Governments pursue their goals by adopting various mixes of policy instruments. This article proposes a specific operationalisation of these mixes and applies it to the analysis of reforms that many Western European governments have pursued, as they have adopted a similar policy design in their higher education systems (HESs) over the last 20 years. In fact, although these policies have similar templates, performance indicators exhibit remarkable variation between countries. Thus, by applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis to a large data set containing all changes in policy instruments undertaken in the last 20 years in 12 HESs in Western Europe, this article explores the possibility that differences in performance across national HESs could be associated – ceteris paribus – with different policy mixes. This article finds not only that the common template has been applied through very different national policy mixes but also that only a few instruments are regularly linked to good teaching performance, regardless of the other components of the actual policy mix.

Over the last 30 years, governments have continuously adjusted their Higher Education policies to make universities more efficient (achieving more by spending less) and more effective (by increasing the percentage of graduates, by reducing the number of university dropouts and by focusing more on the third mission). At the core of governmental endeavours to reform Higher Education lies the redesign of the actual governance mode: governments have not only changed the general principles of Higher Education governance but also continuously changed the mix of those policy instruments they have chosen to adopt. The steering at a distance/supervisory/supermarket model appears to be unable to cover these differentiated trends; in fact, scholars have underlined that each country has designed its own hybrid interpretation of the common template. This paper focuses on this issue, describing how governance has been hybridised at the systemic level and detailing the content of these changes, operationalised with regards to policy instruments together with two financial dimensions. It emerges that three types of hybrid systemic governance modes are actually present in Europe: a performance‐based mode, a re‐regulated mode and a systemic goal‐oriented mode.

No abstract

Although many interest groups work together perpetually, most academic studies agree that coalition formation does not lead to more influence. In this article, we try to explain these puzzling findings. While former research generally tends to frame the decision of forming an interest group coalition as a strength, in this paper, we argue that coalition building should be considered as a ‘weapon of the weak’. Interest groups fearing that they are insufficiently influential, and whose very existence as an organisation is at risk, are more likely to coalesce. This theoretical framework is tested on a sample of around 3000 interest groups in six European countries – Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Sweden – and the European Union. Empirical findings clearly demonstrate that perceived fears – oriented towards both organisational survival and policy influence – have an effect on how likely it is that an interest group will decide to build a coalition.

As a result of domestic pressure or international prescription, many national higher education systems (HESs) in Europe have undergone structural changes over the last 30 years. These changes have been made primarily to enhance the overall performancedefined as students' access, quality of teaching, and excellence in researchof universities. As such, almost all of these countries have decided to adopt similar policy strategies to foster institutional autonomy and differentiation, and greater managerial steering. However, although similar policy patterns have been replicated, performance indicators are remarkably variable across Western European countries. Thus, many of the proposed explanations may be oversimplifications of reality. This issue leads to our main research question: Which factors are associated with (teaching) performance improvement in HE? This paper focuses on university-level education to explore the possibility that this association is conjunctural in nature. In other words, when considering the performance of university systems (i.e. teaching), it is important to identify the most effective combination of institutional autonomy, evaluation, internal governance, and public funding. Qualitative comparative analysis was employed to test this expectation on developments (