In this SIWG session, EUI researchers Jane Arroyo and Mafalda Escada will each present a draft version of their Prospectus.
The Janus Face of the European Union: Exploring the Internal-External Nexus in European Green Industrial Policymaking
Speaker: Jane Arroyo (PhD Researcher, EUI)
A convergence of factors has recently led the European Union to break with its traditional dynamic of market integration to pursue a stronger European industrial policy and geoeconomics strategy. A key part of this new strategy has been the European Green Deal Industrial Plan, presented in February 2023 by the European Commission to enhance the competitiveness of Europe’s net-zero industry and support the transition to climate neutrality. In parallel, the multiple crises that the EU had to deal with in the past 15 years have also contributed to widen divisions and polarisation at different levels of European politics, with populist parties rising throughout the continent and challenging the centrist and integrationist consensus that had until now underpinned European integration.
In this divided political context, the rapid and successful adoption of policies that bring to the forefront key political choices about the green transition and geopolitical policymaking is surprising. In the background of rising concerns about supranational dominance, especially with the recent push back against the Green Deal, why and how have EU policies that push for more EU-level intervention and more environmental action been successfully and rapidly adopted?
To answer this question, I argue that it is necessary to further understand the mediating role of the EU between domestic and international pressures. Existing theories of European integration and recent empirical literature on the EU geoeconomics turn fail to systematically account for the interactions of domestic and international politics. I propose to build on the conceptualisation of European policymaking processes as two-level games to uncover the tensions that the EU faces in responding to domestic and international demands, and to shed light on the strategic opportunities available for different actors in this balancing act. To operationalise these two-level games, I propose to conduct case studies of EU green industrial policy initiatives that crystallise these tensions, such as the Net Zero Industry Act and the Critical Raw Materials Act. Within these case studies, I plan to use process tracing through document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews in order to trace the institutional development of the EU’s attempts to enhance its economic competitiveness and support the green transition while facing structural and political constraints.
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Converging and diverging? Minimum income and activation in Southern Europe
Speaker: Mafalda Escada (PhD Researcher, EUI)
Today, most European welfare states have introduced minimum income schemes entailing activation measures, with the EU officially endorsing this policy. Yet this has been a heterogenous experience for which Southern Europe is an example. While Portugal and Spain have long implemented these policies, Italy has had a rocky path and pended towards reversal. However, in general, minimum income reform has been gradual and difficult to trace (Natali, 2018), pointing to positive cases being potentially divergent. On one hand, literature on welfare state reform tends to take Southern Europe as a whole and presents it as a difficult case for reform (Bonoli, 2013; Garritzmann et al., 2022). Yet, reform has happened. On the other hand, comparative analysis has been conducted, especially for Spain and Italy (Bürgisser, 2022; Giuliani & Rizza, 2023; Natili, 2019; Pavolini et al., 2016). These analyses have seldom gone beyond the implementation/no implementation, reform/reversal, expansion/retrenchment dichotomies, and have often disregarded differences in policy design, thus providing incomplete accounts of gradual reform in this policy domain. Additionally, they have focused on party politics and interest groups and often assumed their policy preferences, leaving some questions unaddressed. For example, why has a religious Church related cleavage prevented minimum income scheme implementation in Italy, but not in Portugal or Spain (Natili, 2019)? Why did the Socialist Party initially resist a minimum income scheme in Spain but not in Portugal (Aguilar-Hendrickson & de Durana, 2020)? When answering why and how minimum income schemes with activation have been implemented in the different Southern European welfare states, the literature does not present a satisfactory answer. The different paths taken by the Southern European welfare states call our attention to the specific contexts of each country. By focusing on the construction of policy problems, grounded in historical and political context, I intend to fill in some of the gaps that the literature has not been able to answer. In sum, this research proposes to conduct three case studies – Spain, Portugal, and Italy – in a comparative historical analysis perspective, focusing on the timing and sequences of policymaking but also on policy problem formulation in each country and their concrete policy practices to disentangle the politics of minimum income and activation.
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