Mapping The Quality Of Government In Europe

In this book the authors tackle the concept of 'quality of government' (QoG) both conceptually and empirically and apply their focus to EU countries and regions. In a pioneering empirical effort, they map out regional QoG for the first time for 172 NUTS 1 and 2 regions throughout 18 countries in the EU, and provide a detailed methodology. They follow up the quantitative assessment with three case studies demonstrating the wide variation of QoG found within the countries of Italy, Belgium and Romania. The book concludes with important lessons and ideas for future research. Quality of Government and Corruption from a European Perspective will offer a unique insight to an important issue of development within the EU that speaks to students and academics in the field of comparative politics, EU politics, development, governance and corruption.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

Experts and Democratic Legitimacy challenges the technocratic reading of expert bodies, such as central banks, advisory committees and regulatory agencies. Expert contributors ask in what way expert bodies are subject to some of the key pressures in contemporary governance, such as democratisation, politicisation and expertisation. Based on empirical studies, the book traces the multiple social ties of expert bodies and refines the common perception of expert bodies as ‘de-politicised’ institutions that are detached from political interference and societal input. It further theorises the tension and reconcilability between reliable, independent expert knowledge on the one hand and the need for accountability and legitimacy in modern policy-making on the other hand. Refining the detached, de-politicised image of non-majoritarian institutions, Experts and Democratic Legitimacy will be of great interest to scholars of European studies, political and social theory, modern governance and policy-making. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Politics and Society.

The new EU Cohesion Policy is one of the largest integrated development policies in the Western world, and one of the largest of such programmes anywhere in the world. The reforms to the EU Cohesion Policy contain many different elements each of which interlink in order to provide a cohesive overall framework. Some of the key elements in the reforms, however, relate to the conditionalities employed and their effects on policy governance and the control mechanism, the smart specialization approach to policy prioritization and resource allocation, the underlying place-based logic of the policy, and the overall results orientation and evaluation emphasis of the policy. In each of the areas of the EU Cohesion Policy reforms, many different scholars from the fields of regional studies, regional science and economic geography have played important roles in shaping the new policy, and the chapters here highlight these increasing interactions between the policy and academic spheres of debate. The collection of essays in this book each deal with specific aspects of these critical elements of the Cohesion Policy reforms. In particular, they examine some of the strengths and weaknesses of these individual elements and allowing for a better understanding of the origins and backgrounds of many of the ideas underpinning these reforms. This book was previously published as a special issue of Regional Studies.

What does Brexit actually mean for the UK and what are the wider implications for Europe? Was the UK ‘leave’ vote actually symptomatic of broader issues within Europe such as population mobility and the rise of non-traditional parties? Written by leading international authors, this timely atlas explores Europe’s society, culture, economy, politics and environment using state of the art mapping techniques With maps covering over 80 topics ranging from life expectancy, greenhouse gas emissions, GDP to Eurovision voting, The Human Atlas of Europe addresses fundamental questions around social cohesion and sustainable growth as Europe negotiates the UK’s exit while continuing through the economic crisis. This concise, accessible atlas is packed with exciting features, including: • short introductions to each topic • maps using the very latest data • infographics bringing this all to life • summaries of key information including league tables • core statistics on Europe Taken as a whole, the atlas shows how geographical and state boundaries only tell a partial story and that we still live in a far more cohesive Europe than we realise.

This volume presents a compilation of composite indicators created in order to measure important aspects of the quality of European societies. It examines three main questions: do Europeans live in good societies and enjoy good lives; are European societies becoming better as time passes, or is their quality slowly deteriorating; is the quality of life of Europe’s citizens improving over time or is it gradually and irrecoverably getting worse. The volume uses a precise and rigorous system of information to answer these questions and to assess the current situation and monitor the quality of European societies. It describes and discusses fourteen key domains, and per chapter, presents five rankings of EU countries based on composite indicators, which are used as one of the best instruments social science has to synthesize a large amount of information, and they are especially well suited to measure multidimensional social phenomena. The new System of Indices on the Quality of European Societies (SIQES) presented in this volume offers a very broad and rich empirical overview of more than 70 social composite indicators and their nearly 300 dimensions. One of the key findings coming out from the SIQES is that, according to the societal quality of European countries, there exist five different “Europes” inside Europe.

Offering a novel contribution within the growing field of regional innovation policies, this book combines recent theoretical developments and empirical contributions, with a particular focus on non-core regions. Leading academics in the field discuss the topics of regional path transformation, place-based strategies and policy learning. Also included are sections on the role of EU institutions on the promotion of regional innovation and the analysis and comparison of the innovation policies experiences of four non-core European regions.