Still the main show in town? Assessing political saliency of the Bologna Process across time and space

Abstract

Numerous studies focused on the linkages between the Bologna Process and system – as well as organizational-level changes – implying significance of the process for higher education policy dynamics. However, what has been lacking is a closer examination of the political importance of Bologna for the different actors involved and whether this varies over time, space and types of actors. The present study investigates the changes in the size and rank of delegations of national governments and European stakeholder organizations to the Bologna ministerial conferences in order to assess Bologna's political saliency in relation to (1) a more concrete interest in the actual European policy preferences for higher education and (2) an interest in the symbolic aspect of European policy coordination in higher education. The results suggest that the Bologna Process is primarily losing political appeal for the national governments of European Union (EU) members, while for the EU candidates and potential members as well as for the European stakeholder organizations it remains politically salient.

Keywords:

• Bologna Process
• political saliency
• uploading policy preferences
• lobbying
• signalling
• status

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the institutions that helped them collect the data for this paper: the Romanian Bologna Secretariat, the ministries of education of Austria, Germany and Italy, the Council of Europe and especially Sjur Bergan, Gottfried Blacher, Ligia Deca, Marzia Foroni, Birgit Galler, Hélène Lagier, Ann McVie and Věra Šťastná. Additionally, we are grateful for the comments we received to an earlier version of this paper at the 2013 CHER conference. Furthermore, we would like to thank Jeroen Huisman, Marco Seeber as well as the reviewers for Studies in Higher Education for their constructive and helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Official website of the Bologna Process, www.ehea.info (30 July 2015).

2. Based on observations by the authors who participated in the proceedings.

3. See, for example, The Economist from 23 April 2009 (http://www.economist.com/node/13527558, 30 July 2015).

4. Such as the University World News or Times Higher Education.

5. For example, the news that at the Bergen summit in 2005 Serbia's ‘grade’ was 2.2 (third worst) garnered a lot of attention, see, for example, http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2005&mm=05&dd=19&nav_id=168791 (in Serbian, 30 July 2015).

6. http://ec.europa.eu/eurydice (30 July 2015).

7. Such a visualization was used in the 2005, 2007 and 2009 stocktaking reports. While the 2012 and 2015 version follow the 5-level assessment of implementation, it does not include composite scores, but rather more detailed tables and visualisations of data, which were used in calculating the composite score for each country.

8. Size of EUA delegation for 1998 corresponds to sizes of its two predecessor organizations combined. Data concerning delegations of these two organizations for 1999 are missing.

9. BFUG, Bologna Follow Up Group; CoE, Council of Europe; DG, Directorate General; EACEA, Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency; EHEA, European Higher Education Area; EI, Education International; ENQA, European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education; ESG, European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Higher Education; ESU, European Students' Union; EU, European Union; EUA, European University Association; EURASHE, European Association of Institutions in Higher Education; OMC, Open Method of Coordination; PISA, Programme for International Student Assessment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the institutional funding of the ‘Higher Education: Institutional Dynamics and Knowledge Cultures’ research group at the University of Oslo and financial support from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) [grant number G.OC42.13N].