We alert our readers that we have discovered an article in our pages to have sections of identical text to an article published by the same authors in another journal. The articles are as follows:

Capano, G., Pritoni, A., & Vicentini, G. (2020). Do policy instruments matter? Governments’ choice of policy mix and higher education performance in Western Europe. Journal of Public Policy, 40(3), 375-401.

Capano, G., & Pritoni, A. (2020). Exploring the determinants of higher education performance in Western Europe: A qualitative comparative analysis. Regulation & Governance, 14(4), 764-786.

The overlapping text is as follows (page references are to the Journal of Public Policy article):

“The most common indicator of teaching is the percentage (%) of people with a university-level degree.8 As such, we operationalised teaching performance starting from the percentage of adults between 25 and 34 years old who have a university-level degree” (p. 382).

“In other words, all else being equal, countries that offer short-cycle tertiary degrees (i.e. first-cycle degrees lasting less than 3 years: level 5B in the ISCED 1997 classification and level 5 in the ISCED 2011 classification) should be rewarded more than countries without them because in the former case, HE institutions are subject to more competition for students (or, at least, they have a smaller catchment area) and, in turn, are less likely to improve their results. Consequently, we modified the data slightly following a two-step process. In the first step, we differentiated countries into three categories: countries below the mean of university degree attainment (25–34 years old) in 1996, countries above the mean but less than 1 Standard Deviation (SD) above the mean, and countries above 1 SD above the mean” (p. 383).

“Hundreds of official documents and thousands of pages of national legislation were carefully scrutinised and hand-coded in the search for both substantial and procedural policy instruments. The coding procedure proceeded in three steps: first, we identified a list of relevant pieces of legislation in national HE policy, namely, laws, decrees, circulars and ministerial regulations that affected the HES of each country under scrutiny. Second, we reduced every piece of legislation to its main issues” (p. 388).

“For the first two steps, the research strategy was twofold. With respect to Italy, France and both English-speaking countries – England and Ireland – the analysis was conducted “in house”, meaning that the three authors of this article were responsible for entering the Italian, French, English and Irish pieces of legislation into the data set. Linguistic barriers rendered the selection of regulations and their direct coding impossible for the other eight countries – Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden. Therefore, we contacted a highly reputable country expert for each case to achieve a perfectly comparable list of pieces of relevant regulation and, in turn, legislative provisions regarding HE for those countries” (p. 388).