Politicisation and economic governance design

ABSTRACT

The functional pressures shaping policy design may be disrupted in salient policies and politicised contexts, according to recent postfunctionalist/new intergovernmentalist theories. We contrast these expectations with those derived from liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism by analysing the reforms of the European Union economic governance. Its Council-centred enforcement, which has been a dominant feature until the euro crisis, despite noncompliance, does not sit comfortably with traditional theories but can be explained by policy salience and implementation uncertainties. Instead, the emphasis that traditional approaches assign to noncompliance, commitment problems, threats of exclusion and veto, issue linkages, path dependencies and supranational decision-making, allows to adequately account for the overall direction of reforms toward more tightening and delegation, notwithstanding the pooled enforcement in recent ancillary measures. Postfunctionalist theories overall fall short in highly politicised contexts, exactly where they should do most of the explaining. We conclude discussing politicisation as a strategic elite response.

KEYWORDS:

• Politicisation
• policy design
• economic governance
• liberal intergovernmentalism
• neofunctionalism
• new intergovernmentalism

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the guest editors of the special issue, Philipp Broniecki, Frank Schimmelfennig, the anonymous reviewers and the participants at the Workshop on ‘Politicising and De-Politicising the European Union’ King’s College London, 15–16 December 2017 and at the panel of the ECPR Standing Group on the European Union Conference, Sciences Po, Paris, 13–15 June 2018.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Fabio Franchino is professor of political science at the Università degli Studi di Milano.

Camilla Mariotto is postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Political Science of the University of Innsbruck.

ORCID

Fabio Franchino http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8774-6494

Camilla Mariotto http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1116-2975

Notes

1 Except perhaps for pension reforms, it is unclear whether the criteria for evaluating budgets listed in the corrective regulation allows for greater discretion.

2 Yearly revisions of the structural balance are larger than 0.5 percent of GDP, i.e. the required baseline annual adjustment (Claeys et al. 2016, p. 6).

3 For positions on capacity building measures, see Lehner and Wasserfallen (2019). As corroborating evidence, we find Germany, Finland and the Netherlands opposing article 13.4 of the SGP enforcement regulation that demands the Commission to draft a report on Eurobonds.