Higher Education Policy Convergence and the Bologna Process

A Cross-National Study

E. Voegtle, Kenneth A. Loparo, Eva Maria Vögtle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137412782
• eBook ISBN: 9781137412799
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

What are the principal drivers of recent higher education reforms? This study investigates whether the soft governance mechanism of transnational communication has evoked cross-national policy harmonization. Results suggest that the Bologna Process has triggered substantial policy harmonization beyond general policy convergence.

1

Introduction

Research on cross-national policy convergence is closely connected to the “world society approach” (Meyer et al., 1997) where is it assumed that the world is becoming ever more similar as a result of globalization and Europeanization. This research is concerned with questions about the relationship between globalization and the convergence of political institutions, policies, the legal order, and societal structures (Guillén, 2001, p. 235). Convergence research is by no means a novelty; yet, we still lack knowledge on whether policy diffusion actually leads to policy convergence. This likely consequence has been stated frequently as a result of globalization, however, most diffusion and convergence research focuses on the process of convergence without observing convergence directly. One major drawback in cross-national policy convergence research is that we still lack knowledge about which national or policy-specific factors condition the impact of the diffusion mechanisms. Scholars have focused either on international, relational, or domestic factors as causal factors for policy diffusion and convergence, but rarely have they explicitly considered the interplay and causal relationship between them. Consequently, they do not distinguish between causes and conditions. Explicit modeling of the relatedness between factors at different levels, with some potentially impacting the degree of convergence and others causing it are so far rare; questions about which factors further or hinder convergence, and why policy convergence is easier in some policy fields than in others, remain unresolved.

In the field of political science, research on convergence deals with the question of whether, and under which conditions, policies of different states approach each other over time (Heichel, Pape and Sommerer, 2005). Common research questions are: Do national policies of countries approach over time? Under which conditions do they approach? What are the causes of international policy convergence? In this context, special focus was placed on international factors and their relative relevance for the explanation of policy convergence. In particular, international legally binding commitments and harmonization guidelines, conditionality by international organizations, economic regulatory competition as well as transnational communication have been identified as significant causes for the adjustment of national policies over time. So does cross-national policy convergence imply a diminished role of the nation state, or can we think of scenarios where the nation state gains influence at the expense of other – domestic or international – stakeholders? What are the drivers of transnational policy convergence, and which domestic factors have an impact on the degree of observable convergence? Even though in recent years a lively scientific debate on convergence and divergence of national policies has been led, we still have a limited understanding of the phenomenon of policy convergence.

Lately, it is not only economic policies that have been subject to harmonizing efforts on an international scale, but also those in previously strictly national policy fields, such as higher education. Hence, higher education is a policy field where harmonization should be more unlikely when compared to other policy fields, such as environmental policy. The phenomenon of international policy coordination is often equated with the diminishing power of the nation state to influence policy making processes as it is assumed that the growing influence of international and non-governmental organizations on these processes implies a loss of influence for national actors. But does this assumption hold true in processes where nation states voluntarily engage in cross-national policy harmonization, where they agree to coordinate policies explicitly in the absence of international organizations, as has been the case in the Bologna Process? This book engages in providing answers to these questions by using the Bologna Process as an example for voluntary cross-national policy coordination.

But what are the principal reform drivers in higher education? Changes occurring over the last 20 years have been credited to “massification, diversification, marketization, and managerialism,” which are frequently regarded as “global phenomena and can be related to political trends and the ‘triumph’ of neo-liberalism, to the emergence of so-called knowledge economies and to continuing concerns about equity issues and social justice” (Brennan, 2005, p. 49). A common ground for these reforms is “the end of the government being a benevolent patron to the universities” (Pechar and Pellert, 2004, p. 284 on the Austrian case) due to the emergence of a knowledge-based economy, leading to the increasing importance of university-based research and teaching. Higher education became an “absolute necessity in terms of social demand and economic competitiveness” (Pechar and Pellert, 2004, p. 284). Thus, internationalization and globalization are frequently mentioned as the origin of recent higher education policy reforms. Yet, in seeking explanations for why the various national higher education systems take the shape they do, the majority of scholars pay attention to the causes of variety instead of convergence (Teichler, 2005).

From a European perspective, universities are “involved in literally every kind of social and economic activity” (Enders, 2005, p. 31–32), which makes the university such an interesting research object. Due to this conception, universities, defined in the European context as “institutions responsible for both teaching and research, in contrast to institutions of higher education with a more limited research role or none at all” (Teichler, 2005b, p. 98), were identified as institutions holding primary responsibility for scientific progress and enhancing economic competitiveness. Historically, “the leading axiom had been that Europe’s richness and strength lay in the very diversity of the higher education systems” (Westerheijden, 2007, p. 85), but nowadays the predominant perception is that the capabilities of European universities to compete in the global “knowledge-based economy” are limited due to brain drain¹, the poor international reputation of national universities, low graduate outputs and success rates, rising academic unemployment, and insufficient financial resources (Heinze and Knill, 2008). Because “there is no longer a single society to which a university can be expected to respond” (Enders, 2005, p. 32), but instead “governments and managements, status groups and reference groups, communities and localities, and the dis-localities of the global” (Enders, 2005, p. 32), European universities² have begun to reform their program as well as their organizational structures to respond to these external pressures. At the same time, governments abolished many of the universities’ privileges, and “no longer gave unconditional support ... on mere cultural motivations,” but public funding is increasingly “based on the expectation of social and economic returns” (Pechar and Pellert, 2004, p. 284).

In addition to parallel national reforms of higher education institutions’ steering structures and policies, European governments have begun to coordinate their reform efforts. The changing structures of higher education programs can be viewed in relation to the Bologna Process, whose name is derived from the Bologna Declaration drafted by European education ministers in 1999, and can be regarded as a response to competitive pressure in a globalized educational surrounding. As the prime example of intent to harmonize higher education policies on an international scale, the Bologna Process aims to create a European higher education area, to harmonize education program structures as well as to institutionalize quality assurance mechanisms. The main stated goal is to increase the mobility of European students by adjusting higher education program structures, and by assuring mutual recognition of study time and qualifications obtained.

The Bologna Process has triggered extensive public debates as it is the first attempt to harmonize higher education policies on an international scale. Even though an increasing body of academic literature has dealt with the Bologna Process from various investigative angles, we still lack knowledge of the extent to which the higher education policies of the participating countries actually converged, and whether factual policy convergence has occurred. To shed light on these questions, this study will reflect on them from a theoretical perspective and derive hypotheses about convergent higher education policy change in the realm of the Bologna Process. Specifically, two research questions are central to our study. First, we investigate whether the transnational communication manifested in the Bologna Process has evoked harmonization of national higher education policies. Second, we focus on those national factors believed to condition the convergent effect of transnational communication. At the center of attention are cultural, political-institutional, and socio-economic similarities as well as student exchange patterns between the countries of our sample. Empirically, these questions will be addressed by an international comparison of public higher education policies and their potential modification in the course of the Bologna Process. Using the example of the Bologna Process, we try to resolve to what extent and under what conditions transnational communication can lead to cross-national policy convergence. As the Bologna Process is an intergovernmental initiative that explicitly excluded supranational organs from central decision making when it was launched, it poses a challenge to the assumptions that supra- and non-governmental actors increasingly gain centrality in transnational decision making processes.

Analyses of the empirical data are based on the undirected dyadic approach, assessing convergence of the dependent variables study structures and quality assurance mechanisms on the basis of various indicators. Innovative macro-quantitative statistical techniques are applied to explore the research questions at hand. The analyses focus on policy outputs, thus policies adopted by governments, but also consider similarity in instrumental design and implementation levels, hence outcomes. To measure convergence processes triggered by the Bologna Process, higher education policies of 20 members to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the period between 1996 and 2008 are investigated. The selection encompasses, on the one hand, 14 European Union member countries, which have been Bologna participants from the onset, and on the other hand – serving as control group – six OECD countries not participating. By including countries not participating in the Bologna Process, it will be feasible to account for convergent effects not triggered by membership of the Bologna Process. The dependent variables for sigma convergence refer to two domains of higher education policies, to study structures and quality assurance, which were chosen due to their detailed policy recommendation in the Bologna documents.

This study is structured as follows. The next chapter (Chapter 2) provides an overview of the Bologna Process, its development, actors, and objectives. This overview is accompanied by figures visualizing the main characteristics of the Bologna Process, which has been an expanding process in terms of actors involved as well as goals pursued. Further, it is demonstrated how the Bologna Process evolved into a multi-actor/multi-purpose network whose governance mechanisms have been copied all around the globe (see Vögtle and Martens, 2014). We supplement our account by giving reference to research projects in relation to the Bologna Process. Although all of the studies presented in this section have identified the Bologna Process as a new form of soft international governance, they draw different conclusions regarding the centrality of the involved actors, its steering quality, and factual impact on national higher education policy reforms.

Then, in Chapter 3, we focus on the definitions and concepts of policy diffusion, transfer, and convergence in the social sciences. It presents an overview of research undertaken on mechanisms and exogenous factors of policy diffusion, such as policy networks and epistemic communities; norms, legitimacy, and opinion leadership; as well as policy learning. Adjacent to this, domestic and policy-specific factors, which are generally believed to influence processes of policy diffusion and convergence, are discussed as well as the methods applied in policy diffusion and convergence studies. This provides general background information on research strategies and methods in the field of policy diffusion and convergence research, and also lays the groundwork for discussions on research methodology, which will be seen in later chapters. Adjacent to this, we sharpen our focus by giving an overview of convergence research in the field of higher education. In this section, only higher education studies taking a comparative stance are presented, because this study is interested in cross-national policy convergence, which can only be explored through comparative research. This discussion of studies of policy diffusion and convergence in the field of higher education research is structured in accordance with Bennett (1991), who stressed the importance of precision with regard to the aspects – convergence in policy goals, content, instruments, outcomes and policy styles – (Bennett, 1991, p. 218) of policy being compared. Lastly, a discussion of unresolved puzzles of policy convergence research, and potential research strategies to solve them, tops the chapter off.

The subsequent chapter (Chapter 4) will elaborate on an organizational theory explaining institutions’ and organizations’ adaptive behavior, namely Sociological Institutionalism. Its assumptions will guide our predictions about whether and how we expect higher education convergence to occur, even for countries not participating in the Bologna Process. It is supplied by Transnational Communication, providing a framework for processes of policy adjustment between sovereign states. Under transnational communication, explaining the occurrence of policy transfer and policy convergence by communication and information exchange between states at international level, mechanisms such as lesson drawing, transnational problem solving, emulation, and international policy promotion are subsumed (see Holzinger and Knill, 2005). We then reason why the Bologna Process can be perceived as a process of transnational communication, and why higher education policy convergence is expected to result from this process of voluntary policy coordination. After having identified the causal mechanisms, the analytical focus is broadened to include domestic factors believed to condition the degree of higher education policy convergence evoked by transnational communication. These factors are cultural, political-institutional, and socio-economic similarities as well as student exchange patterns between the countries of our sample. This part of the theoretical discussion is concluded by explicating the hypotheses on the causes and conditions for higher education policy convergence.

Analyses of policy convergence are based on the dyadic approach, assessing convergence developments on the basis of various indicators over three periods. In Chapter 5, we present the research design of the analyses in the following chapters. We explicate sample size and composition, period of investigation, and data collection procedures for the dependent as well as the independent variables. Because we rest our analysis on the undirected dyadic approach to measure sigma (σ) convergence, we will explain the characteristics of the dyadic approach and discuss its usefulness for the research scheme at hand. The dependent variables for sigma (σ) convergence refer to two domains of higher education policies, study structures, and quality assurance, which were chosen due to their detailed policy recommendation in the Bologna documents. To provide the full picture of our research design, we conclude the chapter by exposing the coding procedures for the independent as well as the dependent variables and the transformation of the data into a dyadic data set.

The following chapters are occupied with the analyses of first the dependent variables, and then the causal relationship between dependent and independent variables. To account for differences in adoption and convergence patterns between the sub-groups, results are separated by participants and non-participants in the Bologna Process. The analyses presented encompass increased policy similarity as well as convergence patterns adjusted for pre-existing policy similarities between the countries under scrutiny; they will be supplied by figures giving an account on cumulated similarity scores and tables demonstrating factual policy convergence. Convergence scores calculated in this chapter constitute the measures for the dependent variables in the causal analysis presented in Chapter 7. The results presented in this chapter allow initial conclusions about the effectiveness of transnational communication as a mechanism for inducing convergent policy change.

Chapter 7 focuses on those national factors expected to condition the degree of cross-national policy convergence triggered by transnational communication. It investigates the causal relationship and the interplay between domestic and international factors of policy convergence. Precisely, the analyses concentrate on general as well as policy-specific cultural, political-institutional, and socio-economic similarities between countries and on student exchange patterns between them. By means of multilevel models, the impact of transnational communication, as well as the additional effects of domestic similarities between the country pairs, will be explored. Thereby, transnational communication variables are modeled as causal, and domestic variables as conditioning factors. Again, our dependent variables are from the two domains, study structures, and quality assurance; they will be investigated over three areas – adoption, policy instruments, and scope of implementation – and pooled for the three periods of investigation, while accounting for periodical effects. Thus, the causal analyses do not merely investigate the causal effects of transnational communication, but additionally identify those national factors that condition the magnitude of the causal effect.

The first part of Chapter 8 summarizes the study’s main findings, and, due to this condensed overview, final conclusions about the effectiveness of transnational communication as a mechanism for inducing cross-national policy convergence are drawn. Further, the relevance of domestic similarities on the degree of convergence triggered by transnational communication is discussed. The proposed book concludes with a discussion if processes of coordinated cross-national policy harmonization, such as the Bologna Process, actually lead to a decline of influence of national policy makers as is suggested by the world society approach (Meyer et al., 1997). Referring back to the states’ role in policy diffusion, the role of governments in the Bologna Process (Chapter 2), theoretical assumptions about factors furthering diffusion processes (Chapter 3 and 4), and the results of the empirical analyses (Chapter 6 and 7), it combines what we have learned from investigating the Bologna Process by exploring the relationship between increasing cross-national policy convergence and the assumed diminishing power of the nation state. In short, the Bologna Process has evolved into an international platform for information exchange and higher e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  The Bologna Process: Emergence, Goals, and Developments
• 3  Policy Diffusion, Transfer, and Convergence
• 4  Theoretical Framework
• 5  Research Design
• 6  Descriptive Analyses of the Dependent Variables
• 7  Analysis of Causal and Conditioning Factors
• 8  Conclusion
• Annex A
• Annex B
• Annex C
• Notes
• References
• Index