In this Social Investment Working Group session, Mafalda Escada will discuss her ongoing PhD project on minimum income schemes in Southern Europe, while Milan Thies will present his work on how bureaucrats become the driving force of a policy change.
The Politics of Poverty: minimum income in Southern Europe
Speaker: Mafalda Escada
The presentation features the current state of my PhD project delving into the politics of redistribution against the background of evolving social assistance policy. The project starts by asking how policies increasingly targeted at low-income groups can be expanded despite mobilisation and representation challenges by such groups. I argue these challenges can be overcome by welfare state institutions and policy configurations. Against this background, a universe of cases is explored, and Southern European welfare states arise as an empirical puzzle representing ‘least-likely cases’ for universal social safety nets on which empirical research focuses in a most similar systems research design. Lastly, the first case study of the project – Spain - will be introduced, combining a more in-depth analysis of the first minimum income scheme introduced in the Basque Country in the late 1980s with a more extensive analysis of the introduction of the same policy in other autonomous communities.
The Quiet Politics of Social Investment
Speaker: Milan Thies
Political science research typically understands policymaking as a political process in which partisan politics, public opinion and interest group politics are the decisive drivers. Yet neither ministers, parliamentarians, nor the wider public can engage with the full scope of the growing number of public policies and their development. As a result, many policies that are not politically salient -and therefore attract little attention from political parties or the public - originate from the initiatives of unelected actors with specialised interests. Traditionally, such processes of quiet politics are described as dominated by interest groups. I argue that there is a second form of quiet politics, in which policy bureaucrats within ministries act as central drivers of reform. These policy bureaucrats are specialised according to their assigned responsibilities and, like interest groups, have a strong interest in policies that affect their area of responsibility. However, unlike interest groups, bureaucrats are formally tasked with designing and formulating public policies. This paper develops a theory of bureaucratic quiet politics that discusses when bureaucrats become the driving force of a policy change. The paper further identifies two mechanisms - puzzling and linking - through which bureaucrats exert influence: by developing policy solutions without political instruction and by strategically connecting low-salience issues to politically salient agendas such as climate change or digitalisation. Empirically, the study analyses vocational education and training reforms in Germany and France, two diverse cases with different administrative, electoral and education systems. The presentation will focus on the key theoretical concepts and illustrate them with selected empirical evidence.
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