We examine the relationship between material deprivation and different types of responses to economic crises by civil society actors. We are interested in understanding whether material deprivation has an effect on civil society reactions to the crisis and whether political opportunity factors contribute to this relationship. In particular, we wish to ascertain if the effect of material deprivation is moderated by perceptions of political stability, on one hand, and of the effectiveness of government, on the other. Our results show that the effect of material deprivation on various aspects of responses to the crisis varies depending on the perceptions of the political environment. This suggests that perceptions of political stability and government effectiveness feed into the interpretation of present conditions. Therefore, perceptions of political stability and government effectiveness act as signals leading material deprivation to become politicized as a grievance.
Purpose – The goal of this chapter is to explore whether variation in the distribution of union members across the income distribution affects the role of unions in redistributive politics. Design/methodology/approach – The conceptual part of the study provides a theoretical motivation for disaggregating organized labor by income. The empirical part uses European Social Survey data for 15 West European countries 2006–2008 to describe the composition of union membership by income across countries and to explore, in a preliminary fashion, the implications of where union members are located in the income distribution for social protection and redistribution. Findings – In most countries, workers with incomes above the median are better organized than workers below the median and the income of the median union member exceeds the income of the median voter. The political implications of the overrepresentation of relatively well-off workers depend on the mechanism of preference aggregation within unions and the influence of unions in the policymaking process. While leaving a thorough examination of these issues for future research, we present descriptive regression results that indicate that the share of union members below the median does condition the association between aggregate union density and redistribution. It does not condition the association between union density and policy variables that pertain less directly to the distribution of income. Originality/value of paper – This is the first comparative study to map the distribution of union members across the income distribution and to examine the implications of compositional variation by income for redistributive politics.
Contrary to the wide majority of studies that try to characterise EU external governance by looking at the macro structures of association relations, our comparative analysis shows that overarching foreign policy initiatives such as the EEA, Swiss-EU Bilateralism or the ENP have little impact on the modes how the EU seeks to expand its policy boundaries in individual sectors. In contrast, modes of external governance follow sectoral dynamics which are astonishingly stable across countries. These findings highlight the importance of institutional path-dependencies in projecting governance modes from the internal to the external constellation, and question the capacity to steer these functionalist patterns of external governance through rationally planned foreign policy initiatives.
The concept of external governance seeks to capture the expanding scope of EU rules beyond EU borders. This article elaborates the theoretical foundations of this concept, differentiates the various institutional modes through which external governance takes place and suggests a set of hypotheses addressing the conditions under which EU external governance is effective. Here, we contrast institutionalist explanations, which are the most germane to an external governance approach, with competing expectations derived from power-based theories and approaches emphasizing the role of domestic factors in the target countries.
Traditionally a core aspect of state sovereignty, immigration control has first moved upwards to the intergovernmental sphere. It has then been brought closer to supranational governance, and is now gradually moving outwards towards the realm of EU foreign relations. This article interprets this move as the continuation of established patterns of transgovernmental cooperation in an altered geopolitical and institutional context. It explains internationalisation as a strategy of immigration ministers to increase their autonomy towards political, normative and institutional constraints on policy-making. Whereas these constraints were originally located at the national level, they are now increasingly perceived in communitarising immigration politics. The shift ‘outwards’ may thus be interpreted as a strategy to maximise the gains from Europeanisation while minimising the constraints resulting from deepening supranationalism. Yet this might in the long run also yield a widening of the external migration agenda, distracting it from the original focus on migration control.
The introduction of the principle of mutual recognition in EU justice and home affairs co-operation has been associated with a ‘revolution’ in internal security co-operation and has raised as many expectations as concerns. Whereas most discussions focus on the legal coherence of the concept in third pillar legislation and its potential tensions with procedural law and human rights standards, this article goes two steps back and questions at a more fundamental level the transferability of a principle of market integration into a core area of statehood and analyses the institutional preconditions for its implementation. Juxta- posing the different constellations of interdependence and governance modes in the economic and internal security spheres, it is argued that what functions as an instru- ment of liberalization in one sphere becomes a tool of governmentalization in the other, yet hampered by an unsettled tension between supranationality and states’ prerogatives.
ABSTRACT The creation of the Single European Market has been accompanied by an intense discussion on whether market-creating measures have been privileged over market- correcting ones by the institutional system of the EU. The creation of an ‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’ (AFSJ) launched by the Treaty of Amsterdam poses a similar question which, however, has remained heavily under-researched: will the balance between policing competencies and individual rights shift towards the former at the expense of the latter? Recent work on the ‘new raison d’e ́tat’ and the strengthening of national executives in processes of Europeanisation points in this direction. This essay explores the parallels between the Common Market and the AFSJ with regard to the relationship between the structures and substance of governance. The balance between security and individual rights is scrutinised in the main pillars of the AFSJ: asylum cooperation, judicial cooperation in criminal matters and police cooperation.
This article explores whether and under what conditions functional sectoral cooperation between the EU and the countries of the European Neighbourhood Policy promotes democratic governance. In an analysis of four countries (Jordan, Moldova, Morocco, and Ukraine) and three fields of cooperation (competition, environment and migration policy), we show that country properties such as the degree of political liberalization, membership aspirations, and geographic region do not explain differences in democratic governance. Rather, sectoral conditions such as the codification of democratic governance rules, the institutionalization of functional cooperation, interdependence, and adoption costs matter most for the success of democratic governance promotion. We further reveal a notable discrepancy between adoption and application of democratic governance in the selected ENP countries that has not been remedied in the first five years of the ENP.
