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Politics Without Choice? Policy-Making and Discourse in a Three-Level Game

Policy
Institutions
WS18
Daniel Cardoso
Instituto Português de Relações Internacionais, IPRI-NOVA
Alexandre Afonso
Departments of Political Science and Public Administration, Universiteit Leiden

OUTLINE & RELATION TO EXISTING RESEARCH There is little doubt that the room for manoeuvre of European governments has been substantially restricted in the last decades. As Mair (2009) famously noted, governments now find themselves more and more constrained by European and global commitments. Moreover, as most European countries have run deficits and accumulated debt, a declining part of government revenue is now available for discretionary spending (Streeck 2014). The sovereign debt crisis has exacerbated the long-term shrinking of government discretion as executives have been pressured to act in a way that (they think) will convince rating agencies and investors that they are serious about repaying their debts. In this context, many governments have had to negotiate conditions with the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission (EC) and - in bailed-out countries - the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to obtain financial support. Today, the pressure on sovereign debt is lower, but the new European economic governance rules of 2010-13 influence governments' medium-term spending plans, wages, taxes and labour market reforms (Bauer and Becker 2014). However, governments are not powerless. Schelling (1960: 22) was the first to note that weakness is often a strength in negotiations, as “the power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself”. Drawing on this, many scholars have shown that executives can take advantage of the secrecy of discussions when negotiating with the EU, the ECB and the IMF - a second level game - to enhance their power vis-à-vis that of domestic groups and other party members (Putnam 1988, Moravcsik 1994, Grande 1996, Dyson and Featherstone 1996, Vreeland 2003). In addition, governments can sometimes exploit a third level, the markets, as the need for credibility in financial markets gives them a justification to concentrate power, as well as a strong counter-argument to opposition to their proposed reforms. Recent scholarship has shown how this three-level game offers ideologically oriented governments an opportunity to pass economic and structural policies they wanted all along but had previously been powerless to introduce (Dukelow 2015, Moury and Standring forthcoming). Although generally very successful, these attempts have triggered resistance from opposition parties, social movements, and trade unions (De Giorgi et al. 2015, Lima and Artiles 2011, Della Porta and Mattoni 2014). While the research cited above has shed some light on these three phenomena of constraint, political opportunism and resistance, it has mainly focused on a single country and on the crisis period. Moreover, existing research on the topic generally focuses on policies and context and, with few exceptions, disregards the fundamental role of agency and discourse. Yet both agents (Blyth 2013, Cioffi and Dubin 2016, Moury and Standring forthcoming) and discourse (Hay 2013, Rosamond 1999, Hay and Smith 2005, Schmidt 2014, Morin and Carta 2013) play an important causal role in determining policy change under material constraints. The workshop aims to fill this gap and shed light on these three phenomena of constraints, political opportunism and resistance, from both an agency and discourse analysis perspective. OBJECTIVES The workshop pursues three objectives. First, it analyses the interplay between international, financial and domestic processes, how policymakers use discourse in this three-level game and how such discourses are received by the public. As written above, many scholars have emphasised how material conditions such as financial crises, globalisation or European integration are used by policymakers to bypass opposition to unpopular reforms and delimit conceptions of 'the possible' (Hay and Rosamond 2002) - hence obscuring the correspondence of policy choices with ideological preferences (Hay 1999; McNamara 2002) and vested interests. During the EU sovereign debt crisis, one observed mode of ‘discursive depoliticisation’ (Flinders and Buller 2006) has been to shift blame to international actors. Another, more common, discursive mode is the Thatcherian claim that there is no alternative (Seville 2016) and/or that these are simply ‘common sense’ policies (Mouffe 2013, Fonseca and Ferreira 2013, Borriello 2016). Yet, very little is known about whether there is evidence of ‘communicative dissonance’ - i.e. a consistent disjuncture between discourse and facts (Berry and Hay 2016:30); and how the room for manoeuvre of executives and their discourse have changed since the peak of the crisis. A second objective of this workshop is to look at how actors attempt to reconcile these discourses with the political legitimation of their function. Indeed, a discourse of blame-shifting or no-alternative is risky for policymakers as it makes them appear powerless and indistinguishable. This is especially dangerous when opposition parties - often at the extreme of the ideological spectrum - are, by contrast, proposing alternatives to retrenchment and deregulation. Moreover, at a time of low support for the EU and globalisation, blame-shifting might reinforce opposition to already unpopular reforms. Moury and Standring (forthcoming) show that Portuguese Prime Ministers combined a discourse of necessity with a focus on control; yet there is still liltte knowledge about how governments reconcile the “There is no Alternative” (TINA) discourse with the preservation of the political legitimacy of their function. Similarly, a direct analysis of the link between such discourses of lack of choices and public attitudes versus politicians’ legitimacy is still lacking. A third focus of this workshop are non-state actors in particular trade unions and opposition parties. As we see it, these actors are faced with a dilemma (De Giorgi and Moury 2015). On the one hand, they could choose to collaborate with the governments with the aim of influencing the content and scope of the reforms to their advantage. Discursively, this means they must present themselves as reasonable agents who accept the premises of the discourse of their interlocutors (Uzelgun et al. 2015) and therefore opt out of some possible choices from the start. On the other hand, they might stress their adversarial position in order to mobilise against those policies, with the risk of being excluded from negotiations and accused of lacking ‘common sense’ and being out of touch with reality. FUNDING Our research relies mainly on qualitative and quantitative data gathered through the project ‘Democracy in times of crisis: Power and Discourse in a three-level game’, funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation.

To understand the politics of constraints in all its complexity, we aim to bring together political scientists, sociologists, political economists and argumentation scholars. We particularly encourage papers using innovative methods to study policy-making and discourses; which focus on cases in which the crisis was very intense but also on those in which pressure was lower and with a time-frame that encompasses the peak of the crisis as well as the preceding and following periods. In particular, we welcome papers that: - Analyse the margin for manoeuvre of executives before, during and/or after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis; - Show how non-governing actors (opposition parties, Trade Union, employers, etc.) respond to material constraints and political opportunism; - Show how discourses were used by governments or European actors to legitimise their policies; - Analyse how such discourse shape the material constraints themselves; - Shed light on the way political actors balance their commitment to comply with their external obligations and preserve the political legitimacy of their function; - Analyse how non-governing actors legitimise discursively their choices of collaboration / opposition with the executives;

Title Details
Power to Resist: Services Liberalization in Greece, 2006-2016 View Paper Details
Pitfalls of Discursive Depoliticisation in the Age of Populism View Paper Details
From Coercive to Bottom-up Europeanization? The Impact of Bailed-Out Countries on the Post-Crisis Eurozone Architecture View Paper Details
How Economic Globalization affects Satisfaction with Democracy and Preferences for Electoral Procedures? The Case of France View Paper Details
Constraining Germany. Distributional Conflicts, Discursive Depoliticization and Insulation from Change in Post-Crisis German Economic Policy View Paper Details
Finding the Political in (De)politicized Discourse: Understanding the Changing Political Nature of Austerity in Post-Crisis Parliamentary Discourse View Paper Details
The Virtue of Collective Sacrifice: Antagonism and Moral Values in the Legitimation of Austerity Policies in Italy and Spain during the Eurozone Crisis (2010-2013) View Paper Details
Democracies without Choice? Exogenous Pressure, Partisanship and Labour Market Reforms in Southern Europe 2010-2017 View Paper Details
Fallacious Arguments in a Three-level Game: Discursive Strategies of Irish and Portuguese Executives during the Financial Crisis View Paper Details
Amalgams not Paradigms: Economic Ideas and Macroeconomic Policymaking Discourse in the Great Recession View Paper Details
When do Governments Share Their Power with Organised Interests? Economic and Political Determinants of Social Concertation in Europe View Paper Details
Assessing the 'Agency Slack' of National Governments in Today's Politicized EU View Paper Details
Beyond Blame Avoidance: Elite Explanations for Social Policy Reform and their Effects on Public Opinion View Paper Details
Here to Stay? Analysing Policy Reversals in the Aftermath of the Crisis View Paper Details
Exploring Mechanisms of Idea Formation in the European Commission During Times of Crisis: Evidence from the Discussion on Debt Relief View Paper Details
Concertation or Disintermediation? Government and Union Strategies in the Implementation of Labour Market Reforms in Italy and Portugal (2010-2015) View Paper Details
The (de)Politicizing Attitudes of National Political Parties on European Integration View Paper Details
From Bail-Out to Bail-In: Explaining the Variegated Responses to the International Financial Aid Requests of Ireland and Cyprus View Paper Details