doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9299.2011.01936.x GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO DO ITS JOB: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF GOVERNANCE SHIFTS IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION SECTOR GILIBERTO CAPANO Governance in higher education has undergone certain substantial shifts in recent decades. In order to analyse this process from an empirical point of view, a specific understanding of governance, based on the role of the public power in question (state, government or another such power, depending on the context) has been assumed. Changes in systemic governance (and consequently also at the institutional level) are a product in particular of governments’ responses to changes in their respective environments. This theoretical assumption, which in this particular study takes the form of a specific typology of governance modes, is employed to analyse those changes witnessed in higher education over the last 20 years. It does this by focusing on four specific national cases (England, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands). The empirical evidence shows that government continues to govern, and has not lost any of its policy-making power, but has simply changed the way it steers higher education. INTRODUCTION The majority of scholars involved in the analysis of higher education policy tend to be specialists in this particular policy; this means that research findings in the higher education field tend to remain detached from the broader theoretical debate in the political science and public policy sectors. This is rather unfortunate, and a wasted opportunity, since the intrinsic features of higher education policy (the historical survival of universities as institutions, the ongoing internal battle for resources, the intrinsic multilevel-structure of universities and higher education systems, governments’ task of coordinating structural needs) are of considerable interest to both political scientists and policy scholars. Moreover, we should not forget that certain fundamental concepts in institutional and policy analysis (such as loose-coupling, garbage-can decision making and organized anarchy) derive from the empirical analysis of the workings of schools (Weick 1976) and universities (Cohen et al. 1972; Cohen and March 1974; March and Olsen 1976). In addition, the governance issue in higher education should be considered by scholars in various other policy fields, since the governance shift in education has been of a particularly complex, multifaceted nature: at both systemic and institutional levels, this shift continues its unclear, contradictory journey, with increased institutional autonomy emerging in some countries, compared with a reduction thereof in others; with a shift towards greater decentralization in some countries, while centralization persists in others. These complex, often contradictory governance shifts in higher education represent a process that could be of considerable interest were it included in the broader debate on ‘governance’ that has emerged over the last 15 years in the social sciences, and in particular in the political science and public policy sectors. In fact, many scholars have been fascinated by the State’s apparent loss of its traditional role in steering society and public policy, replaced by a more decentralized form of self-governance (Considine and Lewis 1999; Pierre 2000; Newman 2001; Kooiman 2003). Giliberto Capano is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy in the Department of Political Science, University of Bologna at Forl` ı. Public Administration Vol. 89, No. 4, 2011 (1622–1642)  2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.