European Politics Exam Two Study Guide

The Welfare State

  • “The state plays the primary role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens”
  • Social “insurance” common to most advanced industrial countries
  • Involves direct transfer of funds from public sector to welfare recipients
  • Differs from sources of private aid
  • Means-tested vs. “blanket” assistance
  • Means-tested – ex: unemployment
  • “Blanket” assistance – ex: pension
  • Context/origins: came out of Great Depression and WWII
  • How do we measure welfare?
  • Tax rates, tax types
  • Government expenditure as % of GDP?
  • Specific policies
  • Cultural aspects like support for equality and redistribution of wealth?
  • Benefactor: state, market, family, voluntary organizations
  • Esping-Anderson (1990): 3 important components
  • The 3 important components:
  • De-commodification: degree to which social rights exist to allow people to make a living independent of pure market forces
  • Social stratification: degree of inequality between classes
  • Employment: % of working-age population with a job
  • 3 types of welfare states
  • Liberal:
  • Least de-commodifying and most market differentiated
  • We often attach moreal conditions (see individual to blame, not the market)
  • Ex: US
  • Conservative:
  • Primarily based around church, family, occupation, traditional values
  • Hierarchical, status-distinctive
  • Ex: Germany
  • Social democratic:
  • Highly de-commidifying and universalist programs
  • Ideas of basic/minimal social rights
  • Ex:
  • What causes a big welfare state?
  • 5 categories of factors
  • Economic: growth, GDP
  • Fiscal: taxation (direct vs. indirect/invisible)
  • Electoral/political: frequency of elections, partisan/ideological leanings
  • Institutional: government centralization, wage bargaining/interest group structure
  • Corporist (labor union, private government) vs. pluralist (labor union vs. private government (?))
  • International: global economy, size of state (small, homogenous), globalization, deindustrialization
  • Is the welfare state in crisis?
  • “The Middle Way”
  • Retrenchment = privatizing, cutting back the welfare state
  • Austerity = trying to spend the smallest amount possible
  • Demographic trends = strain on welfare state
  • Different type of Welfare States Graph
  • Is the welfare state dead?
  • Crisis; demand for austerity
  • Youtube video
  • Culprit?
  • “Big government”: spending, transfers, tax rates
  • See table 10.3, textbook p. 275
  • Socialized medicine
  • ARG: textbook p. 285

Introduction to the European Union

  • Supranational
  • History
  • 2 videos
  • Info of videos on European questionnaire sheet
  • Why join the EU?
  • Once upon at time . . .
  • Back in the 1940s
  • EU did not become known as EU until 1993
  • But existed back in the 1950s
  • WWII incredibly devastating
  • EU started in an agreement between France and Germany
  • French leaders (2 leaders: Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman) came up with idea that France and Germany should link economies to make them dependent on each other to make future war not at all likely
  • Called the Monnet Plan
  • Then led to creation of the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community)
  • Historical context behind ESCS
  • Postwar reconstruction and economic recovery
  • With or without Germany?
  • Yes, Germany important
  • Marshall Plan (1948 – 1953)
  • 1947: Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OECD)
  • Prior integration effort
  • Just to keep in mind prior attempts did happen
  • Cold War: US vs. USSR
  • NATO
  • Elites’ desire for “United States of Europe”
  • Jean Monnet: supranationalist aspirations  The Monnet Plan
  • Robert Schuman: Schuman Declaration (5/9/1950)
  • Voicing the Monnet Plan
  • Famous speech
  • Security and welfare
  • European Steel and Coal Community 1951 (/1952)
  • Timeline
  • 1951  Treaty of Paris  ECSC with 6 members
  • 1957  Treaty of Rome  EEC and EURATOM
  • Still 6 members, doing well so want to expand
  • Link all economies, free market
  • EEC – European Economic Community
  • European Atomic Agency – EURATOM
  • 1973  consolidation of all 3 (ECSC, EEC, EURATOM) into one European Community (EC)
  • 3 new members
  • 1992  Treaty of Maastricht  EU
  • 1993 – official title EU
  • 1997-1999 Treaty of Amsterdam
  • 2000-2001 Treaty of Nice
  • 2004-2005 European Constitution  FAILS
  • 2007-2010 Treaty of Lisbon
  • MISSING NOTES

The European Union

  • MISSING NOTES
  • The three main actors
  • The European Parliament
  • The “Council”
  • Euro Council
  • Council of the EU
  • The European Commission
  • **No single over arching president of the EU**
  • Each institution has someone in charge
  • The European Commission
  • Executive branch
  • Most supranational: aka “Brussels”
  • Oath to “put Europe first”
  • Executive and bureaucratic branch
  • Powers of initiation and implementation
  • Budget/finances; external relations
  • President College of Commissioners (28)
  • Renewable 5 year terms
  • Must be approved by European Council
  • High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (post-Lisbon)
  • Directorates-General (DG)
  • Comitology
  • Network of advisory, management, and regulatory committees involved in decision-making
  • EU centers
  • Visit website
  • European Council
  • Most intergovernmental!
  • Gives national voices more of a say
  • Summit of heads of state or government for all 28 member states
  • Meet to make decisions, discuss problems
  • President: Donald Tusk (Dec. 2014)
  • Tension between EU interest and national interests
  • So supranational vs. intergovernmental
  • Council of the EU
  • Also intergovernmental . . . but??
  • Relevant cabinet members of all 28 national governments
  • Coreper Committee of Permanent Residents
  • Qualified majority voting (Treaty of Nice)
  • 6-month rotating Presidency:
  • 18 month “trio”/”Troika System”: Italy (Jul-Dec 2014), Latvia (incumbent) and Luxembourg (Jul-Dec 2015)
  • PR to make citizens have pride – they are proud when their country is president
  • 4 major presidencies  only one held by country as a whole
  • Qualified majority voting
  • 55% of votes, from at least 15 member states that together comprise 65% of EU population
  • Member state number of votes depends on size of population
  • European Parliament (EP)
  • Supranational?
  • Multi-state dilemma . . . “traveling circus”
  • Legislative arm (shares power with council)
  • Consultation, cooperation, consent
  • Direct elections since 1979 . . . but credibility problem
  • 751 members (MEPs) elected for fixed and renewable 5-yr terms
  • Next one: Spring 2019
  • How laws are made
  • Eurozone: why?
  • Eurozone – term that only applies to countries that use the Euro currency
  • Optimum Currency Area (OCA)
  • Benefits:
  •  integration
  •  transaction costs
  •  trade
  •  exchange rates/risk uncertainty
  • Price parity (eventually)
  • Eurozone: who?
  • Must be EU member state to use the euro currency, but not all EU members do
  • 19 members in the Eurozone
  • ~335 million people
  • 3 said “no thanks”
  • Remaining 6 coming on board soon . . .
  • Eurozone: how?
  • EMU = Economic and Monetary Union of the EU
  • Finishing documentary
  • What caused the crisis?
  • German perspective and Greece perspective
  • What countries most affected? How and why?
  • Proposed solutions?
  • Eurozone: crisis
  • BBC documentary
  • Concept of solidarity present
  • German citizens, despite their frustrations, still support helping Greece out
  • What went wrong? What “caused” the crisis?
  • Importing extravagant cars and goods form other countries
  • “Too much borrowing”
  • 2004 Olympics
  • Economic diversity
  • Not all countries in Europe on the same page when they started using the euro
  • Competitiveness??
  • Inflexible monetary policy with the euro
  • Greece fudged their numbers from the beginning
  • Probably why Greece is most affected by this crisis
  • Not all countries met the criteria to join the Eurozone from the beginning
  • This was not a secret
  • Tax evasion
  • Greece had very generous welfare state
  • Corruption
  • What countries are affected? How/why?
  • Greece, Germany
  • Affects the entire Eurozone
  • PIIGS countries
  • Main countries in Eurozone that have had trouble since the 2007/08 crisis
  • Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain
  • Seen the most severe government debt
  • Have needed bail outs
  • High unemployment
  • Very very severely affected by the crisis
  • What are some of the proposed solutions?
  • Eurozone: how?
  • 1993: Convergence Criteria (Maastricht)
  • Treaty of Maastricht included section on its intent to create an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)
  • Specific criteria countries start working toward if they wanted to have common currency
  • Criteria: (main things countries needed to do if they wanted to join the Eurozone)
  • Budget deficit of < 3% GDP
  • Spending > than what its bringing in  deficit
  • Debt ratio < 60% GDP
  • Low inflation: no more than 1.5% higher than the average of the best 3 performing member states
  • Interest rates close to EU average: can’t be more than 2% higher than in 3 lowest inflation member states
  • Called the convergence criteria
  • Still the same today
  • 1997: Stability and Growth Pact (SGP)
  • Further elaboration of countries’ commitments to uphold the Convergence criteria
  • Reaffirming their commitment
  • ECB (Euro Central Bank) vs. national governments
  • Recall monetary vs. fiscal control . . .
  • The Eurozone and ECB has centralized monetary policy for the member states
  • (ECB) but never took over authority in the fiscal realm
  • Monetary control but never took over fiscal control
  • 1999: electronic introduction
  • 2002: cash introduction of the euro
  • Why didn’t anyone care that Greece fudged its numbers?
  • Greece was not the only country that did this
  • Greece did fudge them the most, but not the only one
  • Very strong belief that if we got these countries into the Eurozone everything would work out in time
  • Bottom line: Greece was not alone
  • Euro crisis
  • In 2004 and 2005 something very important happened
  • Economies of big players (Germany and France) went through troubles (and neither held up their convergence criteria these years)
  • ECB didn’t punish them for this and they were in a position to get out of their situation
  • Set an empirical precedent: big players aren’t following the rules so we won’t either
  • Then spending got way out of hand
  • MORAL HAZARD
  • Ignoring fudged numbers and ignoring Germany and France, countries didn’t take the Convergence criteria as seriously
  • Exceptions to the rule can have a very bad domino affect
  • Causes
  • Main causes – countries all throughout the Eurozone had a lot of access to funds, could borrow very easily, took advantage of this
  • Almost free access to money, got out of hand
  • Cheap access to money and got out of hand
  • Couldn’t pay back all they had borrowed
  • Who did they borrow from?
  • Economically strong countries (like Germany and France and the UK)
  • Everyone’s economic standing is tied together
  • Underlying point
  • Huge spiderweb, tangled mess
  • Causes of the crisis (reading from last class)
  • So many things played into the causes
  • One-size fits all monetary policy
  • All controlled by ECB
  • Misplaced confidence and assessment of risk
  • Economic divergence and trade imbalance
  • Country-specific factors
  • Solutions to the Euro crisis?
  • No pre-existing mechanism or plan for what would be done in the face of financial difficulty
  • Osterity – governments have to change the way they’re doing things in order to fix this
  • Kick Greece out? Greece leave on their own?
  • Nothing really about it in convergence criteria
  • Would lose a lot of money if Greece left (Greece owes a lot of debt money)

Identity

  • The basics
  • Identity matters
  • Self esteem
  • Interpersonal interaction
  • Intergroup relations
  • Political attitudes and behavior
  • Identity has capacity to facilitate or obstruct collective action
  • Collective action is getting different people to all come on board for a certain cause
  • Self-identification exercise
  • DON’T CONFUSE
  • Attributes – they are primodial
  • We don’t choose
  • Role
  • Things we do, activities
  • Identity – VERY distinct from roles and attributes
  • Things that can be manipulated
  • Categories that take attributes, roles, ideas, etc. and politicize them
  • Politicized
  • Subjective
  • Increased salience
  • Mobilize people
  • Identity
  • Definition: “that part of the individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership”
  • Identity (actual identity/group) vs. identification (to what degree do you identify with that identity (varies per person))
  • Dual process – when determining if someone holds a certain identity
  • You go through 2 psychological processes:
  • Self-categorization
  • Placing yourself into particular group
  • Social comparison
  • Role of the other
  • US vs. THEM
  • Who we are not helps define who we are
  • Problem because ingroup (us) is seen as better than the outgroup (them)
  • What is “identity”
  • Role
  • “The expected social behavior of an individual”
  • Attribute
  • “A quality or characteristics inherent in or ascribed to someone or something”
  • “A property, quality, or feature . . .”
  • Identity
  • See definition
  • Manipulation of identity
  • Roles and attributes get manipulated by things in society
  • How things get politicized into identities
  • Watched part of PBS video
  • A Class Divided
  • “A Class Divided”
  • She politicized eye color
  • Institutionalized discrimination
  • Collar of distinction
  • No water fountain
  • The rules she put in place
  • Results
  • Eye color on bottom was quiter, slower at tasks, etc.
  • It was hard to undo what happened
  • Lasted long after the experiment
  • Identity is something very unique
  • Politicization of roles and attributes somehow gets large salience attached to them and has effects on society, etc.
  • Making them good or bad, placing some value on it (roles and attributes)
  • Why does identity mitigate hate?
  • Stereotypes (stereotype about the “other”, the outgroup, an enemy)
  • Heuristics – cognitive shortcuts
  • Political entrepreneurs
  • Perceived threat
  • Realistic – economic or financial threat (or monetary)
  • Symbolic – threat to who we are as our ingroup
  • Identity threat
  • Getting back to how this applies to Europe . . . Why we care about nationalism . . .
  • Identity getting manipulated and justifying bad things like genocide, etc.
  • Jenkins and Sofus (1996) (reading for today)
  • Resurgence of “nationalism” in post-Cold War context
  • “Balkanization,” globalization, localization
  • ARG: a political phenomenon
  • An identity is political, its politicized
  • A malleable artifact: “complex social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle”
  • Feeds off of raw collective identities
  • Imagined communities (only 200 years in . . .)
  • Ideas that people in power created a story about what it was like to live in that community and that they want to get back to how it was
  • Missing rest of notes

Immigration