Markus Haverland

National Adaptation to European Integration: The Importance of Institutional Veto Points

The repercussions of European integration on national policymaking have increasingly drawn scholarly attention, yet, the determinants of national adaptation to the European Union are still poorly understood. This article takes issue with evolving arguments which grant crucial importance to the “goodness of fit†between European provisions and national rules and practices for explaining the degree of national adjustment to European requirements. In the case of the implementation of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the country with the greatest misfit, the United Kingdom, adapted more successfully than the country which only needed incremental adjustments, Germany. The German record was also worse than the Dutch, despite the higher adaptation pressure of the latter. The case study suggests that the number of institutional veto points that central governments has to face when imposing European provisions on their constituencies, ultimately tend to shape the pace and quality of implementation, regardless of differential degrees in the goodness of fit.

Review Essay: The new politics and scholarship of the welfare state:

The development of the advanced welfare states has long been an issue attracting enormous scholarly attention within both political science and sociology. For a long time, the welfare state literature was about explaining the growth of modern welfare states in general as well as variation across OECD countries.1 However, since the publication of Pierson’s seminal work (1994; 1996), the welfare state debate has increasingly shifted towards the question of welfare state retrenchment. Numerous journal articles and books about welfare state retrenchment have been published, and we believe that this literature is now so extensive that a review is warranted. Pierson argues that the politics of retrenchment is qualitatively different from the politics of expansion. We claim that the scholarship about retrenchment is also markedly different from the scholarship about the expansion of the welfare state. The expansion literature was dominated by economic and sociological approaches focusing on the societal forces shaping the growth of the welfare state (van Kersbergen, forthcoming). Following van Kersbergen, we argue that the retrenchment literature is dominated by political science approaches. We claim that this is partly visible in the factors highlighted in investigations of retrenchment at the level of welfare states and partly in the attention paid to differences across policy sectors. This review has four sections. First, there is a brief outline of Pierson’s main argument. Then we turn to the main part of the review; the post-Pierson debate. Here we will first look at the factors suggested as explanations for retrenchment at the level of welfare states, and subsequently we turn to the factors suggested to explain retrenchment in relation to specific policy sectors focusing on pensions and health policy. We finish with some suggestions for a further research agenda.2

When the welfare state meets the regulatory state: EU occupational pension policy

ABSTRACT The increasing relevance of occupational pensions for the income security of the elderly moves this policy area to the core of the tension between national redistributive welfare states and EU-wide single market regulations. Focusing on the European pension fund directive, the paper investigates whether European occupational pension policies are primarily shaped by the Commissions and international business agenda of market liberalization or the government preferences for national autonomy in social policy. The study finds that the directive liberalizes the pension market to some extent. Member states largely succeeded in securing the national prerogative in social policy. In explaining this outcome, the paper argues that the nature of domestic pension arrangements not only shapes government preferences but also the preferences of the European Parliament and important business actors. Business was too fragmented internally to succeed in establishing a full-blown liberal Europe in regard to occupational pensions, although their pressure was sufficient to secure liberal investment principles.

Another Dutch Miracle? Explaining Dutch and German Pension Trajectories

This paper compares old-age pension policy trajectories in the Netherlands and Germany. These two advanced welfare states have developed different financial arrangements despite similarities in policy legacies, political institutions and party systems. Both countries established and extended comprehensive pay-as-you-go financed public pension schemes in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the Netherlands achieved a fully fledged multi-tiered pension system with a strong funded component, while until recently the German system relied almost exclusively on pay-as-you-go financing. The Netherlands has, therefore, a financially more viable and sustainable set of pension arrangements than Germany, at least under the current and foreseeable economic and demographic conditions. The paper reconstructs the pension trajectories in the two countries in order to explore the role of path dependency, political choice and contingency in explaining this divergence. It is argued that divergence is essentially unrelated to different strategic choices or variations in institutional capacities for reform. Instead, divergence is the largely unintended consequence of a series of incremental decisions in combination with contingent events and developments.

Sectors at Different Speeds: Analysing Transposition Deficits in the European Union

This article reports on a quantitative study of 1,117 cases of transposition of directives in five EU Member States and eight policy sectors between 1978 and 2002. It finds significant cross-sectoral performance differences, which complicate generalization from studies of only one sector. These differences can be partly explained by systematic cross-sectoral differences in transposition deadlines given, the share of Council versus Commission directives, and the legal implementation measures used.

Member State Interest Articulation in the Commission Phase: Institutional Pre-Conditions for Influencing ‘Brussels’

There is a large literature on Member State influence in the European Union, typically focusing on a combination of preferences of the Member States and their strategies with an emphasis on Council negotiations. However, prior to Council negotiations Member States also seek to influence the Commissions development of legislative proposals. This paper argues that Member States need scientific expertise, experiential knowledge and target group support to make this strategy work and that the availability of these resources is partly shaped by domestic institutions, such as the territorial organization of the state, the recruitment principles of governmental departments, and the structure of governments relationship with business groups and societal interests. As a plausibility probe for our argument we have conducted a case study of the Dutch governments strategy regarding the REACH Regulation.

Agenda-setting by the European Commission. Seeking public opinion?

ABSTRACT Historically, the European Commission has followed an expert-based depoliticized route to gain attention for policy issues and the credibility to deal with them. Given growing politicization, we ask whether the Commission might increasingly seek citizens’ views and whether there is patterned variation. We provide the first mapping of special Eurobarometers, the massive instrument for issue-specific public opinion. We found a steep increase and a curvilinear pattern: public opinion is rarely invited in areas of exclusive European Union competencies and exclusive national competencies. Most special Eurobarometers focus on shared competencies. Citizens are almost never asked about expenditure programmes and never on immigration. There is large variation across the Directorates General, which is only weakly related to the amount of planned legislation and the number of expert committees. Business-oriented Directorates General are much less likely to seek public opinion. These results open up promising avenues for research on agenda-setting strategies at times of politicization.

Policies of the EU Towards Occupational Pensions: Limits to Regulation

The European Union has only lately and reluctantly become involved in pension policy, and there is not much EU regulation focusing on the social aspects of pensions. Exceptions to this are directives dealing with issues of gender equality and issues related to the free movement of workers. While Davy (Chapter 6 in this book) provides a broad overview of EU pension policy, including the regulation of occupational pensions, this chapter focuses on the debates concerning the formation of the key directive concerning the ‘activities and supervision for institutions of occupational retirement provisions’ (in the remainder: ‘the pension fund directive’), that was adopted in 2003.1

Introduction: Adapting Public Policies for an Ageing Society

Population ageing is one of the most fundamental developments our societies are experiencing. In 1960 the average man in the OECD worked 50 years with a life expectancy of 68 years. Thus, 74 per cent of his life was devoted to work. By 2000, only 50 per cent of an average man’s life was devoted to the labour market (OECD 2000: 14–17). Within the European Union, the ratio of people over 64 to the working age population (20–64) may very well double in the course of the next 50 years from 26.7 per cent (2000) to 53.4 per cent (2050) (EPC 2000: 32). The combination of an ageing population, generous state commitments to public benefits, and slower economic growth is causing the welfare state to be in a condition of ‘‘permanent austerity’’ (Pierson 1998). The rising costs of age-related programmes are also problematic in the context of international developments that constrain public finance such as economic and financial internationalization and, for EMU countries, the tight Maastricht convergence criteria. Therefore, the reform of age-related policies ranks high on the political agendas of almost all advanced industrial democracies. At the same

The politics of (de-)politicization and venue choice: A scoping review and research agenda on EU financial regulation and economic governance

ABSTRACT Scholarly interest in EU financial regulation and economic governance has increased sharply over the last decade, but the literature on their politics remains fragmented. We present a scoping literature review which systematically locates and aggregates academic articles on their politics in ISI-ranked journals between 1999 and 2016. We identify lacunas in this literature by mapping its strands onto the EU political system. We then present a system-level research agenda that focuses on the cycles of depoliticization and politicization that strongly characterize the politics in these areas. Future research must pay careful attention to the conditions, mechanisms and, especially the venues that (dis)allow the linkage of societal politicization to EU-level politics. This approach is deeply rooted in the specifics of the politics of these policy areas, but also draws on the strengths of research in these areas to increase its relevance for broader debates on the future of the EU itself.