We explore the factors behind the long-term erosion of National Social Dialogue Institutions (NSDIs) to provide insights about the conditions for their revitalization. By applying policy analysis insights into the industrial relations field, we argue that limited policy effectiveness goes a long way towards explaining the erosion experienced by many NSDIs worldwide in recent years. Drawing on a global survey and on case studies of NSDIs in Brazil, Italy and South Korea, we show that these institutions’ policy effectiveness crucially depends on combinations of their problem-solving capacity, an encompassing mandate to deal with relevant socioeconomic issues and an enabling environment that grants the inclusion of social dialogue into decision making. With regard to rekindling their role, the article provides substantial evidence that two sub-dimensions of effectiveness are key: enjoying political support and having an ‘effective mandate’ as opposed to relying on just a formal remit to deal with socioeconomic issues of interest.
This article introduces the special issue by presenting a framework for the study of regulatory politics using the analytical tools and approaches of comparative political economy. Having traced the evolution of studies on regulation, it argues that scholars should pay more attention to the systemic features affecting regulation and to the relationship between regulatory policies and their outcomes. The article presents the foundations of an analytical framework based on the "regulatory policy process," a comprehensive approach that links inputs, outputs, and outcomes. The review of the contributions to this special issue shows that regulatory regimes can be better understood by placing them within the broader political economy of a state or region. A renewed focus on regulatory outcomes can help foresee what one should expect from the impact of a certain regulatory regime on a political-economic system.
The Varieties of Capitalism literature posits that national economic institutions reflect the mode of coordination of a country's market actors. Despite the importance of this claim and a rich literature on the emergence of regulatory capitalism, few studies test such prediction for Independent Regulatory Agencies (IRAs). This article connects the two fields of research by analysing the impact of economic coordination on the formal independence of IRAs. The results show that, beyond issues of credible commitment and policy stability, the collective action capacity of market actors matters. In particular, regulators in Coordinated Market Economies enjoy less independence than in Liberal Market Economies, while intermediate regimes grant IRAs the least autonomy. The policy implications are nontrivial. Similar to other macroeconomic institutions, inappropriate combinations of economic coordination and IRA independence may engender Pareto-suboptimal regulatory solutions. In such cases, policymakers should reconsider the rules governing national regulators
The European Semester, launched in 2011, enhances the coordination of macroeconomic policies among European Union member states. This article contributes to the lively scholarly debate on whether this policy-making cycle has empowered more the European supranational or intergovernmental institutions. Drawing on a new dataset covering all pension-related country-specific recommendations between 2011 and 2016, and employing an original quantitative method, we show that the Commission mainly follows a ‘technocratic’ approach in drafting its recommendations, which are grounded in objective indicators. As the Council refrains from systematically altering the recommendations’ logic, we conclude that, at least in pension policy, the Commission’s role in macroeconomic surveillance has been significantly strengthened in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.