| Objectives |
The project 'Governance, territoriality and Europeanisation - Whither Welfare Regimes?' will investigate the ways in which welfare regimes are responding to the contemporary crisis of the (national) political system and the emergence of a system of European multilevel governance.
It is hypothetically possible that welfare systems are converging with regard to their leading normative ideologies but not with regard to their institutional practices. This may result from two kinds of processes, which are compatible but distinct. On the one hand, it may be due to the variable interpretation of leading ideologies by key actors or the latter's resistance to institutional change. On the other hand, it may be because the institutional 'thickness' of welfare systems makes them partly independent of their ideological underpinnings. A conflicting hypothesis is that welfare systems are more similar in terms of their institutional practices than their normative ideologies would lead us to believe. The most plausible basis for this hypothesis is that welfare institutions respond to functional dynamics that are independent of actors' perception of them. The core research question of this project is to find out which of these two hypotheses is true and, based on this, to enlarge our insight about the future of the European social policy, more specifically with regard to the sharing of competencies between the European and national levels and the future of the open method of coordination. |
Le Centre Interdisciplinaire pour la Recherche Comparative en Sciences Sociales (CIR), France