Author: JEPP Online

The EU’s ventures into social policy-making have been few and far between, as member states remain reluctant to cede their competencies on taxation, spending and social insurance to the supranational level. Nonetheless, albeit a lack of capacity for social policy-making, positive integration via supranational social regulation can still have a crucial impact on welfare state regimes across the EU. In his article “Liberalizing markets, liberalizing welfare? Economic reform and social regulation in the EU’s electricity regime” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Hanan Haber analyses how and why social provisions were added to the EU’s electricity sector reform, highlighting their impact on national welfare states. Hanan’s research shows that the EU’s response to consumer dissatisfaction amid power blackouts and rising prices emphasised the protection of vulnerable consumers and the concept of energy poverty, which reflected regulations common in the liberal welfare regime of the United Kingdom. By adopting supranational social regulations concerned with an issue by and large exclusive to liberal welfare states, the EU introduced liberal welfare problems and solutions to other types of welfare regimes, effectively “promoting a liberal model of welfare through social regulation, pushing member states towards this type of welfare.”

Amid the communitarization of migration policy, the driving forces shaping EU migration governance have been the subject of a vivid scholarly debate. If anything, the fallout from the EU’s migration crisis is likely to fan the latter’s flames. Zooming in on the actors and mechanisms behind migration policy change in the EU, Saskia Bonjour, Ariadna Ripoll Servent and Eiko Thielemann identify three areas that deserve the attention of future research. In their article “Beyond venue shopping and liberal constraint: a new research agenda for EU migration policies and politics” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Saskia, Ariadna and Eiko call on future research to open up the black box of preference formation in member states and EU institutions, to analyse when, how and why we observe variation in actors’ influence in migration policy-making processes, and to embrace greater transparency in conceptualizing and measuring the extent and the content of policy change. They argue that scholars’ focus on these three axes may allow the community “to engage in a more productive debate and collectively work toward gaining greater insights into the multiple puzzles of EU migration governance.”

The euro crisis and an unprecedented influx of asylum seekers and migrants highlight a shift in the dimensionality of political conflict across EU member states. While the recent crises have not manifested themselves in dramatic programmatic adaptations of extant parties, we can witness a rise and strengthening of new parties, especially on the far-right end of the political spectrum. In their article “Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the transnational cleavage” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks argue that recent European crises can be conceived of as critical junctures, revealing pressures that have built over the past two decades. As traditional cleavages along class, territory and religion gradually forfeit their shaping power on political conflict, Liesbet and Gary identify a new, transnational cleavage, “which has as its core a political reaction against European integration and immigration.” Their analysis shows that as extant parties appear to labour in vein to come to terms with a new social division, change in national political party systems “has come not because mainstream parties have shifted in response to voter preferences, but because voters have turned to parties with distinctive profiles on the new cleavage.”

As unemployment soared in the wake of the euro crisis, some observers feared that the economic hardship experienced across many societies and dissatisfaction with their governments’ responses to the crisis may prove too much for the resilience of some European democracies. Would the effects of the euro crisis undermine Europeans’ confidence in the principles of democracy? Would it pave the way for a resurgence of authoritarian-styled politics, particularly in places where the crisis hit hardest? In his article “The implications of the euro crisis for democracy” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Hanspeter Kriesi draws on data from the sixth round of the European Social Survey and takes stock of Europeans’ evaluations of democracy. Hanspeter’s analysis uncovers that in the aftermath of the crisis dissatisfaction with both domestic and European politics escalated in Southern Europe, whereas Northern Europeans remained relatively content with their national politics. Somewhat counterintuitively, we should not expect those losing confidence in their governments’ capacity to effectively deal with the crisis to show democracy the cold shoulder. In fact, Hanspeter’s analysis suggests that dissatisfaction with governments’ performance strengthened citizens’ belief in democratic principles. Instead of undermining European democracies, “[b]y creating ‘critical citizens’, the economic crisis contributes to the strengthening of democratic principles.”

Recent years have been marked by anything but smooth sailing for the EU and its member states, with the fallout from the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the union yet to fully emerge and credible challenges arising from the euro and Schengen crises that have rocked the foundations of European integration. With regard to the latter two, the products of these crises could not be any more different, as the euro crises has ushered in new supranational institutions and strengthened existing ones, whereas the Schengen crisis laid bare the EU and member states’ inaptitude to update – or at the very minimum save – their common migration and asylum policies. In their article “From the euro to the Schengen crises: European integration theories, politicization, and identity politics” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse unpick this puzzle and demonstrate that existing theories of European integration can only partially explain variation in European responses to these crises. Contending that debates surrounding the two crises have been framed in fundamentally different terms, solidarity within the European community in the context of the euro crisis contrasted by an ‘Us against them’ notion on migration and asylum policies, Tanja and Thomas also zero in on the role of politicization. Here, they highlight the importance of the crises’ sequence, with efforts to depoliticize the euro crisis coming back to haunt the EU when dealing with an unprecedented influx of migrants and refugees, suggesting that “[d]epoliticization through supranational delegation has ultimately led to more, not less politicization”.

Fiscal austerity and structural reform in response to the euro crisis hit Southern European societies hard, while dwindling confidence in the euro had strained economic activity throughout the eurozone for years. With several European economies still grappling with the euro crisis’s effects and yet to fully recover from 2009’s shock, it is a crucial task for scholarship to take stock of the lessons learned from the crisis and to initiate debate on the way forward. In his article “Varieties of capitalism in light of the euro crisis” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Peter A. Hall discusses how the literature on varieties of capitalism contributed to the understanding of the euro crisis, and in turn how the crisis itself has advanced our understanding of varieties of capitalism, including the literature’s limits. Peter argues that attempts to make sense of the euro crisis have led to efforts to complement the varieties of capitalism literature’s emphasis on the supply side of the economy with growth models focusing on the demand side. While such efforts have contributed to our understanding of the root causes of the crisis and help explain variation in responses to it, he warns that our vision on how to secure growth in Southern Europe remains clouded. With EU officials seeking ways to reinvigorate growth across Southern member states, Peter highlights that pursuing a single set of best practices seems ill-advised, as Europe’s history teaches that “there is more than one route to economic prosperity, and finding a successful national path requires adapting social and economic policies to the institutional conditions specific to each type of political economy”.

By Carsten Daugbjerg and Peter H. Feindt

This new special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy introduces a new concept to the discussion about the ongoing transformation of policies in the modern welfare state: post-exceptionalism in public policy. The point of departure is the observation that Western democratic welfare states have often developed sectoral governance arrangements where governments negotiated policy with sectoral elites, based on shared ideas and exclusive institutional arrangements. Food and agriculture policy is widely considered an extreme case of the ensuing compartmentalized and ‘exceptionalist’ policy-making, where sector-specific policy ideas and institutions provide privileged access for sectoral interest groups and generate policies that benefit their members. In the last two decades, policy exceptionalism has been under pressure from internationalization of policy making, increasing interlinkage of policy areas and trends towards self-regulation, liberalization and performance-based policies. This special issue explains and applies the concept of ‘post-exceptionalism’ to characterize an incomplete transformation of exceptionalist policies with the result that old and new ideas, institutions, interests and policy instruments coexist in various combinations. Food and agriculture policy serves as an example to illustrate an incomplete transformation towards a more open, contested and networked politics that still betrays an enduring exceptionalist policy heritage. The articles of this themed issue demonstrate the analytical utility of the concept of post-exceptionalism to understand the co-existence of transformation and path dependency in contemporary public policy. The collection consists of articles that analyse recent developments in agricultural policy making in the European Union and the United States, environmental policy integration in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the politics of food in Germany and the United Kingdom, transnational organic standard setting, the role of productionism in global food security debates and the resilience of paradigm mixes in the international food trade regime.  These contributions show that in agri-food policy, to varying degrees, changes have taken place in at least two of the four dimensions of policy exceptionalism (ideas, institutions, actors and policy). They also indicate that such partial transformation of policy means that in some situations post-exceptionalism can be a stable constellation while in others it may be a fragile and contested arrangement which can potentially move towards a ‘normalization’ of the policy sector or reverse to a more classical exceptionalist mode. The concept of post-exceptionalism provides a broader and more nuanced perspective on policy transition processes than typically found in studies of policy change. It promises to be useful to understand changes not just in agriculture and food policy, but in other domains of the transforming welfare state as well.