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This article investigates how organizational structure, collaboration, and professional standards influence the resilience of public agencies facing adversity. It links organizational reputation and blame avoidance literature with resilience and collaboration literature. We use the case of the Swiss Child and Adult Protection Agencies (CAPA), which faced massive media attacks. We apply a qualitative research design analyzing data from interviews and participatory observations. Our findings show that professional organizational structure, collaboration and standards are three interrelated factors that increase resilience against adversity. In particular, these factors reduce "blame‐avoiding policy implementation" (BAPI), which is a coping strategy where street‐level bureaucrats (SLB) exploit their discretion to make policy implementation less blameworthy. In their interplay, professional organizational structure, collaboration and standards increase the knowledge of a public agency about a particular situation because they enable better‐informed decisions through collective deliberation practices, and strengthens the collective ownership as well as the individual SLB's confidence that the right decision is being made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on street-level managers' (SLMs) compliance with COVID-19 measures in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Israel, in order to better understand their role during policy implementation. Responsible for the direct delivery of public services, street-level organizations serve as the operational arm of the state in general and as the frontline of government policy in times of crisis. SLMs who occupy the top managerial tier within their organization are understudied, although they exert a significant influence on everyday public life. The data comprise 399 "compliance stories" based on interviews with managers in nurseries, schools, health care and welfare offices, police stations, and care homes. Using "codebook thematic analysis," we identify various levels of (non)compliance and several prominent explanatory factors that shape (non)compliance. Data show that even when asked about particularly challenging measures, managers reported that their organization had been noncompliant (either full or partial) in only about a quarter of the stories. Three influences emerge as primary barriers to compliance—a lack of resources, managers' relationships with clients, and the perception of the measure's effectiveness. Emphasizing that SLMs often act as local policy entrepreneurs using their discretion to solve problems and serve the public, our findings further demonstrate the crucial role they play in shaping the face of the government for the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This summary provides an overview of a journal issue focused on European perspectives in political process research. The articles cover a range of topics, including political networks, causal mechanisms in policy change, EU governance, migration policy, animal welfare policies, policy learning, and individual drivers of policy preferences. The European Policy Analysis (EPA) journal has received high citation scores and is ranked in the top quartile in political science and public administration categories. The article also emphasizes the importance of conferences and journal rankings in attracting high-quality submissions and promoting the journal's impact in the field. [Extracted from the article]

Pressure on evaluators has been investigated recently by surveys in the USA, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. This study compares the results of those studies regarding pressure on evaluators in different countries. The findings suggest that independence of evaluations does not exist for many respondents. Moreover, the person who commissioned the evaluator for evaluation is identified by all studies as the primary influencing stakeholder in the evaluation process. In terms of differences, Germany seems to be more prone to pressure on evaluators. However, German evaluators do not show stronger tendencies to surrender to pressure than the other countries' respondents. We suggest that this pattern may be explained by the strong state tradition in Germany as opposed to the U.S. and Switzerland, in conjunction with evaluators' profession-based, principled resistance to such pressure.