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Research interests

Im Dokument Political Science (Seite 80-85)

Current research

Europeanization, especially of party politics and policy platforms/ Interaction between EU and national level

Dissertation Outline

Title: Preference formation with regards to the Employment Equality Directive (2000/78/EC) at the national level.

Puzzle:

This dissertation focuses on Directive 2000/78/EC (hereafter referred to as Employment Equality Directive), which largely extends the provisions of the 1976 Equal Treatment Directive to discrimination on grounds of religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation in the field of employment and occupation. The institutional rule for the adoption of measures under Article 13 is the consultation procedure; under this procedure, decision-making requires unanimous agreement in the Council of Ministers while the European Parliament has a limited, consultative role4. This dissertation seeks to contribute to our knowledge concerning why Member States agree to further European integration. Thus, the research question is: Why did Member States agree on Directive 2000/78/EC despite high misfit levels between EU requirements and national standards?

Theoretical Framework and Hypotheses:

Intergovernmentalists’ central claim is that Member States, i.e. national governments, and/or especially the most powerful ones, effectively regulate the space and scope of integration, through control of Treaty revision and the legislative process (e.g. Moravcsik 1991). The source of integration lies in the interests of Member States and their relative power, while

4 The directive under consideration was adopted in 2000, before the enlargement of the European Union. Thus, the research locus for integration dynamics lies within the EU 15.

I H S — Zoe Lefkofridi / Scholar — 77

supranational actors (EU institutions) or private actors play only a secondary role (Moravcsik 1999: 270). The liberal version of intergovernmentalism opens the ‘realist black box’: liberal theories of international relations examine the impact of state-society relations in shaping national interests; they build on the assumption that “private individuals and voluntary associations with autonomous interests interacting in civil society are the most fundamental actors in politics” (Moravcsik 1993: 483). Hence, liberal intergovernmentalist accounts of European integration focus on domestic pressures in explaining the formulation of national executives’ positions in inter-state negotiations. According to liberal theorists, societal principals delegate power to agents (governments), whose prime interest is to maintain themselves in office by ensuring the support of domestic voters, parties, interest groups and bureaucracies (ibid). In a similar fashion, we would expect Member States with high misfit levels to oppose the Employment Equality Directive, especially due to the costs that its implementation would require. Given that each of these member states could have vetoed the adoption of this legislative act, we need to investigate why they did not. From an intergovernmentalist perspective, we would also expect the outcome of the negotiations to reflect the lowest common denominator of the member states’ interests, especially of the most powerful ones, e.g. UK, Germany.

General Hypothesis H1: National positions reflect domestic interests.

Alternative General Hypothesis, H0: Despite the high levels of misfit, Member States did not decide according to their interests, but based on common values, such as diversity, equality and justice. Schimmelfennig (2001: 76) highlights the possibility and consequences of

‘rhetorical entrapment’ of actors (e.g. the principals, i.e. national governments) by the

‘rhetorical action’ of other actors (e.g. the agent, i.e. Commission), who use norm-based arguments strategically, in order to push forward their agenda. Member States constitutionalised the fight against discrimination in the Treaty of Amsterdam (Article 13 TEC) and were trapped in their own rhetoric to eliminate social exclusion and social dumping. “The emphasis on social solidarity and justice has been and remains much stronger in this part of the world than in other advanced democratic societies” (Tsoukalis 2005: 122).

Specific Research Questions:

The birth of the Employment Equality Directive happened in stages: policy initiation, formulation, deliberation and decision. The specific research questions of this research proposal are based on the general assumption that Member States are rational actors.

Hence, explanatory factors may be divided in two clusters: the willingness and the ability of national executives to influence decision-making in the Council of Ministers. We formulate the following Hypotheses:

H2: National executives were in favor of the overall thrust of the Directive5. H3: National executives had no salient position on the Directive.

H4: National executives’ position opposed the Directive.

H4a: National executives opposed the Directive and managed to push their interests forward.

H4b: National executives opposed the Directive but were unable to push their interests forward.

Specific Research Questions:

Did Member States6 participate in the stage of consultation before the drafting of the original Commission proposal? If yes, what were their positions at this stage and how did preferences arise at the national level?

Did national interest groups put pressure on national executives? If yes, were their proposals taken into account when ‘national preferences’ with regards to the Directive were defined?

Was it a matter of party politics? What were the (electoral) costs for the party in government?

Was the directive some kind of trade-off between the needs of the labor market and the wishes of the constituencies?

Testing this last hypothesis (H4) requires knowledge on how Member States monitor their agents in Brussels, i.e. the interplay between the permanent representative in COREPER and the national ministry, and on how do they co-ordinate their activity at the EU level.

How do ministries (e.g. Ministries of Labor, Justice) aggregate their position?

How do Member States organize their activity in the Council of Ministers?

Which agents participate in the working groups while the proposal is being re-drafted? How well do the established structures function in terms of ‘feedback from home’?

Method:

Expert interviews at the Ministries of Employment and Justice, as well as with the national representatives involved in the negotiations (COREPER).

References:

Falkner, G., Treib, O. Hartlapp, M. and Leiber, S. (2005) Complying with Europe: EU Harmonisation of Soft-Law in the Member States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kassim, H. Menon, A., Peters, G. B. and Wright, V. (2003) The national coordination of EU policy: The European Level, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

5 For reasons of space, this hypothesis appears simplified here. However, the Directive is not a ‘black box’; Member States might approve some of its provisions while objecting on others.

6 The dissertation will examine two Member States among the EU 15, which participated in the negotiations for the adoption of the Employment Equality Directive. The cases to be studied will most probably be Greece and the UK but the case selection is still in progress.

I H S — Zoe Lefkofridi / Scholar — 79

Moravcsik, A. (1991) Negotiating the Single European Act: National Interests and Conventional Statecraft in the European Community, International Organization, 45: 9.

Moravcsik, A. (1993), Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmental Approach, Journal of Common Market Studies, 31:4.

Moravcsik (1999) A new Statecraft? Supranational Entrepreneurs and International Cooperation, International Organization, 53: 2.

Schimmelfennig (2001). The Community Trap: Liberal Norms, Rhetorical Action, and the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union, International Organization, 55:1.

Tsoukalis, L. (2005). What Kind of Europe? Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.

Previous research

2002/3: The free movement of people in the enlargement debate: the restriction of the free movement of labor between Germany and Poland.

2003/4: Democracy in the 3rd Hellenic Republic: Parties, Elections and Europeanization.

Abstract

No political institution can exert more influence on the formation of the political system than its electoral system and its political parties. The present paper investigates the case of the 3rd Hellenic Republic. The basic assumption of this thesis is that parties and voters are rational actors, maximizing utility. As institutions constrain the political actors’ choices in two-level games, the two-levels of analysis are both national (domestic) and European. The assumption to be tested is that parties in two party-competition advocate centrist policies.

The paper argues that rational choice of reinforced PR led to easy formation of single party governments. It analyzes all attributes of the unique Greek electoral engineering, and observes the changes in the so-called ‘effective’ number of parties in the assembly. Results of reinforced PR at the national level are contrasted to results of pure PR at the European level in order to show how differently the party system performs across levels. The paper argues that the disproportionality between seats and votes discouraged voters from voting for smaller parties, which led to the function of the party system as two-party competition with centrifugal tendencies. Furthermore, the study investigates the two main parties’ identity and behavior in regard to their past as well as their strategies in order to win elections. It demonstrates the two office-seeking parties’ move towards the center from their initial positions at the genesis of the system. Moreover, it narrates their stance vis-à-vis the European Union and underlines that the move towards moderate policies was fostered by the conditional variable of the EU. The paper concludes that only after almost two decades of EU membership, the two office-seeking parties resulted in advocating similar policies to win the swing voters in the center.

I H S — Heidrun Maurer / Scholar — 81

Im Dokument Political Science (Seite 80-85)