Previous Meetings 2017/2018

6 March 2018

Referendum Challenges to the EU's Policy Legitimacy - and How the EU Responds

Richard Rose (Centre for the Study of Public Policy, Scotland / Robert Schuman Centre, EUI)

Abstract

Multiple ways of legitimating policy in a multi-level system of states are now creating cross-level challenges to European Union (EU) policies. At the national level referendums are challenging EU policies by claiming that demands arising from a direct democratic ballot have the highest legitimacy. By contrast, the EU legitimates its policies by means of the legal rationality of the policymaking process established by international treaties and confirmed by the representative credentials of the European Parliament and member state governments endorsing its actions in the European Council. Referendums are no longer held to confirm a national government’s decision to become an EU member state. There has been a paradigm shift since 2005; most votes in countries are holding EU referendums have rejected policies approved by their elected representatives. The EU has successfully responded using strategies that involve legal coercion; instrumental calculations; secondary concessions; and avoidance of the risk of a referendum veto through differential integration. However, the legal legitimation of an EU policy without frustration by national referendums does not ensure policy effectiveness.

23 January 2018

Anmial Protection Parties in Europe

Marco Morini (Robert Schuman Centre, EUI)

Abstract

In 2014, animal protection parties from several countries across Europe formed a joint international network called Euro Animal 7, which includes the Partij voor de Dieren (PvdD) of the Netherlands, Partito Animalista Contra el Maltrato Animal (PACMA) of Spain, Pessoas-Animais-Naturaz (PAN) of Portugal, Partei Mensch Umwelt Tierschutz (PMUT) of Germany, Djurens Parti (Dp) of Sweden, Animal Party Cyprus (APC) and the Animal Welfare Party (AWP) in the United Kingdom. These seven parties are at different stages of their histories. Some are new, some are well-established, some have never been represented in national and European assemblies, some gained representation more than ten years ago.

The emergence of green parties throughout Europe during the 1980s marked the arrival of a new form of political movement, challenging established models of party politics and putting new issues in the political agenda. In the first decades of the 2000s, other new parties are emerging in several European countries: animal advocacy parties. Are they a spin-off of pre-existing green parties? Are they positioned on the left? Do they have the potential to enter into political alliances with other parties or even in coalition governments (like the greens have done in several EU countries)? This paper studies the seven members of the Euro Animal 7, highlighting their national peculiarities, their political histories and electoral manifestos. The central question is: do animal advocacy parties constitute a new party family, as defined by Mair and Mudde (1998)? In analysing Euro Animal 7 parties’, we also aim to define whether these parties can be considered as single-issue or they have developed towards more comprehensive policy platforms and if they can also be placed on a left/right ideological scale.

7 December 2017

The politicisation of unintended consequences: shaping EU-ACP relations in an unfavourable context

Maurizio Carbone (University of Glasgow)

Abstract

The Cotonou Partnership Agreement (CPA) – which has been governing relations between the European Union (EU) and 79 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) since 2000 – is due to expire in February 2020. A number of signals, not least the strong intention manifested by many EU Member States to abandon what is considered a relic of the past, indicated that it would be very difficult to justify the extension of the CPA beyond 2020. Yet, the European Commission has proposed a new, legally binding EU-ACP partnership consisting of a common foundation applicable to all ACP countries ad three separate partnerships for the three ‘regions’. This paper looks at the reasons behind this proposal, arguing that it can be seen as the aggregation of the unintended consequences in three policies beyond development: trade policy and the need to ensure a framework so as to prevent a potential re-negotiation of some controversial Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) agreed upon in 2014; environmental policy and the attempt to capitalise on the one-off successful EU-ACP cooperation in the international arena in the context of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change; foreign and security policy and the pursuit of a rules-based international order whilst promoting diverse cooperative regional orders as set out in the 2016 EU Global Strategy.

30 November 2017

Pattern Bargaining in Germany: does it exist? And why it matters for EMU.

Donato di Carlo (Max Planck Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung / SPS Department, EUI)

(Joint session with the Political Economy Working Group)

Abstract

In Germany, restraint in public sector wage setting ever since the start of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has been explained through the presence of a specific type of inter-sectoral wage co-ordination in the industrial relations system, i.e. export-sector-led pattern bargaining. Pattern bargaining is often understood in the literature as the institutional comparative advantage which underpins the transmission of wage moderation from the export sector to the sheltered one, of which the public sector is usually taken as a proxy. This paper has a twofold ambition. First, as a literature-assessing exercise, I review critically the pertinent literature in industrial relations and comparative political economy. This leads me to argue that the origins of inter-sectoral pattern bargaining in Germany have not been laid out clearly and that, so far, the pattern bargaining thesis has never been tested empirically. Second, as a theory-testing exercise, I perform hoop tests to verify whether the pattern bargaining hypothesis can really account for public sector wage restraint in post-reunification Germany: before and after EMU. I argue that pattern bargaining starts to unravel approximately around 1995/1996. As a consequence, it can not account for wage restraint during EMU, as widely believed. Wage restraint in the German public sector is a phenomenon which predates the single currency. It appears to be not directly linked to the role of the Bundesbank as the anti-inflationary gate-keeper. Also, it is not necessarily co-ordinated to wage bargaining in the exporting industries. These findings challenge core tenets of a long-lasting scholarship in comparative political economy and industrial relations. Most importantly, they open a new interesting research agenda on public sector wage setting centered on the need to bring in fiscal federalism and the politics of fiscal policy.

23 November 2017

25 Years of EU Climate Policy

Xavier Labandeira (University of Vigo / Robert Schuman Centre, EUI)

Summary

Xavier Labandeira discussed the international context for the development of climate policies and then focus on the European experience with a general approach, including also “implicit" climate policies and national/subnational developments. Special emphasis was on the economic literature on the relationships (positive and negative) between policy instruments (EU ETS, renewables policy, energy efficiency promotion and energy/carbon taxation) and on the assessment of their effects.

09 November 2017

Communitarisation: The Erosion of the European Union's Intergovernmental Method

Lewis Gordon Miller (SPS Department, EUI)

Abstract: Since 1970, the European Union’s Member States have often co-operated in areas of core state powers through the Intergovernmental Method. This choice has historically been explained because of this policy-making method's ability to reduce sovereignty cost in areas related to the central functions of the state. This is because the method almost exclusively empowers actors from within Member State bureaucracies and because it limits the structures of decision-making to being informal, unanimous, and outside of the EU’s treaties. Despite the pressures for the Intergovernmental Method's distinctive properties, over time the method's central properties show a general tendency to erode, with many features traditionally commonly associated with supranational modes of co-operation being incorporated. This project has two aims. Firstly, the project conceptualises this phenomenon, borrowing the term ‘communitarisation,’ arguing that the Intergovernmental Method should be understood as being part of a wider process of integration rather than simply as an alternate mode of policy-making. In doing so, the article brings together existing literatures with their own specific terminologies into a more general line of enquiry. Secondly, it attempts to argue that communitarisation is a political and not solely functional phenomenon, with reforms often reflecting the distributional interests of Member State governments. Three case studies are used; fiscal policy in the Eurozone, Trevi/Justice and Home Affairs, and European Political Co-operation/Common Foreign and Security Policy.

31 October 2017

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it?: The limited benefits of the Trio Presidency of the Council of the EU

Ieva Grumbinaitė (SPS Department, EUI)

Abstract

The Trio Presidency of the Council of the EU, introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, requires groups of three member states to draft a common 18-month programme and coordinate their activities. It is supposed to improve the continuity of policy-making in the Council, and encourage cooperation between the member states holding the position. However, expert interviews with representatives of three most recent completed presidency Trios show mixed results. Most of the respondents do not recognize the added value of the Trio, the common programme is frequently seen as a formality, and a lot of cooperation happens outside the pre-assigned Trios with the preceding and succeeding Council presidencies. Based on semi-structured interviews, this article examines and compares the performance of three presidency Trios, connects the findings to previous research on earlier Trio formations, and suggests that structural features of the Trio, along with previously established country-level factors, account for its limited success.