https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0553-8574
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ABSTRACT
The policy-responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have fuelled expectations about potential paradigmatic change in European Economic Governance (EEG). Building on existing scholarship on policy paradigms, we develop testable expectations about the steps preceding paradigmatic change, which we explore on the basis of three types of data. First, we show how public spending in three key Eurozone countries between 2008 and 2021 follows predicted patterns of the punctuated equilibrium model. Second, we show that governments’ justifications for their annual budgets reflect a gradual change in policy-ideas between 2009 and 2020, following the expected three orders of change. Third, we show how this gradual change is also present in the European Country-Specific Recommendations and in the bureaucratic logics within the European Commission. Our findings reconcile three strands of scholarship on policy change and have implications for our understanding of the European integration process and for future research on economic policy-making within EEG.
Acknowledgments
This paper was presented at the Lunch Seminars organized by the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Turin and at a panel of the 2022 annual conference of the Council for European Studies. The authors are extremely thankful for the valuable feedback received on these occasions. The authors want also to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the first version of the manuscript. This research benefitted from support from the “Wellsire” project led by Professor Anton Hemerijck at the European University Institute in Fiesole (Italy), funded by the European Research Council (grant agreement No 882276).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2023.2258442
Notes
1. On 9th November 2022, the European Commission adopted a Communication titled ‘Building an economic governance framework fit for the challenges ahead’ and on 26th April 2023 it published a package of three proposals to change the EEG framework (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2023/747906/EPRS_BRI(2023)747906_EN.pdf).
2. This movement is caused by cognitive (i.e. lack/elision of useful information) and institutional frictions (i.e. past legacies, institutional design), which hinder the capability of decision-makers of updating constantly and proportionally their choices to incoming information (Jones and Baumgartner Citation2005).
3. Among the different NGEU programs, the Recovery and Resilience Facility represents the centrepiece, which consists of both loans and non-repayable grants to support MS’ reforms and investments. Funds can be accessed conditional on the implementation of National Recovery and Resilience Plans whose broad goals have been agreed upon by the EU to make MS’ economies greener, digital and more resilient.
4. This is confirmed also by descriptive statistics in Table S1 in Supplementary Material.
5. The threshold for a change to be recognized as a punctuation is an arbitrary decision of the researcher/s, who usually use a 200% limit (among others, John and Bevan Citation2012; Sebők and Berki Citation2018). We chose a 100% threshold to equalize huge increases and dramatic cuts which happen with the cancellation of a budget category. We chose this method to prove that the pattern of budgetary changes in the three countries is punctuated by extreme modifications. Different approaches would have caused a huge loss of information (e.g. considering only macro categories without looking at micro categories), difficulties in the comprehension (e.g. using line graphs with 66 micro categories) or not justifiable (e.g. using line graphs with only some of the micro categories).