Fritz W. Scharpf

Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic?

1. Political Democracy in a Capitalist Economy 2. Negative and Positive Integration 3. Regulatory Competition and Re-Regulation 4. National Solutions without Boundary Control 5. The European Contribution Conclusion: Multi-level Problem-Solving in Europe References Index

Games real actors play : actor-centered institutionalism in policy research

* Introduction * Policy Research in the Face of Complexity * Actor-Centered Institutionalism * Actors * Actor Constellations * Unilateral Action in Anarchic Fields and Minimal Institutions * Negotiated Agreements * Decisions by Majority Vote * Hierarchical Direction * Varieties of the Negotiating State

The European Social Model: Coping with the Challenges of Diversity

European integration has created a constitutional asymmetry between policies promoting market efficiencies and policies promoting social protection and equality. National welfare states are legally and economically constrained by European rules of economic integration, liberalization and competition law, whereas efforts to adopt European social policies are politically impeded by the diversity of national welfare states, differing not only in levels of economic development and hence in their ability to pay for social transfers and services but, even more significantly, in their normative aspirations and institutional structures. In response, the ‘open method of coordination’ is now being applied in the social-policy field. It leaves effective policy choices at the national level, but tries to improve these through promoting common objectives and common indicators, and through comparative evaluations of national policy performance. These efforts are useful but cannot overcome the constitutional asymmetry. Hence there is reason to search for solutions which must have the character of European law in order to establish constitutional parity with the rules of European economic integration, but which also must be sufficiently differentiated to accommodate the existing diversity of national welfare regimes. The article discusses two such options, ‘closer co-operation’ and a combination of differentiated ‘framework directives’ with the open method of co-ordination.

Negative and Positive Integration in the Political Economy of European Welfare States

The process of European integration is characterized by a fundamental asymmetry, described accurately by Joseph Weiler (1981) as a dualism between supranational European law and intergovernmental European policy making. As Weiler (1994) points out, political scientists have for too long focused only on aspects of intergovernmental negotiations while largely ignoring the establishment, by judge-made law, of a European legal order with precedence over national law. This omission has kept us from recognizing the politically significant parallel between Weiler’s dualism and the more familiar contrast between ‘negative’ and ‘positive integration’ (Tinbergen, 1965; Rehbinder and Stewart, 1984), that is, between measures increasing market integration (by eliminating restraints on trade and distortions of competition) and common European policies to shape the conditions under which markets operate.

Die Handlungsfähigkeit des Staates am Ende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts

In verschiedenen Politikbereichen wird das Problem des Wandels von Politiknetzwerken bzw. ihrer Resistenz gegen Veranderungen diskutiert. Die rasche Einbeziehung neuer Themen und Akteure ist insbesondere fur die Forschungs- und Technologiepolitik von Bedeutung, deren Ziel die rasche Umsetzung wissenschaftlicher Entdeckungen in okonomisch nutzbare Produkte sein mus. Dieses Papier befast sich mit der Reaktion des deutschen Supraleitungspolitiknetzwerkes auf einen Durchbruch in der Supraleitungsforschung, die Entdeckung von Hochtemperaturspupraleitern (HTSL). Es zeigt, wie und warum das etablierte Netzwerk das neue Thema in einer sehr spezifischen Weise aufgriff, wie und warum ein externer Akteur - mit Erfolg - versuchte, in das Netzwerk einzudringen, und wie sich die Struktur und die Politik des Netzwerks veranderte. Die Analyse zielt darauf ab, diese Transformation des gesamten Netzwerkes und die Formulierung des HTSL-Politikprogramms als das Ergebnis der Uberlagerung von Akteurstrategien und neuen Moglichkeitsstrukturen zu erklaren, die durch wissenschaftlichen und technologischen Wandel entstanden sind.

Introduction: the problem-solving capacity of multi-level governance

In the post-war decades, advanced capitalist economies have developed in symbiosis with democratic political systems with a high capacity for effective regulation and welfare-state compensations. As economic integration deepens globally and even more so within the European Community, national capacities to regulate and to tax mobile capital and firms are reduced, whereas governance at European or international levels is constrained by conflicts of interest among the governments involved. Nevertheless, as the contributions to this volume show, the effectiveness of problem-solving at the national as well as at the European and international levels varies considerably from one field to another. In this introduction, I attempt to identify the factors that could explain the varying intensity and direction of competitive pressures on national regulatory systems, as well as the greater or lesser political feasibility of European or international regulation.

Community and Autonomy: Multi-level Policy-making in the European Union

Abstract The completion of the internal market reduces the capacity of member states to shape the collective fate of their citizens through their own policies, while the policy‐making capacity of the European Community cannot be increased sufficiently to compensate for the loss of state control at the national level. If European economic integration nevertheless depends on policy co‐ordination, there is a need for co‐ordination techniques which impose minimal constraints on the autonomous problem‐solving capacities of member states. These depend, in turn, on the willingness of member states to pursue their own policy goals in ways which impose minimal constraints on free movement within the European market.

The Joint‐Decision Trap Revisited

The original analysis appears as a basically valid - if simplified - account of the institutional conditions of political policy choices in the EU and their consequences. It needs to be complemented, however, by a similar account of non-political policy-making in the supranational-hierarchical mode of governance by the ECB or ECJ.

The Viability of Advanced Welfare States in the International Economy: Vulnerability and Options

The article represents a preliminary and partial analysis of information collected in a comparative project on the adjustment of employment and social policies in twelve advanced capitalist welfare states to changes in the international economic environment since the early 1970s.1 After the post-war decades, when national governments were still able to control their economic boundaries, the first international challenge came in the form of the oil-price crisis of 1973/74, which confronted industrial economies with the double threat of cost-push inflation and demand-gap unemployment. It could be met if countries were able to achieve a form of ‘Keynesian concertation’ in which expansionary monetary and fiscal policies would defend employment while union wage restraint could be relied on to fight inflation. For this solution, ‘corporatist’ industrial relations institutions were a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Since the second oil-price crisis of 1979/80 was met by restrictive monetary and expansionary fiscal policies in the United States, the steep increase of real interest rates in the international capital markets forced other central banks to raise interest rates accordingly. As a consequence, employment-creating investments could only be maintained if the share of profits in the national product was significantly increased. Under the pressure of rapidly rising unemployment, unions in most countries were forced to accept this massive redistribution from labour to capital. In the 1990s, finally, the international integration of product and capital markets has been constraining private sector employment as well as the financial viability of the welfare state. But now institutional differences among different types of revenue systems, welfare states and employment systems – Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and Continental – create important differences in vulnerability that can no longer be met by standardized responses. The article concludes with an examination of the specific problems faced by, and the solutions available to, the different countries included in the study.

Institutions in Comparative Policy Research

The article explores the intersections between the different perspectives of institutional and policy research and discusses the characteristic purposes and conditions of theory-oriented policy research, where the usefulness of statistical analyses is generally constrained by the complexity and contingency of causal influences. Although comparative case studies are better able to deal with these conditions, their capacity to empirically identify the causal effect of differing institutional conditions on policy outcomes depends on a restrictive case selection that would need to hold constant the influence of two other sets of contingent factors—the policy challenges actually faced and the preferences and perceptions of the actors involved. When this is not possible, empirical policy research may usefully resort to a set of institutionalist working hypotheses that are derived from the narrowly specified theoretical assumptions of rational-choice institutionalism. Although these hypotheses will often be wrong, they are useful in guiding the empirical search for factors that are able to explain policy outcomes that deviate from predictions of the rationalist model.