scholarly journals ‘Framing social policy and populism in a changing European context’

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-171
Author(s):  
Markus Ketola ◽  
Johan Nordensvard
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
Social Citizenship ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Education Levels ◽  
Structural Failures ◽  
Post Industrial

This themed section focuses on the political and social policy discourses of resurgent welfare chauvinism and identity politics in contemporary Europe. The populist radical right, in particular, has utilised these discourses to great effect, reframing social policy and social citizenship through a heady mix of arguments evoking the nation state and ethnicity, often contemporaneously. Although the explanations for the outcome of the referendum on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, or Brexit, cannot be distilled to any single issue or cause, it is also impossible to deny the relevance of social policy to the outcome. For example, vote choice in the referendum was influenced by factors such as education levels and levels of labour market vulnerability (Hobolt, 2016), ultimately dovetailing with the well-known thesis about globalisation's ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ (Kitschelt & McGann, 1995; Mudde, 2007; Rydgren, 2007; Kriesi et al., 2012) and the structural failures of post-industrial economies to stop growing inequality.

Marshall revisited: EU social policy from a social-rights perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-435
Author(s):  
Stefanie Börner
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Social Citizenship ◽  
The European Union ◽  
European Level ◽  
Social Commitment ◽  
Economic Framework ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social

The common legal and economic framework of the European Union (EU) has turned the vast socio-economic differences within Europe into virulent problems of social inequality – issues that it attempts to tackle within its limited resources. The article takes the EU’s self-expressed social commitment as a starting point and analyses its approaches to social policy from a social-rights perspective. It first discusses why Marshall’s social-citizenship concept provides a useful analytical tool to assess the social policies enacted so far at the European level and then presents an institutional analysis of the EU’s four major social-policy activities: harmonising, funding, coordination and cooperation. This analysis focuses on the horizontal and vertical relationships and the addressees of these policies to determine how these policies measure up against social-rights standards. The findings point to the poor development of transnational social citizenship given the special nature of EU social policies. The only social rights that exist at the European level are in the field of social-security coordination. And even those are marked by a double selectivity that excludes citizens who are not transnationally active and those who are but lack the necessary means to provide for themselves.

scholarly journals Evaluating the Labour Market Integration of New Immigrants in the UK

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tommaso Frattini
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Labour Force Survey ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Labour Market Integration ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
Education Levels ◽  
The Uk

This article analyses the labour market integration of newly arrived immigrants in the UK labour market, based on data from the UK Labour Force Survey. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the United Kingdom since 2000 and distinguish different cohorts based on the year of their arrival in the country. We examine the extent to which these new arrivals were able to enter work and move up into skilled jobs, and analyse the sectors of the economy that have proved most amenable to this progression. The analysis indicates that these new arrivals fared relatively well in the workforce. In part as a result of their relative youth and high education levels, many new arrivals (especially those from the European Union and in particular the EU10 countries) moved straight into work.

scholarly journals Northern Ireland and Brexit: Three effects on ‘the border in the mind’

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 497-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Gormley-Heenan ◽  
Arthur Aughey
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The People ◽  
Waking Up ◽  
The Mind

For those who spoke on behalf of Leave voters, the result on 23 June 2016 meant the people of the United Kingdom were taking back ‘control’ or getting their ‘own country back’. However, two parts of the United Kingdom did not vote Leave: Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here, the significant counterpoint to ‘taking back control is “waking up in a different country”’, and this sentiment has unique political gravity. Its unique gravity involves two distinct but intimately related matters. The first concerns the politics of identity. The vote was mainly, if not entirely, along nationalist/unionist lines, confirming an old division: unionists were staking a ‘British’ identity by voting Leave, and nationalists an Irish one by voting Remain. The second concerns borders. The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998 meant taking the border out of Irish politics. Brexit means running the border between the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom across the island as a sovereign ‘frontier’. Although this second matter is discussed mainly in terms of the implications for free movement of people and goods, we argue that it is freighted with meanings of identity. Brexit involves a ‘border in the mind’, those shifts in self-understanding, individually and collectively, attendant upon the referendum. This article examines this ‘border in the mind’ according to its effects on identity, politics and the constitution, and their implications for political stability in Northern Ireland.

Impacts of Environmental Regulation on Sustainable Economic Growth

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 749-773
Author(s):  
Jonathan Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Environmental Regulation ◽  
Technical Change ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Environmental Regulations ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Porter Hypothesis ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Environment Agency ◽  
Sustainable Economic Growth

There is considerable concern and debate about the economic impacts of environmental regulations. Jonathan Fisher, former Economics Manager at the Environment Agency in England and Wales, reviews the available evidence on this subject. Section 2 presents estimates of the costs and benefits of environmental regulations. Section 3 examines the impacts of environmental regulations on economic growth, innovation and technical change as well as impacts on competitiveness and any movement of businesses to less pollution havens. He questions call for greater certainty regarding future environmental regulations, whereas in fact there should be calls for less uncertainty. This section then suggests how this could be achieved. This section then finishes with an overview of the available evidence. This includes an examination of the Porter Hypothesis that environmental regulations can trigger greater innovation that may partially or more than fully offset the compliance costs. Section 4 then sets out principles for how better environmental regulation can improve its impacts on sustainable economic growth and illustrates how the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive is a good example of the application of these principles in practice. Section 5 reviews current and recent political perspectives regarding developments in environmental regulations across the EU and shows how the United Kingdom (UK) has successfully positively managed to influence such developments so that EU environmental regulations now incorporate many of these principles to improve their impacts on economic growth. Section 5.1 then examines the implications of Brexit for UK environmental regulations. Finally, Section 6 sets out some best practice principles to improve the impacts of environmental regulation on sustainable economic growth, innovation and technical change.

Euratom and Brexit: Could the United Kingdom Maintain One Foot in the European Union? Current Scenarios and Future Prospects of British withdrawal from the EAEC

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-151
Author(s):  
Andrea Circolo ◽  
Ondrej Hamuľák
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Independent Solution ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Status ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Energy Community ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The paper focuses on the very topical issue of conclusion of the membership of the State, namely the United Kingdom, in European integration structures. The ques­tion of termination of membership in European Communities and European Union has not been tackled for a long time in the sources of European law. With the adop­tion of the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), the institute of 'unilateral' withdrawal was intro­duced. It´s worth to say that exit clause was intended as symbolic in its nature, in fact underlining the status of Member States as sovereign entities. That is why this institute is very general and the legal regulation of the exercise of withdrawal contains many gaps. One of them is a question of absolute or relative nature of exiting from integration structures. Today’s “exit clause” (Art. 50 of Treaty on European Union) regulates only the termination of membership in the European Union and is silent on the impact of such a step on membership in the European Atomic Energy Community. The presented paper offers an analysis of different variations of the interpretation and solution of the problem. It´s based on the independent solution thesis and therefore rejects an automa­tism approach. The paper and topic is important and original especially because in the multitude of scholarly writings devoted to Brexit questions, vast majority of them deals with institutional questions, the interpretation of Art. 50 of Treaty on European Union; the constitutional matters at national UK level; future relation between EU and UK and political bargaining behind such as all that. The question of impact on withdrawal on Euratom membership is somehow underrepresented. Present paper attempts to fill this gap and accelerate the scholarly debate on this matter globally, because all consequences of Brexit already have and will definitely give rise to more world-wide effects.

Anti-System Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hopkin
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Approach ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Us ◽  
Long Term Result ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Right

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges—from both the Left and the Right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. This book traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the postwar model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s, these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system. Using a comparative approach, the text explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, it discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence.

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