Wielding Soft Power in a World of Neglect: The Europeanization of Greek and Portuguese Public Employment Services

Abstract

The Europeanization literature has extensively examined the influence of the European employment strategy (EES) on Member States' employment policies. However, two least‐likely cases – Greece and Portugal – have been neglected in the literature. This article focuses on the activation of public employment services (PES), which has been one of the key elements of the EES. Based on a sample of 44 semi‐structured interviews and primary and secondary document research on seven reform episodes during 1995–2009, it finds that the EES altered Greek and Portuguese employment policies by empowering policy entrepreneurs and, when the latter were absent, through European Social Fund financial conditionality. While the literature considers policy learning as the chief EES‐Europeanization mechanism, little evidence is found herein to support such an explanation. The findings may be relevant for a number of EU policies based on voluntarism and EU funds, such as the new flagship EU initiative Europe 2020.

How party linkages shape austerity politics: clientelism and fiscal adjustment in Greece and Portugal during the eurozone crisis

“…After 1995, it has only been in power for a brief period (2002)(2003)(2004)(2005) as part of a coalition with the CDS-PP, while the PS ruled between 1995-2002 and 2005-2011. After the elections of 2009, the Socialists lost their absolute majority and formed a minority government. In the direct aftermath of the financial crisis, the government first adopted a number of expansionary social policy measures to cope with rising unemployment (Zartaloudis 2014). As of early 2010, however, as the deficit, public debt and yields on government bonds increased, a much clearer austerity turn was taken.…”

“…Greece and Portugal are cases in point to assess our theoretical propositions because of the similarities in their economic, cultural and political conditions (Zartaloudis 2013b(Zartaloudis : 1179, allowing for a most-similar systems design (Bosco and Verney 2012;di Mascio et al 2010). Besides being the countries that have been most severely hit by the sovereign debt crisis, Greece and Portugal also displayed a number of similarities at its beginning: similar levels of socio-economic development, similar features in their welfare state (Ferrera 1996), similar sizes, they became democracies during the "third wave" of democratisation in the mid-1970s, and both joined the EU (European Union) in the 1980s.…”

“…In September 2009, PASOK won a landslide victory drawing on an expansionist agenda based on pay and pension increases, tax cuts and re-nationalisations in spite of a bad economic climate (Zartaloudis 2013a). In late 2009, when the crisis worsened, PM Papandreou announced a number of reforms to reduce the deficit, but it claimed that it would "protect the vulnerable and the middle class", and that the government was "not here to dismantle the welfare state" (Financial Times 2009).…”

“…Greece and Portugal are two countries -together with Ireland, Cyprus and Spain 1 -that were granted bail-out packages by a so-called "Troika" of international financial institutions (European Central Bank, European Commission and International Monetary Fund), in exchange of which they committed to implement drastic "adjustment programmes" which involved cuts in wages and dismissals in the public sector, cuts in welfare expenditures, as well as tax increases (Armingeon and Baccaro 2012;Zartaloudis 2014).…”

Breaching the Social Contract: Crises of Democratic Representation and Patterns of Extreme Right Party Support

“…These countries share a number of political, cultural and economic similarities that allow for a meaningful comparison (Hartlapp and Leiber 2010;Zartaloudis 2013). In terms of their political landscapes, Greece, Portugal and Spain are all characterized by a strong left-right divide and have experienced civil war and rightwing authoritarianism in their recent histories.…”