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Introduction -- 1. Language, National Identity, Old and New Minorities: An Overview -- 2. Theoretical Framework: Looking at the Agenda of Language Education Policy Through the Multiple Streams Framework Lens -- 3. The Problem Stream: Language, Migration and Integration Between Assimilation and Intercultural Dialogue -- 4. The Politics Stream: What do Political Entrepreneurs Think About Migrants' Linguistic Integration? -- 5. The Policy Stream: Searching for Migrant Language Rights and Policies in Europe and Beyond -- 6. If Someone Has Done It, Can Everybody? Foundations for Language Education Policy Learning -- Conclusions: For an Inclusive Europe.

Migration flows in Europe have rendered its population more diverse and resulted in the presence of multiple languages in migrant-hosting countries and their education systems. Despite the potential of this language heritage to be leveraged as a resource, many European countries have been reluctant to adopt active public policies that promote the preservation of migrant languages. This article aims to explain the prevalent absence of policies promoting migrant languages in education in Europe through an analysis of the direction and approach of the external constraints and incentives that influence policymaking at the national level. Thus, the article embarks upon an unprecedented analysis of official documents (e.g., covenants, regulations, directives, etc.) adopted (or not adopted) by the main international and supranational organizations that have an impact on national policies in Europe: the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the European Union. The analysis identifies the prevalent attitude of such organizations toward migrant languages and classifies it according to an assimilation-pluralism dichotomy and a continuum that sees policy approaches as negative, symbolic, or positive. The findings show that both international and supranational organizations have been reluctant to actively promote the preservation of migrant languages in education, thus explaining the generalized absence of significant national migrant language promotion policies in Europe. Ultimately, the results of the analysis will be interesting for academics in the fields of language, integration, and migration, and useful for practitioners at both the policymaking and the education delivery level.

Notwithstanding the linguistic hyperdiversity that characterizes most European countries and the evidence that points to the value of migrant languages as resources for host societies, home language (HL) education is taken seriously and developed only in a few countries in Europe. The article aims to identify the policy design and implementation elements that can lead to effective HL teaching as well as the contextual and institutional premises that can facilitate or hamper processes of policy learning flowing from advanced HL education experiences (in this study, Austria and Sweden) to prospective policy learners (i.e., in this article, Italy). It does so in light of the lesson-drawing theorization of policy learning. The research design involves a comparison of three country cases, selected on the basis of their respective approaches to HL teaching. This comparison develops in terms of both contextual features and HL teaching policy characteristics, based on data collected from official reports. The research results are then discussed in light of the literature and indicate several lessons to be learned while at the same time pointing to the existence of many facilitators and a few obstacles to the activation of policy learning dynamics, and puts forwards a few ideas for both education policymakers and policy deliverers. ; Nonostante la iperdiversità linguistica che caratterizza molti contesti nazionali e il valore riconosciuto dalla letteratura scientifica alle lingue dei migranti come risorse per le società ospitanti, l'introduzione di tali lingue nei programmi di istruzione scolastica è una realtà consolidata solo in alcuni paesi europei. L'articolo si propone di identificare gli elementi che riguardano la formulazione degli interventi pubblici che possono condurre a un'efficace didattica delle lingua d'origine dei migranti, nonché le premesse contestuali e istituzionali che possono facilitare o ostacolare l'attivazione di processi di policy learning tra esperienze avanzate di insegnamento delle lingue ...

AbstractAdministrative style is a central concept in public policy and administration research. Despite the developments in the field, less is known about the effect different administrative styles have on policy output. To contribute to filling this gap, the article offers an original framework to explore the link between administrative styles and policy output based on the consolidated distinction between functional and positional orientations as constitutive elements of administrative styles. This framework is applied to an under‐investigated case of public organization in the Italian context, that is, the administrative apparatus headed by the Extraordinary Commissioner for the Covid‐19 Emergency, to test the general hypothesis that what makes the difference in determining output performance is an administration's positional orientation, not only its functional one. Doing so, the article contributes to "second generation" administrative style research and provides a theoretical and analytical framework to be tested in future cross‐national and cross‐sectoral comparisons.

This special issue is the sequelto the issue on COVID‐19 policies published in European Policy Analysis in fall 2020, which focused on the European countries' early responses to the pandemic. The collection aims to go beyond the "honeymoon" phase of the outbreak, that is, the first wave. The selected cases—Sweden, Greece and Cyprus, Germany, Turkey, Hungary, and the Eurozone—provide a variety of national features in terms of political systems, institutional structures, and policy styles. The featured articles adopt different theoretical perspectives and are authored by scholars from a variety of disciplines, who pursue both interpretative and explanatory goals by focusing on policy adoption, policy perception, and learning opportunities, but also on local pandemic management and policy outcomes. A fil rouge unites the featured contributions: they all show the importance of analyzing change over sufficiently long timeframes, to capture the complexity of existing trends.

AbstractThe use of knowledge and evidence in policymaking is a recurrent topic of research due to its scientific and policy relevance. The existing and expansive body of literature has been scrutinised in various ways to grasp the dimensions of knowledge utilisation in policymaking, although most of this research has a monosectoral focus and is based on very general criteria of analysis that do not completely account for the complexity of policy making. This paper overcomes this limitation by enlightening the epistemological divide in the field between an objectivist and a subjectivist perspective and by distinguishing two different focuses in this literature: a focus on knowledge for policy making and a focus on knowledge in policy making. Based on this analytical distinction, the paper presents an original and unprecedented systematic, intersectoral metareview by considering the thirty-year period between 1990 and 2020 (approximately 1,400 were selected for fine-grained analysis). This metareview offers a broader and more detailed map with a clear idea of the distribution of interest in the topic among the different policy fields, a better classification of the theoretical/empirical content and research goals that scholars adopt and a novel and, above all, more fine-grained perspective on the types of conditions that favour or disfavour a significant role of knowledge in policymaking. Ultimately, and above all, this metareview identifies three highly relevant components of policy making that can facilitate or constrain the use of knowledge in policymaking more than others: values/ideology/beliefs, actors' relationships, and policy capacities.

AbstractItaly has been heavily affected by the COVID‐19 pandemic. National and subnational authorities have introduced several measures to tackle the resulting crisis, including social distancing and restrictions on economic activities. However, as we will show in this contribution, such measures have sometimes resulted in uncertainty concerning the allocation of decision making powers along the central–local government continuum and regarding the exercise of administrative tasks by public authorities, thus producing conflict and variation within the policymaking and policy‐delivery processes in Italy. To show this, we review the relevant events that occurred during the pandemic in the country in light both of the literature on centralization and discretion and of the principles shaping the Italian legal system. Our analysis, based on a dialogue between political science and public law, allows us to read the Italian case as a mix of inadequate institutional coordination and insufficient and unclear central guidelines which ultimately produced uncertainty, which together had a direct impact on policymakers, policy‐deliverers, and citizens in general.

AbstractThe study of scientific advisory committees (SACs) is a recurrent topic of research in public policy and public administration. Scholars are increasingly interested in analyzing the scientization of policy advice as well as the role played by knowledge‐based policymaking processes. Despite recent developments in the field, SACs studies continue to face an analytical and empirical gap due to the lack of parsimonious conceptualizations of the characteristics that enable them to be both theoretically relevant and effective in driving comparative analysis. To fill this research gap, this article proposes a novel typology of SACs based on a specific conceptualization of the motivations of policymakers that allows the selection of two classificatory criteria: the origin of the members and the degree to which their expertise is homogeneous. The theoretical relevance of this typology is illustrated by applying it to the SACs established in the Italian regions to address the COVID‐19 pandemic. The article highlights the relevance of the typology to the theory underlying the empirical analysis. In doing so, it provides relevant insights into the composition and nature of SACs that is useful not only for the academic debate on evidence‐based policymaking but also for both practitioners and decision‐makers.

AbstractThis article studies how different systems of policy advice are suited to provide relevant knowledge in times of acute crisis. The notion of evidence-based policymaking (EBP) originated in the successful 1997 New Labour program in the United Kingdom to formulate policy based not on ideology but on sound empirical evidence. We provide a brief overview of the history of the concept and the current debates around it. We then outline the main characteristics of the policy advisory systems in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy through which scientific knowledge—in the form of either person-bound expertise or evidence generated through standard scientific processes—was fed into policy formulation processes before the COVID-19 crisis. Whereas EBP takes place in the form of institutionalized advisory bodies and draws on expertise rather than on evidence in Germany, the system in Switzerland focuses more on the use of evidence provided through external mandates. Italy has a hybrid politicized expert system. The article then analyzes how this different prioritization of expertise vs. evidence in the three countries affects policymakers' capacity to include scientific knowledge in policy decisions in times of acute crisis. The comparison of the three countries implies that countries with policy advisory systems designed to use expertise are better placed to incorporate scientific knowledge into their decisions in times of acute crisis than are countries with policy advisory systems that relied primarily on evidence before the COVID-19 crisis.

This article studies how different systems of policy advice are suited to provide relevant knowledge in times of acute crisis. The notion of evidence-based policymaking (EBP) originated in the successful 1997 New Labour program in the United Kingdom to formulate policy based not on ideology but on sound empirical evidence. We provide a brief overview of the history of the concept and the current debates around it. We then outline the main characteristics of the policy advisory systems in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy through which scientific knowledge—in the form of either person-bound expertise or evidence generated through standard scientific processes—was fed into policy formulation processes before the COVID-19 crisis. Whereas EBP takes place in the form of institutionalized advisory bodies and draws on expertise rather than on evidence in Germany, the system in Switzerland focuses more on the use of evidence provided through external mandates. Italy has a hybrid politicized expert system. The article then analyzes how this different prioritization of expertise vs. evidence in the three countries affects policymakers' capacity to include scientific knowledge in policy decisions in times of acute crisis. The comparison of the three countries implies that countries with policy advisory systems designed to use expertise are better placed to incorporate scientific knowledge into their decisions in times of acute crisis than are countries with policy advisory systems that relied primarily on evidence before the COVID-19 crisis. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11615-022-00382-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Abstract This article studies how different systems of policy advice are suited to provide relevant knowledge in times of acute crisis. The notion of evidence-based policymaking (EBP) originated in the successful 1997 New Labour program in the United Kingdom to formulate policy based not on ideology but on sound empirical evidence. We provide a brief overview of the history of the concept and the current debates around it. We then outline the main characteristics of the policy advisory systems in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy through which scientific knowledge—in the form of either person-bound expertise or evidence generated through standard scientific processes—was fed into policy formulation processes before the COVID-19 crisis. Whereas EBP takes place in the form of institutionalized advisory bodies and draws on expertise rather than on evidence in Germany, the system in Switzer- land focuses more on the use of evidence provided through external mandates. Italy has a hybrid politicized expert system. The article then analyzes how this different prioritization of expertise vs. evidence in the three countries affects policymakers' capacity to include scientific knowledge in policy decisions in times of acute crisis. The comparison of the three countries implies that countries with policy advisory systems designed to use expertise are better placed to incorporate scientific knowledge into their decisions in times of acute crisis than are countries with policy advisory systems that relied primarily on evidence before the COVID-19 crisis.