LIST OF PANELS

The growing dissemination of political authority and influence across the supranational, national and subnational levels of government have been the subject of extensive research in the last decades. Such research efforts have noted how the increasingly lower control of national governments over governing tasks has been paralleled with an empowerment of subnational and supranational structures in the governance sphere. Having said that, while a considerable number of pieces have provided valuable theoretical contributions to multi-level governance studies (Hooghe and Marks, 2001; Piattoni, 2009; Enderlein et al., 2010; Tortola, 2017), multi-level governance still remains a “fuzzy and underdeveloped concept” (Bache et al., 2016). For example, few papers have focused on the relational dynamics that underlie multi-level governance systems (exceptions include Börzel and Heard-Lauréote, 2009; Di Gregorio et al., 2019; Bravo-Laguna, 2020). Social network analysis provides an interesting methodological toolkit in this regard, considering its ability to provide empirical evidence regarding formal and de facto interdependencies across governance levels (González and Verhoest, 2020), and its emphasis on the systemic level (Robins, 2015; Scott and Ulibarri, 2019).

This panel has been coordinated and is sponsored by the ECPR Political Networks Standing Group.

Bibliography

Bache, I., Bartle, I., & Flinders, M. (2016). Multi-Level Governance. In: Ansell, C., & Torfing, J. (Eds.) Handbook on Theories of Governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing

Bravo-Laguna, C. (2020). Transboundary Crisis Management under the Volcano: the Case of the Icelandic Ash Cloud. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management. DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12303

Börzel, T. A., & Heard-Lauréote, K. (2009). Networks in EU Multi-Level Governance: Concepts and Contributions. Journal of Public Policy, 135-151

Di Gregorio, M., Fatorelli, L., Paavola, J., Locatelli, B., Pramova, E., Nurrochmat, D. R., May, P. H., Brockhaus, M., Sari, I. M., Kusumadewi, S. M. (2019). Multi-Level Governance and Power in Climate Change Policy Networks. Global Environmental Change, 54, 64-77

Enderlein, H., Wälti, S., & Zürn, M. (2010). Handbook on Multi-Level Governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar

González, C. I., & Verhoest, K. (2020). De Facto Regulatory Decision-Making Process in Telecommunications Regulation: Explaining Influence Relationships with Exponential Random Graph Models. Journal of Public Policy, 40 (1): 144-170

Hooghe, L., & Marks, L. (2001). Multi-Level Governance and European Integration. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Piattoni, S. (2009). Multi-Level Governance: a Historical and Conceptual Analysis. Journal of European Integration, 31 (2): 163-180

Robins, G. (2015). Doing Social Network Research: Network-Based Research Design for Social Scientists. London, UK: Sage

Scott, T. A., & Ulibarri, N. (2019). Taking Network Analysis Seriously: Methodological Improvements for Governance Network Scholarship. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2 (2): 89-101

Tortola, P. D. (2017). Clarifying Multi-Level Governance. European Journal of Political Research, 56: 234-250

This panel seeks to respond to the need for theoretical and empirical research on the subject of multi-level governance from the perspective of network science. Broader examples of research questions include: How do existing multi-level structural patterns affect policy outcomes? How does the position of particular actors within broader multi-level networks help explain decision-making in such polities? How have specific multi-level governance structures evolved over time? What characteristics of a multi-level governance network make it effective? Which self-organizing processes could be identified within a given multi-level networked system? Are there specific actors in the network (brokers) connecting different levels? The panel welcomes contributions centered around an extensive range of policy sectors that examine multi-level governance from a network perspective. While the European Union currently exemplifies the most advanced form of multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks, 2001), this panel is also open to academic papers that review multi-level relational dynamics in other polities.