Taking into account recent critical work in policy theory, on policy planning, democracy, participatory practices and general public welfare, this section wants to explore the challenges and the contributions the critical approach makes to explain transformation of governing regimes and reframing of particular policy practices in Eastern Europe.

The critical orientation of policy studies seeks to combine theoretical sophistication with a return to the ‘real world’ of practice. This challenge posed by critical policy studies, however, makes the interpretation of social meanings a central problem. Acknowledging and emphasizing the importance of meanings and values, the critical approach is able to enhance practice by elucidating the ever-present cultural, historical, and political contexts which – in that they both enable and constrain inquiry – need to be taken explicitly into account by any coherent and effective approach to policy studies. From a critical perspective, indeed, the very notion of a ‘neutral’ position appears to be an irresponsible form of bias that either rules out or inhibits clear attention to crucial questions.

If critical policy studies not only focus on the importance of social meanings, but also draw direct attention to the way these meanings are constructed, maintained, and perhaps changed through social forces and political power the area of Eastern Europe and the post-communist transformation becomes a highly-relevant area of analysis that can put critical endeavours to test.

 

Against this background, we welcome papers addressing:

1.     Theoretical debates that have developed in Eastern Europe in the post-1989 era in the context of political science: such as debates touching on the conditions of establishment of political science as a critical discipline; or debates on particular international intellectual influences of the newly established political science departments.

2.     Development of analytic tools and inquiry techniques in the context of the transformation processes in these countries. Critical policy studies highlight that language practices do not merely describe an underlying social reality, but shape the latter; it is therefore interesting to see how this methodological debate has been understood and developed in the context of the reshaping of the political discourse in Eastern Europe.

3.     Empirical applications of concepts of policy practices, democracy within specific policy fields that have been re-designed in the Eastern European Countries in the course of the post-1989 transformation. Papers can undertake theoretical debates using concrete empirical examples or they can discuss development of specific policy fields in the context of post-communist transformation.

Please submit your papers via he online submission system of ECPR http://ecpr.eu/Login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fdefault.aspx

 

If you wish to submit panels  (with a minimum of 3 Papers), feel free to contact the convenors for further details at anna.durnova@univie.ac.at, ondrej.slacalek@ff.cuni.cz