Governments across western Europe have adopted significantly different policy responses to the existential challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose that a key to understanding the differences in policy responses may lie in narratives. Focusing on fifteen countries in western Europe, as well as two contrasting case studies on Sweden and Greece, we investigate the relationship between the narratives that governments developed on the threats generated by COVID-19, and the (early) stringency of their respective policy responses that followed. Our analysis suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the emphasis on the economic cost of the pandemic and on framing the disease as affecting 'only' certain sub-groups severely in government narratives, and the tendency to introduce early and stringent restrictions.
South European countries were severely hit by the eurozone crisis. Adopting the theoretical framework of prospect theory, this article conducts an empirical analysis of the interpretation of the situation by the South European political leaders in terms of gains and losses. After discussing the stances of South European countries vis-à-vis a number of contested issues which emerged during the 2010-2013 negotiations, the article goes on to provide a comparative account of the determinants of national preference formation with respect to the eurozone crisis reforms in Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain, paying special attention to the relationship between governments and parliaments.
Over the last decade, many developing countries have adopted the Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA). Despite the promise of bringing economic development, the results have been largely disappointing. The conventional wisdom is that the lack of administrative capacity and data availability are the two main reasons behind this failure. However, an in-depth analysis of two recent high-impact RIAs performed by Mexican authorities reveals that regulatory capture might be an additional and significant problem. In both cases, RIAs appear as merely instrumental to confer a scientific aura to the political rhetoric supporting a regulation that favored a specific interest group. In this vein, absent a sufficiently strong system of checks and balances, a greater sophistication of government officials might paradoxically
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