The impact of the EU on Turkey: Toward streamlining Europeanisation as a research programme

This article provides a reassessment of the literature on the transformative impact of the EU on Turkey through the lens of the Europeanisation research programme. It relies on systematic examination of a sample of the literature based on substantive findings, research design and methods. It suggests that this sample displays limitations characteristic of the Europeanisation research programme and proposes to remedy these limitations by applying the research design and methods used therein for generating empirically based comparative research on Turkey. © 2010 European Consortium for Political Research

On consensus, constraint and choice: economic and monetary integration and Europe's welfare states

This article reassesses the theoretical expectations and empirical findings in the political economy literature on the impact of economic and monetary union (EMU) on European welfare states. After summarizing the literature which views EMU as the symbol of the primordial conversion to neoliberalism, the article identifies the underlying hypothesis, assumptions, and predictions of the earlier, largely apprehensive literature of the 1990s which was based on ex ante convictions on EMU's social consequences. Then it reviews more recent ex post studies pointing to dynamics of welfare state resilience informed by new empirical evidence that became available and new theoretical approaches that became influential. After highlighting the conditions under which welfare reforms have taken place and the role played by EMU in these processes, this article concludes by re-evaluating the earlier expectations in the literature in light of the empirical findings and draws lessons for the discipline of political economy

From budgetary pressures to welfare state retrenchment? : economic and monetary union and the politics of welfare state reform

This study examines the relationship between economic and monetary integration culminating in Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and welfare state trajectories focusing on the cases of Belgium, Italy, and Greece in the 1990s. The conventional wisdom on this relationship expected that EMU would lead to across-the-board downsizing of the European welfare states through imposing macroeconomic austerity in general and budgetary restraint in particular. The study questions the validity of this prediction which is represented by the austerity hypothesis. Based on an analysis of social expenditure data in the run-up to EMU the study reveals that spending levels remained largely stable and therefore that the welfare states of the EMU-candidates largely escaped radical retrenchment. Avoiding significant and systematic expenditure retreat was possible not only in the face of powerful fiscal pressures but also during a period when policymakers had the opportunity to justify even the most draconian measures in the name of achieving EMU membership. Hence the study addresses the following puzzle: How could Europe's welfare states largely avert across-the-board downsizing during the 1990s despite fiscal pressures they faced on the road to EMU? Through an examination of episodes of welfare reform in three critical cases (Belgium, Italy, and Greece) which needed to go through drastic budgetary cutbacks for EMU membership, the study shows that the Maastricht criteria did compel successive governments in these member states to propose radical welfare reforms, vindicating the conventional wisdom's expectations. In episodes of welfare reform, however, governments discovered that their reform capacities were largely limited due to domestic opposition from an alliance of entrenched interests. The convergence period was marred with recurrent mass mobilization of unions against welfare reforms which forced governments to scale back their original ambitions or scrap them altogether. This shows that the expectations of the conventional wisdom that EMU would actually lead to massive retrenchment of Europe's welfare states, however, are not borne out by the evidence on welfare state trajectories in the 1990s

Exogenous Pressures and Social Policy: Greece and Turkey in Comparative Perspective

This paper looks at contemporary social policy developments in Greece and Turkey in light of exogenous economic pressures in the period 1980s-2000s. Three sources of exogenous pressures, which allegedly lead to a reduction in social expenditure budgets, are identified: globalization, the process of European integration in its EMU phase and IMF conditionality. Our case studies show that both countries were exposed to impending pressures of economic liberalization, but these exogenous pressures have not resulted in anticipated social policy outcomes. First, social expenditure levels in both countries have not declined; instead, we report rising trends in expenditure. Secondly, and especially in the case of Greece, the 20-year period analyzed shows an expansion in social welfare programmes. Thirdly, those outcomes are mediated by salient domestic political factors, such as democratization and liberalization of the political space. Finally, the positive association between an expanding welfare state and the presence of social democratic/socialist governments, reported in the literature, seems vindicated in our research

Conceptualizing and operationalizing social rights: Towards higher convergent validity in SCIP and CWED

Bolukbasi HT, Öktem KG. Conceptualizing and operationalizing social rights: Towards higher convergent validity in SCIP and CWED. Journal of European Social Policy. 2018;28(1):86-100

Measuring welfare states beyond the three worlds: Refining state-of-the-art tools

Bolukbasi HT, Öktem KG, Savas E. Measuring welfare states beyond the three worlds: Refining state-of-the-art tools. Social Policy & Administration . 2021.The past decades saw the expansion of the geography of comparative welfare state research beyond the three worlds embracing a heterogeneous set of mainly middle-income countries. In response, two leading state-of-the-art tools for measuring welfare states through social rights, Social Citizenship Indicators Program (SCIP) and Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED), integrated many new countries into their datasets. Comparative welfare state research has yet to address the extent to which these measurement tools originally developed for measuring classic welfare states work equally well for measuring welfare states beyond the three worlds. In this article, we explore a number of challenges these datasets face in measuring these new cases. These challenges, we believe, stem from a set of key institutional characteristics widely prevalent in these welfare states. These characteristics are overt and hidden conditionalities, unconventional instruments, informal practices, nature of changes in statutory pension age and labour market characteristics of the representative worker. We propose a set of solutions to refine these datasets for comparing all cases, old and new. We conclude by drawing lessons for comparative research focusing not only on welfare states beyond the three worlds but also on the three worlds themselves

Out of the ivory tower: an explanation of the policy advisory roles of political scientists in Europe

Jungblut J, Gouglas A, Katz G, et al. Out of the ivory tower: an explanation of the policy advisory roles of political scientists in Europe. European Political Science. 2023.The relevance and impact of political scientists’ professional activities outside of universities has become the focus of public attention, partly due to growing expectations that research should help address society’s grand challenges. One type of such activity is policy advising. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding the extent and type of policy advising activities political scientists engage in. This paper addresses this gap by adopting a classification that distinguishes four ideal types of policy advisors representing differing degrees of engagement. We test this classification by calculating a multi-level latent class model to estimate key factors explaining the prevalence of each type based on an original dataset obtained from a survey of political scientists across 39 European countries. Our results challenge the wisdom that political scientists are sitting in an “ivory tower”: the vast majority (80%) of political scientists in Europe are active policy advisers, with most of them providing not only expert guidance but also normative assessments