Contrary to many other areas, international and, in particular, European influences on national policymaking in higher education (HE) have remained limited. This picture, however, changed fundamentally from the late 1990s onward. In 1999, 29 countries signed the Bologna Declaration, denoting the start of the so‐called Bologna Process. Thus, a collective supranational platform was developed to confront problem pressure, which has in turn fostered considerable domestic reforms. However, we still have limited knowledge on whether the Bologna Process has actually led to the convergence of national HE policies toward a common model. This article analyzes these questions by focusing on Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Because of its tumultuous and inconsistent path of development and the sheer magnitude of the current reform processes, CEE HE stands out as a particularly worthwhile object of analysis for scholars interested in policy convergence as well as policy legacies and path dependencies.

Recent research has tried to uncover the political space in which the Council of Ministers of the European Union decides. Rather than the left-right conflict or a cleavage between governments with national and supranational attitudes, this article shows that a redistributive dimension, decisively shapes the interactions in this most important legislative body of the European Union. In contrast to extant studies, we employ ex ante rather than ex post preference data and rely on correspondence analysis as a means to identify the underlying dimensions of contestation. The article concludes with an empirical investigation of how enlargement will affect the emerging political space within the European Union. Our quantitative analysis suggests that the gulf between net-contributors and net-receivers will further deepen.

In this article we provide an integrated framework for the analysis of higher education governance which allows us to more systematically trace the changes that European higher education systems are currently undergoing. We argue that, despite highly insightful previous analyses, there is a need for more specific empirically observable indicators of policy change and inertia. We therefore propose a systematic classification of empirical indicators of higher education governance. To do so, we look at three historically entrenched and still highly relevant European models of higher education-academic selfgovernance, the state-centered model and the market-oriented model. Based on these broader overarching models which reflect the tensions between the state, market and academia, we develop three ideal-types that take internal university governance as well as the role of the state and external stakeholders into account. Against this background, we derive empirical indicators with regard to the institutional balance of power, financial governance, personnel autonomy and substantive matters. Our analytical contribution shall enable scholars, and in particular political and social scientists, to trace ongoing patterns of change and convergence as well as persistence and inertia in higher education governance arrangements.

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Aim:We test a new species distribution modelling (SDM) framework, while comparing results to more common distribution modelling techniques. This framework allows for the combination of presence-only (PO) and presence-absence (PA) data and accounts for imperfect detection and spatial bias in presence data. The new framework tested here is based on a Poisson point process model, which allows for predictions of population size. We compared these estimates to those provided by experts on the species. Species and Location: Presence data on Baird's tapir (Tapirus bairdii) throughout its range from southern México to northern Colombia were used in this research, primarily from the years 2000 to 2016. Methods: Four SDM frameworks are compared as follows: (1) Maxent, (2) a presenceonly (PO) SDM based on a Poisson point process model (PPM), (3) a presence-absence (PA) SDM also based on a PPM and (4) an Integrated framework which combines the previous two models. Model averaging was used to produce a single set of coefficient estimates and predictive maps for each model framework. A hotspot analysis (Gi*) was used to identify habitat cores from the predicted intensity of the Integrated model framework. Results: Important variables to model the distribution of Baird's tapir included land cover, human pressure and topography. Accounting for spatial bias in the presence data affected which variables were important in the model. Maxent and the Integrated model produced predictive maps with similar patterns and were considered to be more in agreement with expert knowledge compared to the PO and PA models.Main conclusions: Total abundance as predicted by the model was higher than expert opinion on the species, but local density estimates from our model were similar to available independent assessments. We suggest that these results warrant further validation and testing through collection of independent test data, development of more precise predictor layers and improvements to the model framework.

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This study investigates if transnational communication in the context of the Bologna Process (BP) has led to the convergence of higher education (HE) policies. The country sample includes both Bologna participants and non-participants, for which systematic knowledge about the implications of the BP is absent so far. We investigate study structures and quality assurance measures, which differ in their suitability for transnational benchmarking activities and are explicitly addressed by the BP. Our results show that convergent effects differ across policy dimensions and according to the subsamples. We generally find that convergence is greater for the participant countries than for the control group. However, convergence towards the HE policies of Bologna participants is detectable in the control group, albeit to a lesser degree. Thus, some HE policies have diffused beyond the members of the BP. This lends evidence that transnational communication can induce policy change even for countries not participating in the respective harmonization process.

In this article, we address whether international student comparisons have changed the dynamics of French secondary education policy. We focus on the increasingly significant impact of the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD)'s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on France, a country previously known for its aversion to international comparisons and its turbulent relationship with the OECD. We argue that not only are transnational pressures -in our study the perception of PISA -crucial determinants for the fate of potential reform measures, but also the capacity of the state to transform its education system and take corrective measures. Along these lines, we also examine the role of historically embedded guiding principles of education, in the French case most notably that of equality (égalité). We focus, in particular, on efforts of French policy-makers to emulate elements of the recent 'PISA champion' Finland.