Zartaloudis, Sotirios
(2013)
Wielding soft power in a world of neglect: the impact of the
European employment strategy in Greece and Portugal.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
The thesis investigates under what conditions the European Employment Strategy
(EES) can influence the domestic employment policy of European Union member
states. It aims to answer the question by examining two critical or ‘least likely’ cases:
Greece and Portugal by focusing on three key areas of employment policy: public
employment services, gender equality policies (mainstreaming, reconciliation and pay
gaps) and ‘flexicurity’. The thesis employs the ‘Europeanization’ approach and tests
the hypothesis that ‘if the EES altered Greek and Portuguese employment policy at
all, it did so through one of three main Europeanization pathways: (i) policy
learning; (ii) the domestic empowerment of policy entrepreneurs; (iii) financial
conditionality.’ In examining the domestic impact of the EES the thesis does not
presume an Europeanization effect a priori. Rather, the research begins from the
domestic level (in a process-tracing method) and investigates whether, how and to
what extent the EES had a role in the Greek and Portuguese domestic policy. The
possibility of other variables, either external or internal, being pre-eminent is
examined. The empirical study sought to triangulate a wide range of methods and
sources. Although Greece and Portugal share a number of characteristics that may
inhibit Europeanization in this type of area, empirical evidence largely supported the
research hypothesis and suggested that two key conditions were conducive to the EES
having a domestic impact in these cases: the existence of successful policy
entrepreneurs who would actively use the EES as a policy window to promote their
agenda and -when these were absent or lacked access to power and resources- the
existence of the European Social Fund financial conditionality. Thus, soft power can
be wielded in the world of neglect without policy learning which is considered the
main ‘soft’ mechanism of domestic change in the literature.
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