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- Lehrstuhl für Politikwissenschaft (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stephan Grohs) (53) (remove)
Short presentation of the corresponding conference paper "A soft shell with a powerful core? Soft Europeanisation and social policy: a new understanding of the Open Method of Coordination and its potential to enhance social welfare in Europe", focussing on the theoretical idea and empirical evidence.
The regulation of interest mediation in democratic, economic relevant countries has not been systematically analyzed in a big N-study so far (smaller exceptions are (Chari et al., 2010; Holman and Luneburg, 2012)). This is surprising since interest mediation itself, the integration of societal actors into the decision-making processes, has been studied from many different perspectives using varying methodological approaches (Reutter, 2012; Willems and von Winter, 2007; Beyers et al., 2008; Eising et al., 2017).
This paper starts with the assumption that each country has a distinct way of dealing with the interests in its society, ranging from social, environmental, religious to economic ones, just to name a few. Each democratic country has to decide, how and in which ways societal interests are integrated into decision-making and which rules apply for these processes.
Existing research in interest mediation in general has in common that the concept of institutions helps us to map similarities as well as differences in the system of interest mediation. Institutions are understood as man-made, formalized (written) or non-formalized (unwritten) common conceptions or understandings of how power and other resources are distributed and exerted, how competences and responsibilities are defined, shaped and shared, as well as how interdependencies are structured (Morisse-Schilbach, 2012; March and Olsen, 1989; Mayntz and Scharpf, 1995).
The paper offers a conceptual framework to map the existing institutions relevant for regulating interest mediation in OECD countries to help understand the qualitative similarities and differences. To do so, it looks at formalized (written) or non-formalized (unwritten) rules, in terms of laws and by-laws, administrative procedures, and patterns of practices. The aim is to measure a) the openness of the interest mediation system in terms of equal access for all societal interests, and b) the level of formalized and non-formalized regulation to arrive at a typology of either open or closed as well as regulated or unregulated interest mediation systems.
The European Semester is an instrument for coordinating and monitoring the economic and fiscal policies of the EU member states. However, since the European Commission explicitly emphasizes the importance of the countries’ public administration for economic growth, it seems reasonable to assume that the member states’ bureaucracy will also be addressed within the framework of the European Semester. This article therefore examines the admi-nistrative policy ideas and reform proposals of the European Commission by analysing the annual country-specific recommendations addressed to all EU member states between 2011 and 2019 under the European Semester. Applying quantitative text analysis to all CSRs during the investigation period shows that the European Semester is used to a considerable extent to propose administrative reforms to the Member States. Out of the 466 reform proposals identified, more than half were related to either the management of public finances or the administrative structure in the member states. On the average (without Greece), each country received 17,3 reform proposals with administrative policy implications over the entire period. However, the differences between the EU member states are significant, as can be seen from the distribution of the reform proposals.