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The open method of co-ordination (OMC) has received much attention in the recent EU literature. The predominant view claims that the OMC is not only a new but also an effective policy-making instrument. This paper raises doubts about both claims by offering a comparison of soft law policy co-ordination in three international organizations. More specifically, this paper compares the European Employment Strategy to the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines of the EU, the OECD Economic Surveys, and the IMF Article IV Consultations. Based on expert interviews, it seeks to demonstrate that these procedures are forms of multilateral surveillance that do not differ in kind. Such a comparative analysis of the OMC refutes claims to its novelty. Having compared the four procedures, a more general model of multilateral surveillance consisting of six elements is generated that facilitates further comparisons. This paper concludes that governments select voluntarist procedures mainly to secure their own competencies rather than to realize common goals. Effective problem-solving is therefore not necessarily the dominant objective of soft law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction between bargaining and monetary policy involves three relationships: the interaction of the bargainers with (a) each other; (b) the monetary regime; and (c) their rank and file. Research has centred on (a) and (b) and neglected (c). However, in practice, interaction (c) gains in importance, since bargaining is a multi-level process in the eurozone. Analytically, this interaction should not be neglected, since the monetary regime can target the bargainers more effectively than their rank and file. This paper conceptualizes the interaction between bargaining and monetary policy in a way which includes all three relationships. Based on a comparison of fifteen European countries, it is shown that the responsiveness of alternative bargaining institutions to the monetary regime depends on their capacity for making the rank and file comply, and that these institutions also differ in which monetary parameter they are sensitive to. The implications of these findings for EMU are discussed in the paper's final section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we seek to understand the impact of the macro-political context on power configurations within policy subsystems. For this purpose we systematically compare policy networks in three major policy subsystems and seven Western European countries (and the EU) on the basis of a typology for the power configurations within policy subsystems. We link the European, domestic and policy-specific context to our typology of policy networks. To test the hypotheses we conduct empirical network and reputational analysis of 345 interviews with key policy-makers. The results point not only to the importance of the EU context, but also to the complex interplay of domestic and policy-specific contexts for understanding domestic power configurations. Domestic power configurations vary not only from country to country, but also within the countries depending on the policy domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporaneous welfare states use different mixes of income. payroll and indirect taxes to Fund expenditures. The paper investigates how this mix affects the labour market. It briefly discusses the evolution of tax mixes over rime and countries before dealing with three claims in more detail. First, countries with high levels of payroll taxation are expected to exhibit a worst aggregate labour market performance than countries relying on income taxation. Second, this finding should hold for low-skilled sectors in particular. Third since all countries have opened up their goods and capital markets, the impact of taxation on labour market outcomes should have increased over time. these claims are empirically evaluated by a cautious, step-by-step analysis of cross-country and temporal variation in the tax mix for eighteen OECD countries. `Whereas the evidence for the first two claims is substantial, evidence on internationalization remains inconclusive. The results help to explain why welfare stares show diverging forms of vulnerabilities for employed people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European welfare state autonomy is being eroded by both European integration and 'globalization'. The attempted creation of a European 'social' area, the completion of the internal market, the competitive effects of trade liberalization and the impact on policy autonomy of greater international capital mobility all have implications for the future of welfare states. This article argues that, in combination with a domestic policy agenda making welfare provision subservient to competitiveness, globalization is operating a 'subversive liberalism' which, even in the absence of an explicit neo-liberal assault, is reshaping social welfare systems. Despite persistent differences between welfare states, there is a convergence on a less universal, dualized model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classic partisan theory posits that political parties translate their electorates' preferences into policies. Accordingly, the recent changes in left parties' voter base, from predominantly working-class to middle-class voters, should have resulted in changing policy positions and policy effects of left parties. We test this expectation for economic policies (i.e., subsidies, product market regulation, and privatization) in 16 European countries between 1980 and 2012. We find the expected relationships for subsidies but not for regulation and privatization. This can be explained by the fact that only with regard to subsidies, preferences substantially differ between the working- and the middle-class. Thus, economic policy preferences of voters of left parties diverge less than could be expected. Methodologically, the study suggests that empirically testing the complete causal mechanism of classic partisan theory, assessing voters' preferences and investigating more than one issue area, are promising ways to study partisan effects on public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the umbrella of Capacity Building in Support of Security and Development (CBSD), the EU provides equipment and infrastructure to the armed forces of partner countries. The 2017 reform of the Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP) to implement CBSD represents a remarkable integrative step at the interface of EU security and development policy. This article explains the IcSP reform through a neofunctionalist lens. It argues that the extension of the Commission's competences in EU security affairs can be explained by the interaction of functional and cultivated spillover pressures. Functional discrepancies between the CSDP framework and EU development policy created strong pressures for further integrative steps. Moreover, the Commission exerted strong pressures for adopting its proposal for implementing CBSD through the IcSP by drawing on a combination of strategic coalition-building, bargaining tactics and community framing. The case illustrates neofunctionalism's potential to explain external policy integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regarding the analysis of European economic policy choices since 2010, the literature has largely taken the path of intergovernmentalism, concluding that the member states were the key leaders of the economic and fiscal negotiations and relegating the Commission to the loser status. This article aims to open the black box of European economic policy-making through process tracing and embed a discussion on policy entrepreneurship by the Commission within an analysis of policy change in economic governance. It argues that the coupling of a high problem load with a high level of systemic ambiguity opens a window of opportunity for bottom–up entrepreneurship of the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs which is snuffed out by the political College and the member states when the problem load and the systemic ambiguity are low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent economic crisis has brought into focus how even open and highly interdependent economies in the European Union try to govern their economies according to territorially defined interests. The aim of this article is to examine an area, online gambling, with the technological and legal conditions that challenge approaches that favour economic patriotism. The article compares two cases, the United Kingdom and Italy, that represent two different models of economic governance to argue that they are similar in which interests they seek to protect and at which level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Market deregulation has been integral to economic globalization, but we do not know very much about the comparative dimension of reform, i.e., the performance of liberal and co-ordinated market economies. Co-ordinated market economies are often assumed to perform poorly in deregulation reform, while such reform is path-dependent to the liberal market economy model. The article compares the trajectory of market deregulation in these different ‘varieties of capitalism’. Drawing on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's ‘product market regulation indicators', the analysis shows that co-ordinated market economies have implemented more extensive deregulation than have the liberal market economies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Competitive interdependence characterizes the EU-US relationship vis-a-vis third markets. Each defines success in relation to the other while each also views the other as its key geo-economic competitor in the world economy. CI has developed as the EU has attempted to manage globalization in the field of trade policy by focusing on the multilateral level and then by reversing course and privileging the regional, which in turn has expanded the EU's territorial influence. The reversal occurred largely because the Bush Administration in Washington pursued free trade agreements (FTAs) in a process of 'competitive liberalization'. The US outflanked the EU by negotiating FTAs that favored US firms in third markets. The EU, to protect its own firms, then began to negotiate FTAs itself. Geo-economic competition between the EU and the US is thus key to shaping EU trade policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ambivalent character of time in European economic governance and how it is conceptualized, especially by its constituent expert elites. On the one hand, it serves to rationally order and stabilize power relationships; on the other, it provokes contest about its appropriate use, focused on fiscal and economic reform policies. The article also highlights the different functional specificities in temporal governance in monetary, fiscal, financial stability and economic reform policies and the differences in potential of issues to mobilize political opposition and to produce problems of synchronization. In particular, monetary union forms an inner circle within European economic governance. Its discursive, regulative and strategic effects radiate with varying results into its other circles. Nevertheless, European economic governance is not a single 'time-rule' exercise. Finally, the article examines how, through its 'compression' effects on European states, European economic governance raises serious issues about the quality of modern democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pension privatization trend that swept Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) between 1998 and 2004 presents a conundrum when viewed from the perspective of European Union (EU) enlargement. While these reforms took place at around the same time as EU accession, the EU did not use its formidable membership conditionality to impose them on CEE accession states. This article reviews the major causal explanations for pension privatization in CEE and finds that a critical factor was the transnational policy campaign launched by the World Bank and allied organizations in the mid-1990s. Pension privatization appealed to CEE accession states because it was significantly more 'liberal' than EU social policy norms. Pension privatization enabled CEE liberals to out-liberalize the EU in an effort to further a low-wage, low-cost development strategy and attempt to exert leadership in EU economic policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a reinvestment in political sociology in general, and the concept of territory in particular, as means of renewing analysis of the policy–polity dialectic at the heart of the European Union (EU). Drawing on a sociological theory of decision-making and sectoral regulation, the foundations for a ‘territorial institutionalist’ approach are developed in order to study political usages of territory. Specifically, the process of the ‘political assignment of authority' is examined to analyse three such usages in EU fisheries and wine: justifying frontiers of policy instruments, defining actor eligibility, politicizing/depoliticizing regulatory controversies. Overall, we argue that EU studies must re-engage in epistemological debates over policy–polity linkages in order to produce new and rigorous knowledge about European integration and its legitimization. For, as our findings suggest, these processes are not driven by the certainty of ‘rational’ multi-level governance, but are mediated within sectoral ‘institutional orders’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the state on the retreat? We examine this question through an analysis of changing patterns of government involvement in infrastructure provision, which is generally considered to be one of the main functions of the modern state. Based on an analysis of the extent of privatization of infrastructure companies between 1970 and 2000 across 20 OECD countries, we find that there is indeed a general trend towards less public infrastructure provision visible in all of the countries and that the main factors associated with the extent of privatizations are EU membership and government ideology. Overall, the results of the study are consistent with the view that the trend of privatizing infrastructure companies was triggered by a change of the prominent economic discourse in the 1970s and that a rightist party ideology and EU membership fostered the adoption and implementation of these ideas in domestic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The technical and institutional achievements of Economic and Monetary Union in Europe (EMU) are just the necessary condition for its overall success: the sufficient condition implies a widespread acceptance of the spillover effects triggered by EMU for other areas of economic policy-making, such as possible redistributive effects across euro-area member states. The article notes that much of the recent academic debate on EMU's legitimacy can be reduced to differences in assumptions on those effects. It thus calls for resuming the debate with a specific emphasis on analysing data that would provide information on observable spillover effects from EMU and allow for more solid arguments in that debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe's economic governance is not only highly complex, but also increasingly inefficient and therefore unsustainable in the long run. This conclusion is reached from the theory of collective action and the difficulties in democratic legitimacy. The solution would be the creation of a European government accountable to European citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benchmarking offers actors a means of resolving the horizontal and vertical collective action problems that often bedevil the development and implementation of decision-making. It has assumed a vital role in the EU's ‘open method of co-ordination’ with its focus on the identification and dissemination of ‘best practice’ through mutual learning and peer review, offering new solutions for policy management in an increasingly complex, diverse and uncertain environment. Yet the evolution of benchmarking from management tool to regulatory instrument is also problematic, and not just because it remains conceptually ambiguous and technically difficult to effect in practice. More fundamentally, the mechanisms of control that underpin benchmarking in large companies are generally unavailable to public policy-makers. As a result, benchmarking must be looser at EU level, and perhaps ultimately viewed as a complementary rather than an alternative form of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The volume examines changes in regulatory rules, organizations and policies across several European countries and policy domains, why these changes have taken place and their consequences. The 'regulatory state' hypothesis suggests that regulatory reforms involve a new mode of governance in Europe, with alterations in state functions, political arenas, institutions, actors and policy styles. The volume finds that although several features put forward by the 'regulatory state' model have spread, they remain limited and there is great diversity across countries and domains. It analyses the reasons for this, notably variation in international pressures for change and mediation by national factors. It looks at the effects of regulatory reform on participation in regulatory politics, relationships among actors, economic, social and market outcomes. An analytical framework based on different 'regulatory regimes' offers the best route forward to analyse regulatory reform across countries and sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of growing economic globalization and rapid technological changes governance in the field of information and communication policy increasingly requires policy co-ordination across multiple arenas, not only including vertical co-ordination across different institutional levels, but also horizontal coordination across different policy sectors. In view of these new co-ordination demands the mediation and accommodation of heterogeneous interest positions at the interfaces of various institutional levels and sectoral boundaries become a crucial governance function. The specific political, economic and technological conditions underlying information and communication technology policy favour this function being carried out by European interest associations - a development which coincides with significant strengthening and structural integration of the system of European interest representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union is pursuing a competitive and sustainable development model that combines insights from environmental as well as economic analysis. The rhetoric of this model is attractive: European development should be 'sustainable' both in terms of its use of labour and environmental resources, and in terms of the location of economic activity. European policy, therefore, should encourage industries to use more labour and fewer resources, as well as to create jobs at the local level in order to internalize market externalities. Despite the appeal of such rhetoric, the implementation of this new development model poses both analytical and distributional concerns: the assumptions of environmental and economic analysis come into theoretical contradiction and the economic effects of the policy are socially undesirable. The solution is to abandon the competitive and sustainable development model, and to pursue competitive growth and sustainable resource use as separate policy objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of economic and monetary union (EMU) is often interpreted as the logical outcome of structural trends, macroeconomic consensus, or grand geopolitical bargains. This article argues, however, that such views miss an essential dimension of the EMU process, namely the political strategy developed within the European Commission in order to achieve that goal. As part of their integrationist agenda, Commission officials selectively marshaled the political and economic significance of Europe's emerging Single Market. Thus, over time, they induced key actors to re-articulate their preferences in terms of monetary union. The article discusses the two main facets of the Commission's strategy, i.e. the politics of monetary sovereignty and the politics of monetary orthodoxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas in other policy sectors, established, national policies have become progressively 'Europeanized', the EC was a major catalyst in the generation and extension of national sex equality laws. The origins of these policies lie in second-wave feminism during the late 1960s and 1970s which sought to 'reframe' the way in which policies affecting women were addressed. This article highlights the importance of the EC institutions, notably the European Commission and the European Court of Justice in supporting the rights of working women and forcing national policy change. The impact of these measures has nevertheless been limited by the existence of national 'policy hinterlands' based upon conflicting policy frames. The future development of EC sex equality policies is uncertain. 'Mainstreaming' is a potentially important development, but its success depends upon the willingness of policy-makers to consider routinely the gender dimension of policy options. The provisions of the Amsterdam Treaty relating to sex equality may prove important in this respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do European policies affect national policy-making patterns and problem-solving capacity, and to what extent do national policy-makers seek to influence European politics? In particular, what impact does European road haulage policy have on national policy within the context of the Single Market Programme (SMP)? How can the domestic policy response of four member states - Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy - be explained with respect to the national policy background, problem-solving approach, policy instruments, and patterns of interest intermediation? While the policy responses of Britain and the Netherlands reveal congruence and confirmation, those of Germany and Italy indicate respectively change and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 1 January 1999, the third and final stage of economic and monetary union (EMU) is scheduled to begin. Assuming that the member states of the European Union (EU) adhere to the terms of the Treaty on European Union, on that day a new European Central Bank will assume full responsibility for defining the monetary policy of the member states that have moved to the third and final stage of EMU and the conversion rates of the currencies of those member states will be irrevocably fixed against each other and against a new currency, the euro. This article examines some of the underlying imperatives and third-stage dilemmas of EMU. After considering some of the reasons why, despite the high costs associated with qualifying for the third stage, most if not all of the member states perceive EMU to be in the national interest, the article considers several of the economic, political, and institutional issues and dilemmas that are likely to confront the participating member states in the third stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central argument of this article is that the European Commission has consolidated its role as a 'policy entrepreneur' but that it must pay attention also to its role as a 'policy manager'. The Commission's capacity for management is much weaker than its power of initiative because it lacks sizeable bureaucratic resources and largely implements policies through a system of shared administration with the member states. The Commission's financial management reform programme which was launched by President Santer when he took over from President Delors provides the focus of this article. The expansion of the budget and the saliency of fraud underlined the need for the Commission to enhance its management of EU finances. The programme involves reform enhancing the self-regulation of the Commission (internal reform) and the development of administrative partnerships with the member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Treaty of Rome allowed member states to establish policies governing the trade in and production of armaments at the national level, the European Union (EU) has gradually been expanding its influence in defense industry matters. This article traces the history of EU involvement in defense industrial policy, with an emphasis on events over the past decade. One significant finding is that the European Commission and Parliament have played key roles in expanding the EU's policy-making machinery to include defense industrial matters, while the Council of Ministers has tried to resist such actions. A second important conclusion is that the concept of spillover is particularly appropriate in describing how and why the EU's policy-making has expanded to include defense industrial policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European regulatory policy-making unfolds in the context of diverse interests and traditions of member states. These diverse policy traditions clash in the European arena and have to be brought into balance. In the course of this process, some common co-ordination patterns emerge which, embedded in European institutions, are typical of regulatory policy-making in Europe. These patterns include a 'first mover' strategy by member states, 'problem- solving', and 'negative co-ordination, bargaining and compensation'. The result of the dynamic of these co-ordination patterns in regulatory policy-making is a policy patchwork at the European level. The diverse co-ordination patterns and their typical paths and policy consequences are illustrated by discussion of European legislation in the field of clean air policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]