Instituto de Políticas y Bienes Públicos

La entrevista a Clara Mapelli Marchena, secretaria de Estado de Función Pública, presenta su visión sobre la transformación de la Administración pública española. Mapelli aboga por abandonar el paradigma de «reforma» para adoptar un enfoque de «transformación», concibiendo al Estado como una estructura productiva de bienes y servicios públicos. Destaca la implementación del Consenso por una Administración Abierta, un proceso participativo con dieciocho proyectos estructurados en cuatro ejes: inversión en capacidades del sector público, con políticas públicas informadas por la evidencia y herramientas innovadoras; Administración abierta a la ciudadanía, accesible y humanista, y abierta a la transparencia y rendición de cuentas. Enfatiza la importancia de ordenar la actividad administrativa por procesos, mediante la implantación de un Sistema de Información Funcional que permita visualizar la fábrica del Estado. Mapelli subraya la necesidad de superar el modelo de islas de excelencia para alcanzar la calidad total, aprovechando la digitalización y la inteligencia artificial para liberar al personal público hacia tareas de mayor valor añadido.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the influence of new highways on local development in Spain across two distinct periods of initial infrastructure investment in network development and later network extensions. The results show interesting differences. In the 1990s, when the basic network was completed, new highways generally showed a positive relationship with local population growth in municipalities that had seen their access improved, although with most benefits concentrated in urban areas. In contrast, for the network extensions during the first decade of the 2000s, the results suggest a negative relationship with local population growth in rural areas.

La polarización ideológica mide las distancias entre las identificaciones y opiniones políticas de distintos grupos de ciudadanos. España muestra hoy unos patrones de polarización ideológica similares a otros países europeos. Este tipo de polarización ha aumentado de forma continua desde principios de siglo y se han configurado dos bloques ideológicos claros que se diferencian en el posicionamiento de sus potenciales votantes en la mayoría de temas que conforman el debate político. Si atendemos a una perspectiva longitudinal, la polarización en cuanto a temas económicos parece haber aumentado mucho más que la que se basa en temas morales. Esta última incluso podría haberse reducido en los últimas dos décadas. Podríamos concluir que, si las principales diferencias se establecen en el eje económico, la posibilidad de llegar a acuerdos debería estar más cerca que si se exacerban las diferencias en cuestiones morales.

ABSTRACT The Council’s enforcement inaction regarding the rule of law crisis has been endlessly criticised by scholars and commentators. However, there is currently no theoretically parsimonious explanation of why some national governments oppose enforcement whilst others are more inclined to support it. We address this question by considering structural (time of accession), semi-structural (contributions to, or receipts from, the EU budget and democratic quality) and circumstantial (partisanship, ideology, EU integration stance) conditions. We use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to test the impact of these conditions on governments’ positions from 2016 to 2021. Findings show relatively stable preferences on enforcement within Member States, despite changes in the ideology of the ruling party. Time of accession, having a high quality of democracy and being a net contributor to the budget emerges as the most robust combination of conditions to explain strong pro-enforcement preferences. In contrast, governments of newer Member States that are net recipients of funds tend to be more reluctant to enforce the rule of law. While ideology lacks sufficient parsimonious explanatory power, it is particularly relevant for explaining extreme anti-enforcement reactions.

ABSTRACT One may wonder why countries have used different public policies to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. We argue that social trust could be the missing link in explaining why these public policies vary in stringency. Based on the logic of game theory, we draw the hypothesis that more social trust in a society means that less stringent policies are needed to abate the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical results at both country and individual levels confirm this hypothesis. The implications for public policy stemming from these findings suggest the necessity of addressing initiatives like Team Europe’s 2020 package launched by the European External Action Service (EEAS) to combat Covid-19 in non-EU nations. The more social trust in a society, the higher the likelihood of informal cooperation. Thus, less stringent policies are needed to abate the COVID-19 pandemic. In perspective, policymakers are likely to encounter fewer compliance issues and more cooperative behavior in countries with high levels of trust when confronting future crises.

Abstract Authorship is associated with scientific capital and prestige, and corresponding authorship is used in evaluation as a proxy for scientific status. However, there are no empirical analyses on the validity of the corresponding authorship metadata in bibliometric databases. This paper looks at differences in the corresponding authorship metadata in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus to investigate how the relationship between author position and corresponding authors varies by discipline and country and analyzes changes in the position of corresponding authors over time. We find that both WoS and Scopus have accuracy issues when it comes to assigning corresponding authorship. Although the number of documents with a reprint author has increased over time in both databases, WoS indexed more of those papers than Scopus, and there are significant differences between the two databases in terms of who the corresponding author is. Although metadata is not complete in WoS, corresponding authors are normally first authors with a declining trend over time, favoring middle and last authors, especially in the Medical, Natural Sciences, and Engineering fields. These results reinforce the importance of considering how databases operationalize and index concepts such as corresponding authors, this being particularly important when they are used in research assessment.

An abundant literature on the advantages and drawbacks of different auction design elements exists. However, their comparative effects on market concentration have not been explored, despite the increasing concern of governments about this issue. This article covers this gap in the literature. It follows an exploratory approach to provide a better understanding of the relationship between auctions, design elements and market concentration. An analytical framework is developed to assess the effects of auction and auction design elements on two aspects of market concentration (number and diversity of firms). Then, some research proposals are inferred from this framework and illustrated with a case study of wind power in Spain. Data have been collected through an expert elicitation survey and a Multi-criteria Analysis has been performed. The results show that, compared to administratively-set remuneration, auctions increase market concentration. Furthermore, their impact on market concentration is mediated by the choice of specific design elements (the existence of a schedule, the remuneration type and stringent prequalification requirements). However, those effects of auctions and their design elements are relatively low compared to other context factors. Therefore, if the aim is to reduce market concentration, policy makers should improve these context conditions, followed by auction design.

ABSTRACT The agreements on Next Generation EU (NGEU) and the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021–2027 (MFF 2021–2027) are extraordinary milestones for the EU integration process. Not only do both regulations have important redistributive effects within a defined timeframe, but both regulations shape the hierarchy of objectives and instruments of EU budgetary policies. This is particularly true for cohesion policy, which has been characterised as the model of EU multilevel governance (MLG). Drawing on historical institutionalism and Peter Hall’s classification of policy change, this text examines the dynamics of change in MLG. In particular, this research looks at the timing and scope of changes in EU cohesion policy since the 1980s. We ask whether or not the adoption of NGEU and the MFF 2021–2027 is likely to represent a critical juncture for the MLG and to what extent both regulations modify objectives and instruments of cohesion policy.

ABSTRACT This article analyses how events of political violence in the distant past affect the outbreak of terrorism in the present. Civil wars leave a legacy of distrust that can persist through generations, paving the way to violent responses to perceived threats. We claim that part of the explanation for the counterintuitive terrorism phenomenon in a prosperous and relatively egalitarian region such as the Basque Country (and, potentially, other cases of terrorism) lies in the legacies of political violence in the distant past. Those communities where support for Carlism, one of the warring factions in nineteenth-century civil wars, was strong, were more likely to support terrorism a century later. The article also shows that the transmission of these legacies was robust in communities that have remained largely isolated in the century that separates the civil war from the terrorism of the 1970s.