Uneven Receptiveness for Diffusion Effects? Social Policy Diffusion within the Enlarged European Union

The development of social policies in the course of the Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) constitutes a particularly interesting case for examining regionally diversified effects of policy diffusion. The enlargement has brought together mature Western and transitional Central Eastern European (CEE) welfare states that are likewise exposed to forces of globalization and particularly economic competition while having very different prerequisites and, subsequently, potentially varying receptiveness for diffusional effects. This paper examines whether diffusion of social protection standards has taken place in the enlarged EU since the mid-1990s in the first place and if so, whether the intensity, the mechanisms and the direction of diffusional effects have been similar in the Western European and the CEE countries. We draw upon novel institutional data on welfare benefit entitlements for measuring the generosity of social protection in 26 European countries. This kind of institutional data reflects the intended policy outputs more adequately than plain social expenditure. We also test for different mechanisms that have been discussed in the scholarly literature on diffusion processes (e.g. economic competition, learning and emulation, transborder contagion) in order to answer the question, in which ways different forms of spatial dependencies influence domestic social policies in the enlarged Europe.