Power and ideas: the legitimisation of the end of the Irish social partnership model during the Eurozone crisis

ABSTRACT

One of the consequences of the Eurozone crisis was the collapse of social concertation. Some authors have explained that the need for fiscal retrenchment deprived governments of resources to offer concessions to trade unions (Regan, 2013). Although these explanations partly explain why social partnership ended, we do not yet know how political actors achieved this institutional change, neither which ideas they used to legitimate it. This article adopts a discursive institutionalist framework (Schmidt, 2008, 2010) to identify the ideas and the causal mechanisms through which political leaders were able to exercise ideational power in a paradigmatic case study: Ireland. The article argues that external constraints during the crisis empowered specific political actors that used the crisis as a ‘moment of political opportunity’ (Béland, 2005, p. 10) to end the social partnership model. They constructed a communicative discourse to legitimise this change based on the ideas that social partnership was dysfunctional and undemocratic.

KEYWORDS:

• Eurozone crisis
• Ireland
• social partnership
• democracy
• discursive institutionalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Catherine Moury for her contribution to earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful for the constructive feedback received from the anonymous peer reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Catherine Moury for her contribution to earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful for the constructive feedback received from the anonymous peer reviewers.

Notes

1 Social partners and the government signed the last social partnership agreement, ‘Towards 2016: Review and Transitional Agreement 2008/2009’ in November 2008 (Regan, 2013, p. 134).

2 Bertie Ahern was Minister for Labour in 1987 and Prime Minister from 1997 to 2008 and Charles Haughey Prime Minister was Prime Minister from 1987 to 1992.

3 Saving the future – How social partnership shaped Ireland’s economic success, by Tim Hastings, Brian Sheehan and Pádraig Yeates.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the project ‘Democracy in Times of Crisis: Power and Discourse in a Three-Level Game’ [PTDC/IVC-CPO/2247/2014].

Notes on contributors

Angie Gago

Angie Gago is a post-doc researcher at the University of Lausanne (UNIL). She obtained her PhD in Political Studies at the University of Milan and she is also a Master’s in Politics and Democracy (UNED) and International Relations (London Metropolitan University). Her research interests are the Eurozone crisis, public policies, welfare state reforms and concertation processes. She has presented her work at various conferences (CES, ECPR, ESPanet, etc.) and it has been published in various books and journals such as South European Society and Politics.