Exploring the determinants of higher education performance in Western Europe: A qualitative comparative analysis

Abstract

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 (

Transparency and Accountability in Higher Education as a Response to External Stakeholders and Rules: A Comparison Between Three Country-Case Studies

“…Over the last decades, European countries have experienced quite similar strategies aimed at enhancing institutional autonomy and greater managerial steering (Capano & Pritoni, 2020), with the expectation of contributing to increased HEI performance. According to Kuhlmann and Wollmann (2014) five different institutional models could be identified in Europe: Anglo-saxon, Nordic countries, Continental Europe, Continental Napoleonic countries, and Eastern Europe tradition.…”

“…As mentioned above, over the last decades European countries have experienced quite similar strategies aimed at enhancing institutional autonomy and greater managerial steering (Capano & Pritoni, 2020), with the expectation of contributing to increased HEI performance. Yet, Italy and Portugal are still rather influenced by the so-called Continental governance model (Clark, 1983;Capano & Pritoni, 2020), characterized by hierarchical coordination through state-centered policies and relatively smaller institutional autonomy compared to that typical of Anglo-Saxon countries, which has a stronger influence on the Netherlands, as a Nordic country (see Kuhlmann & Wollmann, 2014).…”

Variedades de capitalismo académico: Un marco conceptual de análisis

“…Naturalmente, lo dicho no significa que el Estado/gobierno haya sido vaciado (Capano et al, 2015) o no ocupe ya un lugar central en la gobernanza de la ES, o que las propias instituciones se hallen entregadas exclusivamente a las dinámicas de los mercados. Por el contrario, al ocupar también los mercados, cuasimercados y mecanismos de tipo mercado, los Estado nación/gobiernos ensanchan su capacidad de guiar a distancia a los sistemas y adquieren nuevos instrumentos, a la vez que mantienen sus medios convencionales de comando y control (Capano & Pritoni, 2019a. En suma, la gobernanza de la ES se mueve decisivamente en torno a la combinación y calibración de instrumentos: por ejemplo, acelerar el mercado de estudiantes facilitando el acceso de nuevos proveedores privados; o bien, ampliar la demanda por estudios mediante una reducción de la tasa de interés de los créditos estudiantiles; o bien, en sentido contrario, reducir el alcance de los mercados, por ejemplo, estableciendo cuotas obligatorias de acceso en beneficio de estudiantes de menores recursos o elevando los requisitos de ingreso para ciertos programas como medicina o pedagogía.…”

Policy instruments at work: A meta‐analysis of their applications

“…On the one hand, policy instruments have been analysed because they help us understand how and why policy dynamics develop, how and why governance modes change over time (Le Galés 2011; Capano et al 2015) and how policy actors aggregate around specific policy instruments (Béland and Howlett 2016; Capano and Lippi 2017). On the other hand, a renewed policy design perspective has focused its attention on the different combinations of policy instruments and on the reasons for using different policy design styles (Howlett and Rayner 2013, 2017; Schmidt and Sewerin 2018; Capano and Pritoni 2019; Capano et al 2019).…”