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Parliamentary Scrutiny of the European Semester: The Case of Poland
Get PDFThe European Semester became an essential part of the revised governance architecture of the Europe 2020 reform strategy for the Single European Market under the conditions of the global financial crisis and the emerging eurozone crisis a decade ago. The article examines to what extent the European Semester offers channels to establish throughput legitimacy by granting national parliaments the ability to effectively scrutinise executive decision-making in the annual policy cycle. Poland is chosen as the case study for parliamentary scrutiny of the EU’s system of multi-level governance in the East-Central European region. The analysis adopts a liberal intergovernmentalist two-level approach. On the domestic level it concentrates on the involvement of the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, on the drafting of the Polish National Reform Plans for the annual Semester policy cycle between 2015 and 2020. The basis for the analysis are official transcripts from the plenary debates in the relevant committees, the European Affairs Committee and the Public Finance and the Economic Committee. The Polish case study illustrates that the European Semester represents a predominantly elite-driven process of policy coordination, which is strongly geared towards EU-level executive bargaining processes between national governments and the European Commission at the expense of domestic parliamentary scrutiny
The European Council, the Council, and the European Green Deal
Get PDFWe assess the response of the European Council and the Council of the European Union (hereafter the Council) to the emergence and development of the European Green Deal (EGD). First, we conduct a literature review of the historical role of the two intergovernmental institutions in EU climate policy development, drawing inspiration from new intergovernmentalism, historical institutionalism, and discursive institutionalism. Next, we provide an overview of the EGD itself and three of its core elements: (1) the ambition to achieve climate neutrality by 2050; (2) its systemic and integrative nature; and (3) the just transition approach. We then present the results of a qualitative content analysis of all Council and European Council Conclusions from 2018 to 2020. Our findings show that the European Council and the Council have declared support for the EGD and its underlying principles. The European Council engaged with all three elements but mentioned the objective of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 most frequently and with growing intensity over the years studied. The Council similarly discussed the three elements of the EGD and gave increasing focus to the integrated/systemic transition over the course of the years 2018–2020. Our empirical analysis suggests that, on paper, the Council and the European Council may manage to govern through the organisational turbulence of member state divisions on climate governance. Furthermore, environmental turbulence arising from external contexts (e.g., economic and health crises) did not dampen their declared support towards the goals of the EGD
Ranked Choice Voting in Australia and America: Do Voters Follow Party Cues?
Get PDFRanked choice voting (RCV) is experiencing a surge of interest in the United States, highlighted by its 2018 use for Congressional elections in Maine, the first application of a ranked ballot for national-level elections in American history. A century ago, the same system was introduced in another federal, two-party continental-sized democracy: Australia. RCV’s utility as a solution to inter-party coordination problems helps to explain its appeal in both countries, underscoring the potential benefits of a comparative analytical approach. This article examines this history of adoption and then turns to a comparison of recent RCV elections in Maine with state elections in New South Wales and Queensland, the two Australian states which share the same form of RCV as that used in the United States. This comparison shows how candidate and party endorsements influence voters’ rankings and can, over time, promote reciprocal exchanges between parties and broader systemic support for RCV. Such cross-partisan support helps explain the stability of RCV in Australia, with implications for the system’s prospects in the United States
Driving the European Green Deal in Turbulent Times
Get PDFThe European Green Deal (EGD) is an ambitious strategy. However, significant events, incidents, and demands, from democratic backsliding in the EU to the Covid-19 pandemic, are causing the ground to shift underfoot. These events go beyond ordinary changes or even individual crises, cumulatively fuelling a “new normal” of turbulence for the EU, encompassing rapid, unpredictable changes. This turbulence can help and hinder policy design and implementation, requiring policy actors to think outside the box and beyond the status quo. This article investigates how the European Commission and other key actors can engage effectively with turbulence to ensure the successful delivery and implementation of the EGD. The first half of the article strengthens and adapts turbulent governance literature (Ansell & Trondal, 2018). It delineates how turbulence differs from crisis; expands the forms of turbulence to include horizontal scalar and policy turbulence, as well as its transversal attribute; and shifts the focus to governing with turbulence rather than against turbulence. The second half undertakes an initial analysis of the EGD in light of turbulence and provides a springboard for further investigations within this thematic issue and beyond. It is apparent that the EGD is both responding and contributing to a varied landscape of turbulence. Policy actors must identify and understand the sources of turbulence—including their transversal nature and the potential for responses to increase turbulence—if they are to effectively govern with turbulence
Post-Truth Politics, Digital Media, and the Politicization of the Global Compact for Migration
Get PDFThe debate over the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) in late 2018 showcases the crucial role of digital and, in particular, social media as vehicles of disinformation that populist actors can exploit in an effort to create resentment and fear in the public sphere. While mainstream political actors and legacy media initially did not address the issue, right-wing populist actors claimed ownership by framing (presumably obligatory) mass immigration as a matter of social, cultural, economic, and not least political risk, and created an image of political and cultural elites conspiring to keep the issue out of the public sphere. Initially advanced via digital and social media, such frames resonated sufficiently strongly in civil society to politicize the GCM in various national public spheres. In this article, these dynamics are explored by comparing the politicization of the GCM in three EU member states, namely Germany, Austria, and Sweden. Using a process-tracing design, the article (a) identifies the key actors in the process, (b) analyzes how the issue emerged in social and other digital media and travelled from digital media into mainstream mass media discourse, and finally (c) draws comparative conclusions from the three analyzed cases. Particular emphasis is placed on the frames used by right-wing populist actors, how these frames resonated in the wider public sphere and thereby generated communicative power against the GCM, ultimately forcing the issue onto the agenda of national public spheres and political institutions
Education and “Categorical Inequalities’’: Manifestation of Segregation in Six Country Contexts in Europe
Get PDFThis article deals with the educational arrangements and the multiple inequalities that they reproduce from a comparative perspective. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in six countries (Austria, Hungary, Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey, and the UK) as part of a multinational research project concerning justice in Europe, the article explores the mechanisms through which education sustains and reproduces “categorical inequalities.” Although equal access to education is granted by constitutional laws as well as by incorporation of international treaties in the national legal frameworks, it is commonly the educational arrangements that identify the features of access to good quality education in a given context. Dealing with different country cases that have their path dependencies in the arrangements of education, the article provides insights on understanding how different features of segregation in education operate as mechanisms of exclusion for students from a disadvantaged background. Hence, the disadvantages manifest themselves concerning socio‐economic status, ethnicity, race, and minority background. By focusing on the country‐based debates around school segregation, which goes together with the segregated character of urban settings and school choice patterns, the article shows how the institutional context with or without residency‐based registration rules and different types of schools with different resources perpetuate multiple inequalities. In a context where educational arrangements operate as a mechanism of sustaining categorical inequalities, identity‐based differences, combined with economic disadvantages lead to a situation where students from vulnerable and minority groups face multiple forms of exclusion
The Contextualized Inclusiveness of Parental Leave Benefits
Get PDFThis article builds on a recent operationalization of inclusiveness of parental leave benefits proposed by Ivana Dobrotić and Sonja Blum and complements it by developing indicators of contextualized inclusiveness. This contextualized approach sets the formal entitlement and eligibility rules of social rights to parental leave benefits in the relevant socio‐economic context of the country to which these rules apply. The aim is to shed light on the extent to which parts of the country’s population are actually excluded or are at risk of being excluded from access to parental leave at a given moment in time. This is strongly shaped by, among other factors, the structure of the population according to employment status, job tenure or type of contract. An important characteristic of the methodological approach adopted in this article is that the proposed contextualized indicators are based on easily and publicly available and internationally comparable data. This makes the approach easily applicable by wide audiences, academic and practice‐oriented ones alike. The proposed indicators are then applied to sixteen European countries and show a much more diversified and nuanced landscape of contextualized inclusiveness of parental leave entitlements in Europe than the comparison of formal inclusiveness done by Dobrotić and Blum suggested. This study also shows that higher formal inclusiveness of employment‐based parental leave benefits was more common in countries with higher shares of those social groups that, in case of less inclusive regulations, would not have access to parental benefits
When Does Expanded Eligibility Translate into Increased Take-Up? An Examination of Parental Leave Policy in Luxembourg
Get PDFThis article aims to explore the role of eligibility for parental leave as a determinant of access and as an enabler of leave take-up. To analyse the link between eligibility and take-up, we study a unique policy change in Luxembourg’s parental leave scheme. The country’s 2016 parental leave reform relaxed the eligibility criteria to enable marginal part-time working parents to access the parental leave scheme for the first time. We focus on this change and examine to what extent relaxing the eligibility criteria translated into increased take-up by the marginal part-time working parents who became eligible. To quantify this transition, we analyse trends in and patterns of eligibility for the scheme in Luxembourg between 2009 and 2018 among first-time parents working full-time, part-time, or marginal part-time hours. We use a subsample of Luxembourg-resident, cohabiting, first-time parents (N = 6,254) drawn from the social security data. Our analysis shows that as eligibility is dependent on individual factors, it has similarities among mothers and fathers, whereas take-up is notably greater for mothers. After the reform, we observe that marginal part-time working mothers started taking parental leave, but up to 2018, the reform’s outreach to marginal part-time working fathers remained limited. We also find that foreign national parents are less likely to be eligible for parental leave and have lower take-up rates. Despite the gendered parental leave take-up behaviours in parallel with international evidence, marginal part-time working mothers’ positive response to the reform indicates progress towards strengthening women’s labour market attachment in Luxembourg
Materiality in the Seam Space: Sketches for a Transitional Port City Dome District
Get PDFBiomass material volatility generates new opportunities for port-city relationships. Alternative energy markets require specialized port facilities to handle new bulk commodities like biomass. Wood pellets, a type of biomass, present warehousing challenges due to combustion danger. The industrial response to this risk has generated new storage forms for port regions. The return to bulk cargo reintroduces materiality as a focus for port city research, which had generally been regarded as a peripheral concern since the advent of the shipping container. The container had come to represent a borderless, ‘fast capitalism’ throughput model, but research on port ‘accidents’ has complicated this reductive globalization narrative. The programmatic dynamism of wood pellet dome structures suggests new spatially-porous possibilities for an interstitial border space at the port-city interface with material commonalities and hybrid potentials for resilient logistics and civic facilities. In contrast to container cargo unitization, the dome signifies the standardization of the coastal/riparian port environment. Dome structures can help ports plan for the complex challenges of cargo material behaviors and increasing extreme weather events. The article begins with wood pellet materiality to then explore programmatic possibilities that industrial construction technology generates. Conceptually, this joins the proposal of port as ‘seam space’ with port-city resilience planning and the porosity celebrated in recent urbanism literature. Scaling up from wood pellet materiality to an interstitial port-city district, the article contributes to calls for increased attention to materiality as a means to envision new urban agendas
Characteristics of Middle European Holiday Highfliers
Get PDFThis article estimates a count-data model on the flight behaviour of Austrian holiday-makers based on information from a large representative quarterly survey spanning the years 2014–2016. On average, the number of holiday flights ranges between 0.6 and 1.2 per year for residents in the least populated region and the capital, respectively. Results of the estimations reveal that the number of holiday flights is highest for persons with tertiary degrees, of a young age (16–24 years) and capital city residents, while it is lowest for individuals with children and large households. Residents of the capital city fly 78 percent more often in a given quarter than those living in Carinthia, the most rural region. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis reveals that the difference is rather related to location than to variations in individual characteristics. Socio-demographic aspects such as age, household size and travelling with children are of no relevance for the holiday flying behaviour of capital residents