The implementation of EU social policy: the ‘Southern Problem’ revisited

Abstract

This article analyses the implementation of EU social policy in the Southern European member states. When studied by implementation research, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain are often treated as a homogeneous group, and some authors speak of a particular ‘Southern Problem’ while others contest this. In this article, we will take issue with central explanatory frameworks of this literature – the existence of a high level of policy misfit, inefficient administrative and political systems, and weak non-state actors and civil societies in Southern Europe. We analyse the effects of these factors on the timeliness and correctness of implementation in the area of social policy. In a first step, we show that images of a homogenous ‘Southern laggard group’ are indeed inappropriate. In a second step, we present a new explanation of why the Southern countries are not as uniform as often supposed: they belong to different ‘worlds of compliance’.

Keywords:

• Compliance
• enforcement
• implementation
• social partners
• social policy
• Southern Europe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 15th International Conference of the Council for European Studies (29 March–2 April 2006) in Chicago. We thank all participants of ‘Southern Europe panel’ as well as the anonymous referees of the journal for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are also very grateful to our co-authors of ‘Complying with Europe’, Gerda Falkner and Oliver Treib, for stimulating debates.

Notes

We anticipate that the ‘world of law observance’ performs much better than the ‘world of neglect’. In the ‘world of domestic politics’ we can expect the implementation performance to fall in between the other two worlds only over a large number of cases.

On different ‘legal cultures of Europe’ when analysing peoples' willingness to comply with law or European Court of Justice case law, see also Gibson and Caldeira (1996).

In principle, misfit can concern either policy content (policy misfit) or apply to matters of procedure and affect domestic politics and/or the polity – in our Southern cases we did not find evidence of politics/polity-related misfit.

Our interviews also included questions on how far the implementation processes studied revealed typical patterns.

In the overall project, we systematically tested for a broad range of factors expected to be relevant along the lines of the three worlds (Falkner et al. 2005). In these case studies, we also provide detailed empirical evidence of which factors did not play a role in the respective ‘worlds’.

This is exactly the pattern also typically found in Central and Eastern European countries (‘world of dead letters’, Falkner et al. 2008).