Catherine Moury

2023 must probably be considered a ‘quieter’ year than those immediately preceding it – years that saw the peak of the Covid pandemic (in 2020–2021) and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (in 2022). Howe...

Between 2010 and 2019, five Eurozone governments in economic difficulty received assistance from international lenders on condition that certain policies specified in the Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) were implemented. To what extent were those conditions implemented? After conditionality, to what extent have governments rolled back changes pursued under external constraint? Do we find variation across governments regarding implementation and reversals, and if so, why?. This paper presents a database allowing the answers to those questions, the Data Base on EcoNomic Adjustment Policies (ENAP) database. We codified all policies and reforms included in the MoU’s, and whether those were subsequently fully or partially implemented. We also codified all decisions taken by bailed out countries since the beginning of the financial crisis and verified whether those had been kept or fully or partially reversed until December 2019. For each condition or policy, a series of explanatory variables were coded: policy sector, type of reform, timing and type of reversal, origin of reversal and number of veto players. The ENAP shows that in all countries, MoU’s were largely implemented and are resilient.

In this article, we start from the assumption that the pharmaceutical industry accumulates material, instrumental, ideational and institutional power. Considering this, we expect that it would be very difficult for governments to reduce the rents of pharmaceutical companies in the long-term, even when the former are externally constrained to reduce their spending. We test our argument by carrying out a qualitative analysis of a paradigmatic case study, the Portuguese economic adjustment programme (2011–2014). We demonstrate that the conditionality associated with the international bailout was welcomed by Portuguese reformist ministers as an opportunity to decrease public pharmaceutical spending. However, the representatives of the industry took several initiatives to make sure that the decrease of its profits would be limited in scope and time. As a result, as soon as the bailout terminated, the industry was able to regain its rents.

Introduction: In 2000, the Portuguese minority socialist government decriminalized the possession and consumption of drugs. This law made Portugal unique in having a formal system that directs the person using drugs to a panel under the purview of the Ministry of Health, as opposed to the Ministry of Justice, and hence constitutes an ‘original innovation’. In this article, we ask under which conditions such kinds of reforms are introduced and successfully implemented.Aims and design: After discussing the limitations of the existing literature, we present a new theoretical framework: the ‘six‐stars’ framework. We argue that successful policy innovation in democracies will only occur and persist when six institutional and individual ‘stars’ are aligned: attention, motivation to innovate, a new solution, political strategies, quality and legitimacy of the decision‐making process and guarantees for full implementation. We then apply this framework to the Portuguese Drug Policy Case through theory‐testing/process‐tracing. Relying upon a qualitative analysis of three different types of data—primary and secondary sources, official documents emitted by key actors and interviews—we identify the presence of the six aligned ‘stars’.Conclusions: The proposed ‘six‐stars’ framework of successful drug policy innovation shows the importance of electoral mandates, communication, inclusion, transparency, deliberation and evaluation when designing innovative drug policies. It also illustrates the importance of ensuring the support of implementing agents and quickly creating visible, positive policy feedback.

The publication pattern of EPSR confirms the findings of established scholarship on gender and publishing; women publish less than men (roughly, 30% to 70%). This gap reflects a previous submission gap; i.e., men submit even much more than women do. EPSR editorial process does not show signs of discrimination: single or leading female authors have significantly lower desk rejection rates than their male counterparts in similar configurations. Women though, are underrepresented as peer reviewers and EPSR has taken measures to redress this situation. Looking at women authors perceptions, findings (that cannot be considered representative), are consistent with existing scholarship. Women authors perceive themselves as more perfectionist and more risk adverse, they also perceive that they can dedicate less time to research, and they express mistrust in the blind review process. As a general conclusion, whilst reversing the gender gap requires structural action beyond and before the editorial process, journal editors must consider forms to secure more extensive women inclusion in publications.

In this article, we argue that the Costa I Socialist government (2015–2019) managed to combine responsiveness to voters with responsibility towards domestic and international actors by pursuing some kind of ‘austerity by stealth’, which we define as less visible fiscal contraction that is not displayed by the government in its public discourse. The radical left parties implicitly agreed with this strategy in exchange for the adoption of a long list of visible anti-austerity policies. This allowed the Costa I government to fulfil its electoral pledges and maintain the support of the radical left on the one hand, whilst also reducing the country’s deficit and consequently the costs of interest-debt repayments.

This article aims to identify the resilience of measures adopted during bailout programmes, and the conditions under which decisions-makers reverse them. Focusing on Spain and Portugal (2014–2019), we calculated that almost half (46 per cent) of the most important measures adopted during the programmes were reversed in the five years following the bailouts. We also show that left-wing parties reversed more than right wing and that the bulk of structural reforms remained unchanged. Using crisp-set qualitative-comparative analysis (QCA), we find that business interests, veto players’ preferences and governments’ electoral calculations are determinants of reversals.

This article proposes a framework to understand and explain the occurrence of policy reversals. We argue that the occurrence and absence of policy reversals is shaped by the constraints of responsiveness (to voters) and responsibility (vis-à-vis creditors, international institutions and financial markets). We review the literature on reversals and their implications for Southern Europe. We finally summarise the main findings of the contributions in the volume, that address when and why governments prioritise responsiveness or responsibility, as well as the economic consequences of these choices.

The Portuguese case provides a unique opportunity to study the opposition’s behaviour in a variety of political conditions. It offers an insight into the impact of the financial crisis on the opposition’s behaviour in both majority and minority political settings. It allows the comparison of the opposition’s relationship with a minority government, during which non-collaboration could have dramatic consequences, and also with a majority government, when such a choice does not have major political or policy implications. Moreover, it enables us to study the effect of an additional veto player (the so-called troika composed of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), which not only constrains both majority and opposition parties, but also gives political entrepreneurs a unique opportunity to push ahead with liberal measures –in this case, clearly in disagreement with the moderate and radical left programmes. Relying on quantitative data on the legislative behaviour of the parliamentary party groups in the period 1995–2012, and on qualitative process-tracking of the opposition’s positions on key economic issues –such as the decision to vote against Prime Minister Sócrates’ last austerity package after a series of approvals –this article aims to determine whether, and if yes how, the financial crisis has affected the behaviour of the Portuguese opposition parties in parliament, by examining and comparing their behaviour in hard and in normal times.