Although bicycling has been the subject of increasing academic attention, particularly in the areas of mode choice, benefit analyses, and discussions of policies/treatments, much less attention has been devoted to actually studying how communities have made decisions about whether and what they’ll implement in regards to bicycle infrastructure. “Policy entrepreneurs” are theorized as actors centrally responsible for either creating an opportunity or capitalizing on an opportunity to pair a public problem with a policy solution. A survey instrument solicited directly the participation of the 200 most populous municipalities within the United States. Using a variety of analytical tools (and merged data sources) as well as a novel matching methodology for the selection of case studies, it was possible to identify interesting and broadly informative relationships, which were explored further via the case study comparison. 20 case interviews were conducted across 6 case study cities as a complement to the survey project. Individual policy entrepreneurs and their role or qualities were not significant quantitatively or qualitatively, despite being regularly present. However, having a network of supportive actors (including strong champions/policy entrepreneurs) played a critical role in making projects happen and at larger scales. Advocates and planners may be more successful by being attuned to these networks and political contexts and taking advantage of open “windows” of engagement. Alternatively, these windows can be opened ‘manually’ through grant applications, developing relationships, hosting trainings or speakers, and more. Lastly, city population was also associated with implementation, suggesting underlying factors to be explored in the future.

I denna studie har policyutvecklingen av den svenska terrorismbekämpningen undersökts. Utvecklingen av den svenska kontraterrorpolicy sedan den nationella strategins introduktion, har ägt rum under en period när allmänheten och det politiska styret inte tillskrivit problemområdet samma betydelse. Medan allmänhetens oro ökat, har det politiska intresset kommit och gått. Med en fallstudiedesign har utvecklingen från 2008 års nationella strategi fram tills idag studerats och analyserats. Genom en kvalitativ textanalys har utvecklingen visat sig ha två trender. Mellan 2008 och 2012 rådde det en internationalisering i svensk policyutveckling. Denna utveckling skiftade till en av nationell förankring mellan 2012 och 2014. Analysen av denna utveckling har visat att stora internationella organisationer varit påverkande, och i mycket styrt denna utveckling. Finns det idag någon nationell självständighet när det kommer till policyutveckling inom terrorismbekämpning, eller har det internationella säkerhetsberoendet länkat samman oss alla?

No description available.

Cette thèse étudie les conditions et l’ampleur des évolutions de la politique nucléaire de l’Union européenne, de 2000 à 2016. Depuis le milieu des années 1990, plusieurs événements – ou « fenêtres d’opportunité » selon la terminologie du Multiple Streams Framework – ont remis les politiques nucléaires au centre de l’attention des décideurs européens : l’adhésion de nouveaux Etats membres en 2004 ; différentes Présidences du Conseil et nominations de Commissaires ayant pris clairement position sur les questions nucléaires ; l’accident de Fukushima de mars 2011 ; et enfin, les deux sorties du nucléaire allemandes, en 2000 et 2011.La première partie de ce travail est consacrée à l’analyse de l’ampleur du changement introduit par les directives adoptées durant la période étudiée: les directives sûreté réacteur de 2009 et 2014, ainsi que la directive déchets radioactifs de 2011. La deuxième partie étudie les facteurs de stabilité qui ont empêché la mise à l’agenda ou l’adoption de certaines propositions, comme les politiques d’harmonisation des régimes de responsabilité civile ou comme les tentatives d’abolition du traité Euratom.Parmi les différentes variables testées, des coûts de mise en œuvre limités, ainsi que l’existence d’indicateurs pour un problème donné, sont apparus comme des conditions nécessaires (mais non suffisantes) pour un changement de politique.La variable la plus pertinente pour expliquer les changements contenus dans les directives adoptées est l’évolution de la place d’un problème dans les priorités des acteurs. L’accident de Fukushima n’a modifié ni les conditions objectives d’existence d’un problème, ni, sur le long terme, les priorités des Etats Membres ou du secteur nucléaire. Ainsi, les propositions post Fukushima tendant à augmenter le rôle de la Commission européenne ou une calibration plus stricte des mesures de sûreté ont donc été partiellement rejetées, pour finalement aboutir à une révision de la directive sûreté, en 2014, avec peu de changements. De même, la priorité accordée à la résolution des problèmes nationaux liés à gestion des déchets radioactifs a abouti à l’adoption d’une directive incluant des mesures plus précises.Les principaux changements ayant eu lieu dans les directives étudiées concernent leur logique instrumentale et leur calibration ; aucun changement n’a été observé dans les buts ou les orientations générales de la politique nucléaire de l’UE. La politique nucléaire de l’UE semble ainsi particulièrement stable.Cette thèse met en évidence plusieurs facteurs d’inertie des politiques et institutions d’Euratom, malgré l’action d’entrepreneurs politiques : le haut niveau de méfiance entre acteurs, la délégation de la sûreté à des agences indépendantes, la dépendance au sentier liée à la technologie nucléaire, et la flexibilité « incorporée » dans Euratom. Ces facteurs réduisent le nombre d’entrepreneurs politiques potentiellement efficaces ainsi que l’éventail de leurs stratégies pour promouvoir un changement. En plus des facteurs institutionnels, la stabilité des politiques et institutions est également promue par des veto players.Néanmoins, les problèmes récents auxquels est confronté le secteur nucléaire européen (intégration croissante de sources d’énergie renouvelable, difficultés économiques) érodent les conditions de reproduction et de stabilité des institutions d’Euratom. Cet aspect se traduit notamment dans le progressif retrait du nucléaire des communications officielles mentionnant les sources d’énergie à développer pour remplir les objectifs de l’Union.En se basant sur le MSF et sur l’institutionnalisme historique, cette thèse démontre ainsi que les évolutions de la politique nucléaire de l’UE requièrent trois conditions : l’action d’un entrepreneur politique, l’émergence d’un problème dans les priorités des principaux acteurs et, pour des changements d’orientation ou d’institution, l’érosion des mécanismes de reproduction. / The goal of this dissertation is to understand the conditions under which the nuclear policy of the European Union has evolved – between 2000 and 2016 — as well as the scope of these evolutions. From the mid-1990s onwards, various events – “windows of opportunity” in the terminology of the Multiple Streams Framework – brought nuclear energy back to the attention of European policy-makers: the accession of new member states in 2004; different Council presidencies and nomination of Commissioners with a strong position on nuclear energy; the Fukushima accident in March 2011; Germany’s first and second nuclear phase-outs (in 2000 and 2011).This PhD proceeds in two parts: First, it analyses the scope of change in policies that have been set on the agenda and finally adopted (the reactor safety and the radioactive waste management directives); second, it analyses the stability factors that have hindered the agenda-setting or the decision-making on proposals for policy change or institutional reforms (harmonisations of civil liability regimes, licensing processes, or decommissioning funds; abolition of the Euratom treaty).Among the several variables tested, low implementation costs, as well as the existence of problem indicators, may be a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for policy change.The most relevant variable accounting for the policy changes included in the adopted directives, was the evolution of the problem in place of actors’ priorities. The Fukushima accident neither modified the objective conditions of existence of a problem, nor the long-term priority of Member States or the nuclear sector. Hence the post-Fukushima proposals suggesting an increase in the role of the European Commission or a stricter calibration of safety measures have been partially rejected. Hence there was no substantial policy change in the safety directive adopted in 2014. In a similar way, the priority granted to overcoming national problems of radioactive waste management led to the 2011 radioactive waste directive, which contained more settings than the 2009 reactor safety directive .The main changes observed in the directives impacted their settings, instrumental logic and calibration; no change has been observed in the goals or orientations of the EU nuclear policy since 2000. Therefore, the EU nuclear policy seems especially stable: in many cases, policy proposals did not even make in onto the agenda of the Council.In order to account for the stability of the policy in spite of the action of policy entrepreneurs, this PhD underlines the particular “stickiness” of the Euratom institutions and policies: The high distrust among actors; the delegation of safety to independent agencies; the technological path-dependence linked to the use of nuclear energy; and the “built-in” institutional flexibility of Euratom. These factors reduce the number of potential successful policy entrepreneurs and the range of strategies of change. Not only the institutional context but also the defiance among actors has accounted for the particular stability of the European nuclear policy and for the absence of change in goals or objectives: Stability was promoted by veto players, whose actions can be taken into account by the Multiple Streams Framework.Still, the recent problems facing the nuclear sector (growing renewable energy share, economic difficulties) are eroding the conditions of stability and mechanisms of reproduction of the European nuclear institutions. This is reflected in the progressive modification of the Commission’s official positions on nuclear energy, which is no longer included in the energy sources to be developed to meet the EU’s energy objectives.Relying both on the MSF and the historical institutionalism, this PhD shows that change in the European nuclear policy requires the action of a policy entrepreneur, the erosion of reproduction mechanisms and the occurrence of a problem among the priorities of main actors.

One of the goals of perception is to learn to respond to coherence across space, time and modality. Here we present an abstract framework for the local online unsupervised learning of this coherent information using multi-stream neural networks. The processing units distinguish between feedforward inputs projected from the environment and the lateral, contextual inputs projected from the processing units of other streams. The contextual inputs are used to guide learning towards coherent cross-stream structure. The goal of all the learning algorithms described is to maximize the predictability between each unit output and its context. Many local cost functions may be applied: e.g. mutual information, relative entropy, squared error and covariance. Theoretical and simulation results indicate that, of these, the covariance rule (1) is the only rule that specifically links and learns only those streams with coherent information, (2) can be robustly approximated by a Hebbian rule, (3) is stable with input noise, no pairwise input correlations, and in the discovery of locally less informative components that are coherent globally. In accordance with the parallel nature of the biological substrate, we also show that all the rules scale up with the number of streams.

The 18th of December 2015 the Swedish parliament approved a change in migration policy, allowing for the government to implement ID- controls at the Swedish border. The policy change was put forward in a, for Sweden, unusual way in that, that it happened quickly, deviated from standard procedure and represented a different stance than the one previously held by the government. By applying an evolved version of the multiple streams framework, originally put forth by Kingdon (2003), I seek to find an explanation for why this policy change occured. A description of the different components of the theoretical framework, as they appear in this specific case, is provided through an analysis of different kinds of government publications and documents, along with articles from the press and public opinion polls. The results of the study indicates that a change in the problem stream opened a policy window of oppurtunity for the government, in the form of a policy entrepreneur, to push for their policy solution, in adherence to the change in the national mood. The study further points to a discussion concerning the salience of this kind of theoretical contextualisation in cases like this one.

No description available.

In recent years, the state of Illinois has joined the "ban the box" movement which typically prohibits employers from inquiring about a prospective employee's criminal history until it has been determined whether the candidate meets the core qualifications for the position. Little, however, is known whether this legislative change has impacted how private employers use criminal history information and to what extent knowledge of criminal history impacts final hiring decisions. Using Kingdon's policy streams concept as a guide, the purpose of this general qualitative study was to understand whether implementation of "ban the box" principles impacts final hiring decisions. Data were collected through interviews with 27 hiring authorities in the state of Illinois. These data were transcribed, inductively coded, and then subjected to a thematic analysis procedure. Findings revealed that when previously convicted applicants were hired for positions, the most common reasons were noted as the quality and presentation of the candidate during the interview, possession of relevant job-related skills, and the candidate appeared remorseful of past behavior. When candidates were rejected by employers, it was most commonly because of a perceived nexus between the convicting offense and essential job requirements. Implications for positive social change include recommendations policy makers to consider future policy development that focuses on balancing the positive consequences of successful offender reentry with concern for public safety. Doing so may encourage lower recidivism and prosocial behavior including improved employment sustainability for those convicted of crimes, thereby promoting overall public safety objectives.

At the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun in 2010, all the industrialised countries committed to producing long-term national strategies to achieve low levels of greenhouse gas emissions. The aim was to meet the goal of reducing emissions by 80-95 per cent by 2050, in line with the two-degrees-goal. In February 2011, the European Commission presented a communication on a roadmap for the EU for moving to a competitive low-carbon economy in 2050. Sweden has actively supported the conclusions within the EU that countries should draw up their own roadmaps, but Sweden has not yet produced a national roadmap to 2050. This thesis examines why the Swedish government has not yet agreed on a low-carbon development strategy to 2050 in line with the agreement at the climate conference in Cancun 2010 and the directives from the European Commission. The purpose of this study is to examine why the investigation on a Swedish roadmap 2050 produced by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, never reached the political decision agenda, in the Swedish parliament. The objective of the study is achieved by applying the Multiple Streams Model, a theory on policy processes and agenda setting, on the case of the Swedish roadmap 2050. The study concludes that (1) the level of political consensus is too low, especially in terms of the basic assumptions that underlie the roadmap; and (2) the document produced by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency was too weak to become a bill.

This study seeks to examine whether the Corona pandemic has potential to serve as a focusing event for the problem of insufficient governmental action on climate change mitigation. The study is built on the Multiple Streams Framework by John W. Kingdon, with a main focus on the focusing event theory. According to this, focusing events can come in three forms: as crises and disasters, personal experiences of policymakers, and as symbols. Kingdon’s theoretical discussions, alongside my own developments of his work, provides the basis for a set of analytical questions through which the answer to the research question is provided. The analysis reveals that while the pandemic indeed can be considered a crisis or disaster and personal experiences of policymakers, establishing whether these could focus attention to the specific problem of insufficient governmental action on climate change mitigation requires further research, as the perceived cause of the crisis or disaster and personal experience must be established. However, the paper finds that the pandemic indeed has potential to serve as a symbol for the specific insufficient governmental action, for instance by stressing that deforestation increases the risk of zoonotic outbreaks, such as the Corona pandemic.