In this SIWG session, EUI first-year researchers John Michaelis and Giulio D'Arrigo will present their thesis prospectuses.
Climate Change as a Populist Battleground
Speaker: John Michaelis (EUI)
Climate policy in Europe has evolved from a largely technocratic endeavor into a fierce arena of identity politics, driven by the growing politicisation of climate issues by populist far-right parties. This thesis investigates why some far-right parties engage aggressively on climate change while others remain silent, despite facing similar pressures from EU decarbonisation mandates. To account for the cross-national variation in far-right parties climate politics across EU member states I propose a framework in which the politisation of climate policy arises from the interaction of three dimensions: (1) structural demand, whereby globalisation, deindustrialisation, and uneven modernisation have produced electorates of economically and culturally 'left-behind' voters; (2) ideational mediation, in which populism’s 'thin' ideology is concretised through authoritarian, socially conservative, and nationalist values that portray climate policy as an elite-driven imposition; (3) spatial competition, where far-right parties calibrate their climate positions in response to the strength and salience of green parties and mainstream consensus. To test these propositions, I will conduct a mixed-methods study: a large-N analysis of party communications (press releases and manifestos) across Western Europe to measure issue salience and positions, followed by in-depth qualitative case studies to explore contextual mechanisms. In doing so, this research aims to determine whether far-right climate politicisation represents a sustained realignment or a temporal moment in European party competition.
Governing Growth in the European Union. Building and transforming the EU economic government through experimentalism
Speaker: Giulio D'Arrigo (EUI)
At least since the outset of its monetary integration, policy-makers in the European Union (EU) institutions have developed an increasing interest in the socio-economic growth of their Member States. An unprecedented policy puzzle was in question: how to accommodate so diverse domestic growth and welfare regimes within a consistent EU-wide framework? Indeed, the EU is the very first example in the history of humanity of advanced economic and monetary integration between advanced welfare capitalist economies.
The frameworks for fiscal and socio-economic policy coordination designed to this purpose have been reformed very frequently, and not always in correspondence of crises. In my research, I plan to explain the dynamic process of change of the institutional architectures of EU growth policy-making by shedding light on the endogenous processes of learning-by-doing driving reforms. To this purpose, I adopt a theory that draws from the insights of the experimentalist governance framework and from the theories of policy and political learning in its puzzling and powering dimensions.
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