The Effects of the EU Fiscal Governance Reforms on Member States

The European Union has experienced major reforms in its fiscal governance framework during the past decade (reflected, inter alia, in the adoption of the Two-Pack, the Six-Pack and the Fiscal Compact). The goal of this paper is to explore how the EU level changes have influenced fiscal governance reforms in the member states. Drawing on the literatures of Europeanization, fiscal governance, budgetary institutions and policy learning, the theoretical part of the paper outlines a series of propositions about which factors are likely to have influenced the implementation of the EU fiscal governance reforms in the member states. The following factors are likely to have mediated the effects of the EU reforms at the national level: the existing administrative style (e.g. Germanic, Napoleonic, Scandinavian or Central Eastern European), the severity of the crisis experience, the existing mode of fiscal governance (delegation mode, commitment mode or a hybrid), and the instruments in place for policy learning. The empirical part of our paper explores the validity of those theoretical propositions in four different member states: Finland, Portugal, Austria and Estonia. The case selection was based on the following criteria. All these countries are relatively small, which enhances the comparability of analysis. They represent different administrative traditions and experienced different degrees of crisis (or crises) during the past decade. Our analysis shows that in analyzing the implementation of the EU mandates it is important to pay attention to the interaction of the various factors. For example, the severity of the crisis experiences is likely to interact with the administrative tradition: the deeper the crisis, the more possibilities there are for the reform actors to depart from the trajectories entailed in the prevailing administrative traditions.