Europeanization and Italian policy for the Mezzogiorno

Abstract

The change in Italy's main regional policy (for the south) in the course of the 1990s provides a prima facie case of Europeanization tout court for scholars of Europeanization. A new policy was adopted that was evidently inspired by the European regional policy launched in 1988. However, examining Europeanization only from a top-down perspective (in terms of policy outcome) provides a limited insight into the process. A bottom-up approach that evaluates the impact of Europeanization through a temporal dimension of change, integrating the Europeanized and domestic effects, allows a more precise assessment of the degree to which Europeanization may have caused or reinforced a process of change in Italian southern policy.

Keywords:

• EU regional policy
• Europeanization
• Italian southern policy
• policy change
• policy paradigm