Quality as politics and as policies and the importance of instruments

Abstract

This chapter aims at contributing to understand the development of European higher education quality assurance politics and policies. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, it analyses policy documents (reports, recommendations and guidelines) on quality assurance issued by institutions at the European level underlining the role of ideas in the construction of quality as a political driver. The argument is that the principles construing the politics of quality assurance at the European level are being diluted in the enactment of quality assurance policies, practices and their instruments. This is a case of goal displacement with regard to the major political objective of a more integrated higher education in Europe. Discursive institutionalism allowed identifying the role of normative and cognitive ideas in the shift from the centrality of ultimate political values to instrumental ideas reflecting proceduralism. This shift illustrates the process of goal displacement of quality assurance policies coordinated at the European level.