ABSTRACT
The Bologna Process is too complex and too challenging for political science to leave it only to policy researchers. There was more at stake in the Europeanization of higher education policy than policy itself; Bologna is also about actors’ strategies to strengthen their power and competencies in the field of higher education. Policy-oriented governance studies often miss this power dimension. Rather than analyzing and evaluating the reform of higher education in its policy dimension, I will question the supposed ‘naturalness’ of such an approach by identifying it as one of two general paradigmatic perspectives with which political science can take on the concept of reform: one represented by the mainstream of policy analysis, the other one based on normative political theory. Only by taking into account both approaches can we properly analyze the reform of higher education in Europe as part of a more comprehensive reform project which is characterized by a fundamental shift from appropriateness criteria of normative political theory to those of mainstream policy analysis in the political as well as the academic discourse. My conceptual approach (the second section) combines:
the perspectives of policy analysis and normative political theory, with:
first-order, second-order and meta-governing as three different levels of reform.
Embedded in this framework, the German case in the third section will illustrate the analytical value added by applying the perspective of normative political theory to the Bologna Process. From this perspective reform is primarily evaluated in terms of the democratic legitimacy of the reform process itself and of the (re-)distribution of power resulting from it, i.e. in terms of normative criteria which seem to have disappeared from the current academic and political reform discourse which evaluates the quality and success of reform solely by the effectiveness of its contributions to sectoral problem-solving.