that JEPP climbed the ladder in both of its listed sections, ranking at 12/176 in the Political Science category and 6/47 in the Public Administration category in 2018. JEPP’s unprecedented Journal Impact Factor score of 3.457 for 2018 (up from 2.994 in 2017) is the cherry on top. Another record year for the journal would not have been possible without the continued support from our family of authors, reviewers and readers, and we are very grateful for your help in making JEPP a success.

Dear members of the JEPP family:

As 2018 draws to a close, we want to use this opportunity to thank all of you – authors, reviewers, readers – for your continued support and commitment to our journal. This year, we introduced a Reviewer Prize to recognize the exceptional commitment of our reviewers and their selfless investment in helping to improve the work of our colleagues. Reviewing is the lifeblood of our profession, and we are extremely grateful to all of you for your excellent work.

We celebrated JEPP’s 25th anniversary this year, and we find it in a very healthy state: the number of submissions remains at a very high level, journal metrics continue to impress us, reaching new heights in 2018, establishing JEPP among the very top journals in the discipline. We thus very much hope to continue where we ended 2018, and are counting on your submissions, which we promise to process swiftly and fairly (which is our first and foremost goal).

Stay tuned for our upcoming issues, debate sections and special issues. Follow us on Twitter (@jepp_journal), read and subscribe to our newsletter.

Seasons’ greetings and all good wishes,
Your JEPP team

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Jeremy will, as usual, be spending Christmas with Sonia, Tessa , and Molly at their holiday home in Akaroa. Akaroa is a very pretty small seaside town, approx 75k from Christchurch (see photo). Jeremy has no intention of attempting paddle boarding again, but might kayak into the bay, simply to prove he is not really 76! This  annual ego trip will, no doubt, result in all sorts of aches and pains and a chorus of ‘we told you so’ from Sonia and the girls.

This year will be the first Christmas in Akaroa without Harvey the family dog, who passed away a few weeks ago, aged nearly 17. However, Murphy (see photo) the new family dog, will be part of the team, though seems not to be much of a beach dog. He has already shown interest in being a JEPP referee, following in Harvey’s footsteps (only joking folks!). We have no idea what type of dog he is (he was abandoned in town by his previous owner) but he is very loving and seems grateful that we adopted him.