Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for a comparative analysis of Higher Education policies that enables us to investigate the explanatory power of structural characteristics of politico-administrative systems. The policies that are studied aim at improving the efficiency and quality of institutional performance. The paper focuses on policy trends in higher education in the eight countries in the study. It discusses how the literature on comparative political and administrative systems can help formulate assumptions about public policy making and policy change. The ideas that are developed are then applied to public reform policies in general and in the area of higher education in particular, followed by a test of the assumptions on available data on reform outcomes in the countries involved. The data indicate that a comparative politico-administrative perspective is potentially useful with regard to explaining cross national variation in higher education reform policies in Europe.
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Notes
The study is part of the ESF funded project Transforming Universities in Europe (TRUE), a comparative study of universities in eight European countries: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland and England, in which public policy is naturally a potential major driver behind organizational change.
Data on one of the eight countries in the TRUE project, Portugal, are not yet complete.
We emphasize that this is a preliminary test based on secondary material from existing literature. At the moment we are finalizing data collection that will bring the information on current systems characteristics, reform outcomes and impact up to date.
In addition to the literature on comparative political systems, there are various strands of literature that might be relevant for our purposes: literature on welfare state regimes (Esping Andersen 1990) and partisan politics and redistribution policy (Iversen and Soskcise 2006; Iversen and Stephens 2008); on public administration and public policy (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004); and on networks and their role in policy formation (Bleiklie 2006; Koppenjan et al. 2009; Rhodes and Marsh 1992; Van Waarden 1992).
This approach provided the template for the comparative analysis of public management reforms in 12 different countries as well as the EU: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, England and USA.
Also role perceptions of top civil servants will be important, e.g. whether they consider themselves as judges, arbiters or negotiator/mediator or as party politicians or accountants (Olsen 1983).
By administrative tradition we mean “a historically based set of values, structures and relationships with other institutions that define the nature of appropriate public administration within society” (Peters 2008:118).
The project, Steering of Universities (SUN) was funded by the EU PRIME program, led by Catherine Paradeise and the team had members from seven different European countries.
Data from Portugal have not yet been collected.
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Bleiklie, I., Michelsen, S. Comparing HE policies in Europe. High Educ 65, 113–133 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-012-9584-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-012-9584-6