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Recent decades have seen a growing appreciation of the role of collaboration in public policy-making. Collaboration may spur knowledge-sharing and creative problem-solving while building a joint ownership over new and bold policy solutions. To qualify and nuance the claim that collaboration improves public policymaking, this chapter explores the promises and problems of stakeholder collaboration in the agenda setting, problem framing, solution design, implementation, and evaluation phases of the policy process. The chapter begins by defining collaborative governance vis-à-vis competing concepts, distinguishing between different forms of collaboration, and breaking down the policy process into different phases. Next, it explains why collaborative governance, under certain conditions, may be considered as a promising strategy for public policy-making. This conceptual ground clearing is followed by an analysis of the positive and negative contributions of different kinds of collaborative governance in the different policy phases and the strategies for mitigating the problems. The ensuing discussion explores the dilemma that a well-managed use of stakeholder collaboration in public policymaking may create effective policy solutions while simultaneously undermining democratic accountability if the standard mechanisms of oversight are not supplemented with new forms of social accountability. The conclusion briefly summarizes the main argument and points to some future research avenues.

This study presents a dual-method approach to systematically analyze public health advisory networks during the COVID-19 pandemic across four jurisdictions: Belgium, Quebec, Sweden, and Switzerland. Using network analysis inspired by egocentric analysis and a subsystems approach adapted to public health, the research investigates network structures and their openness to new actors and ideas. The findings reveal significant variations in network configurations, with differences in density, centralization, and the role of central actors. The study also uncovers a relation between network openness and its structural attributes, highlighting the impact of network composition on the flow and control of expert advice. These insights into public health advisory networks contribute to understanding the interface between scientific advice and policymaking, emphasizing the importance of network characteristics in shaping the influence of expert advisors. The article underscores the relevance of systematic network descriptions in public policy, offering reflections on expert accountability, information diversity, and the broader implications for democratic governance.

Governance includes a plethora of actors, and it is often assumed that these actors aim to realize common objectives through collaboration, and sometimes even through a deliberative exchange of reasons. Although this makes deliberation a key concept in governance theories, conditions for deliberative governance and its mechanisms are seldom elaborated on in the governance literature. This chapter describes recent developments in empirically oriented deliberative theory and research. The current controversies in the field, including discussion on the understanding of reason-giving in different contexts and whether citizens can and are willing to deliberate, are disentangled. Tensions between deliberation and deliberative democracy are highlighted. The aim of the chapter is to contribute to a better understanding of how current research on deliberation can be integrated into theories of governance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given science, scientific information, and health experts a prominent role in public policy design. However, political decisions are rarely automatically derived from scientific information or expertise. Political decisions are made of complex set of choices, balancing preferences and objectives that are sometimes difficult to reconcile. Moreover, all scientific information entails a degree of uncertainty, especially when dealing with a new problem like COVID-19. In turn, this uncertainty can be a source of discomfort when information is needed to inform a public policy decision. Finally, the interpretation of scientific information can be influenced by elements of contexts, institutional structures, and decision makers' own risk assessment and tolerance. Thus, similar information can be perceived and used differently by policy designers. In this chapter, we focus on the role of information selection and processing in policy design by studying school closure decisions during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Faced with similar infection curves, Sweden and Quebec have made radically different decisions about school closures. While on March 1st 2020 Sweden decided to keep its schools open, on March 13th, Quebec decided to close them down. By drawing from public statements in the two jurisdictions between January and June 2021, we argue that the Swedish authorities have favoured information from the World Health Organization, whereas Quebec has relied more on foreign experiences. The interpretation of this different information and the attitudes towards risk and uncertainty have led the Swedish and Quebec governments to make radically different choices.

This paper analyses public leadership in Scandinavia during thelatest two pandemics, the swine flu pandemic in 2009 and thecoronavirus pandemic in 2020, by compiling and contrastingnational proxies of media visibility among pandemic responseactors. Concretely, the paper taps into key media databases todevelop indicators of how often national leaders and leadinghealth experts are mentioned in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedishmedia reports about the 2009 and 2020 pandemics.The study reveals a high degree of continuity of public leadershipin Sweden during the two pandemics. In contrast, Norway and inparticular Denmark both moved from a predominately expertdriven media presence in 2009 to a much stronger top-downministerial leadership presence during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. In addition, Sweden also displays the most balancedmedia representation of health experts and cabinet ministers during both pandemics. The paper concludes by discussing the prosand cons of the outlined differences in public leadership and thepossible practical implications with regards public debateand trust.

Citizens’ adherence to deliberative civic values fulfils a vital function in deliberative democratic systems. We propose a way to measure the prevalence and variations of such values as a first step to better understanding how this works. Based on survey data, we demonstrate that, in Sweden, adherence to the values of reasoning and listening is stronger than adherence to the strategic rhetorical, non-deliberative values. This may have important implications for our understanding of how deliberation and democracy work in this particular context. There are also, however, important individual-level variations of adherence to deliberative civic values related to age, education, gender and Swedish background. Taken together, this opens up for a new research agenda where comparative analyses of deliberative civic values and how it relates to political behaviour are particularly encouraged.

Journalists who interview experts are motivated to select quotations that attract andentertain news consumers. This paper examines whether there is a relationshipbetween how often experts appear in the media and the educational content oftheir quotes. The authors analysed quotes from experts in four Canadian and fourSwedish newspapers during the national election campaigns held between 2000and 2015. They conclude that newspapers prefer experts whose quotes are entertaining, at the expense of experts who can educate the public. The differencesbetween Canada and Sweden are minimal. This suggests there are powerfulforces that transcend national borders at work, including growing competitionamong media organizations.

Lorsque des experts accordent des entrevues aux journalistes, ceux-ci cherchentà leur soutirer des propos qui sauront attirer et divertir les consommateursd’information. Les auteurs de cette étude examinent le rapport entre la fréquenceà laquelle ces spécialistes apparaissent dans les médias et le contenu éducatifde leurs citations. Ils ont analysé les propos d’experts cités dans quatre journauxcanadiens et quatre suédois, pendant les campagnes électorales nationales de 2000à 2015. Conclusion : au Canada comme en Suède, les journaux préfèrent les proposdivertissants à ceux qui pourraient instruire la population, sans grandes différencesentre les deux pays. De puissantes forces semblent ainsi transcender les frontièresnationales, y compris celles d’une concurrence grandissante entre organisationsmédiatiques.

This chapter is a tour of the Scandinavian lobbying landscape providing thestate of the art for research on a contested and necessary activity. We discuss theparticular context of the Scandinavian countries and current trends relevant forlobbying. Lobbying is often juxtaposed with the corporatist channel which impliesinstitutionalised contact patterns between politicians and organised interests. Thecorporatist channel has, however, declined in importance while a number of trendshave led to more diverse interest group systems, and new actors have assumed amore prominent role in Scandinavian lobbying. Besides discussing such trends,we also present some of the main findings about strategies and techniques usedand what similarities and dissimilarities exist between the countries. 

COVID-19 outbreaks forced governments into epic policy choices conciliating democratic legitimacy and science-based policies. We examine how pervasive crises like this pandemic shape public discourses, proposing two ideal-types that discourse may tend toward. One is pluralism, which includes authoritative voices that represent viable alternative policies and credible reasons for them. The opposite is monotony, where authoritative voices offer credible reasons for one policy option only. Two crucial cases for monotony are analysed, where news media represents public discourse. In initial COVID-19 responses, Denmark pursued hard lockdown while neighbouring Sweden enacted voluntary distancing. Pluralism in public discourses could be advantaged while solutions remained uncertain and social and economic disruptions high, in polities with mature democratic and scientific institutions. The empirical analyses show that Denmark’s elected leaders and Sweden’s leading health scientists publicly represented their respective national responses. Yet in sampled public discourses on highly disruptive policies on school closures and crowding limits, both leaderships focused on justifying national choices rather than elucidating options. In turn, other sources skewed toward justifications for national policies rather than attention to alternatives. We suggest finally that such skews toward discourse monotony create risks to democratic legitimacy and long-term response efficacy.

Philippe C. Schmitter (born 1936) has done path-breaking work within many different research fields where interest groups play important roles. This includes studies on neo-functionalism and European Union politics, public policy in Latin America, and global democratization processes. Still, he has primarily become strongly associated with the concept of corporatism, which describes a particular form of relationship between interest groups and the state (see chapter on “Corporatism (and Neo-corporatism)”). Schmitter characteristically combines his deep knowledge of classic political theory with insightful and innovative observations of real-life politics, providing thought-provoking new theoretical ideas. He formulates important critique directed at political science in general and democratic theory in particular, for their simplified assumptions about associations as political actors and state structures. This critique has significantly informed Schmitter’s work on corporatism and interest intermediation and profoundly changed interest group research as he demonstrated the limits of pluralism (see chapter on Pluralism) and other formerly dominating perspectives based on theories of liberal democracy. His thoughts on different modes of intermediation embedded in various contexts have inspired several generations of interest group researchers to continued renewal of the field. Schmitter has published his main contributions in journal articles or in book chapters in influential edited books, often with Schmitter himself as one of the co-editors. While this chapter focuses on his most important work on interest intermediation and corporatism, it is important to reemphasize that Schmitter has contributed to several other fields of research, most notably on democratization, for example, with his Transition from Authoritarian Rule. Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (O’Donnell et al., 1986, co-authored with Guillermo O’Donnel and Lawrence Whitehead).