Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

Recently, political science has seen an intense debate about the phenomenon of ‘governance’. The aim of this paper is to clarify the basic concepts that are at the heart of this debate, notably ‘governance’ and ‘modes of governance’. We argue that most contributions share a common concern for the relationship between state intervention and societal autonomy, but different strands of the literature highlight different facets of this continuum. Existing understandings may be classified according to whether they emphasize the politics, polity or policy dimensions of governance. We use these categories to present a structured overview of different dimensions of modes of governance as they may be found in the literature. In this context, we argue that the classification of modes of governance as ‘old’ or ‘new’ is of little analytical value. Moving from single dimensions to systematic classification schemes and typologies of modes of governance, we highlight a number of shortcomings of existing schemes...

Modes of governance: towards a conceptual clarification

The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 256p. $22.50. The postcommunist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have generated a rich body of literature over the past 15 years. Most works on CEE transitions have drawn from the comparative politics literature and treated international factors, at best, as secondary. Yet with the recent eastern expansion of the Council of Europe, NATO, and the European Union, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the impact of international institutions on domestic changes in this region.

The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe

Starting from the findings of an earlier compliance study covering the 15 ‘old’ Member States of the European Union, which identified three ‘worlds of compliance’, this article seeks to establish whether or not the new Member States from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) represent a separate world of compliance. We present empirical findings from a research project on the implementation of three EU Directives from the field of working time and equal treatment in four CEE countries. The evidence suggests that the new Member States display implementation styles that are similar to a few countries in the EU-15. The expectation that the new Member States might behave according to their own specific logic, such as significantly decreasing their compliance efforts after accession in order to take ‘revenge’ for the strong pressure of conditionality, is not supported by our case studies. Instead, all four new Member States appear to fall within a group that could be dubbed the ‘world of dead letters’. It is crucial to highlight, however, that this specific ‘world of compliance’, characterized by politicized transposition processes and systematic application and enforcement problems, also includes two countries from the EU-15.

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Three Worlds of Compliance or Four? The EU-15 Compared to New Member States*

The Europeanisation of candidate countries and new members is a rather recent research area that has grown strongly since the early 2000s. Research in this area has developed primarily in the context of the EU’s eastern enlargement. A small number of theoretically informed book-length studies of the EU’s influence on the Central and Eastern European candidate countries have provided a generalisable conceptual framework for this research area, drawing on the debate between rationalist institutionalist and constructivist institutionalist approaches in International Relations and Comparative Politics. This framework makes these studies highly compatible with analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, with which they also share one key empirical finding, namely that the impact of the EU on candidate countries is differential across countries and issue areas. At the same time, the theoretical implications of these findings appear more clear-cut than in the case of the Europeanisation of member states: rationalist institutionalism, with its focus on the external incentives underpinning EU conditionality and the material costs incurred by domestic veto players, appears well-suited to explaining variation in the patterns of Europeanisation in candidate countries. A very recent development within this research agenda is the focus on the Europeanisation of new member states. While the study of the EU’s impact during the early years of membership was hitherto primarily a subfield of analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, it has now become an extension of studies of candidate countries by analysing the impact of accession on the dynamics of pre-accession Europeanisation and how durable and distinctive the patterns of candidate Europeanisation are in the post-accession stage.

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Europeanisation in new member and candidate states

Lander, deren soziale Sicherungssysteme auf dem Sozialversicherungsprinzip beruhen, wurden lange Zeit als resistent gegen weit reichende Strukturreformen angesehen. Insbesondere seit Anfang 2000 beobachten wir jedoch auch in diesen Landern verstarkte Reformaktivitaten (Palier 2006; Palier/Martin 2007). Fur den Bereich Gesundheitspolitik sind die Niederlande und Deutschland dabei besonders interessante Falle. Beide Gesundheitssysteme lassen sich historisch dem Modell „soziale Krankenversicherung“1 zuordnen.2 Traditionell ist darin das Solidarprinzip stark verankert, da sich die Beitrage zur sozialen Krankenversicherung prinzipiell an der finanziellen Leistungsfahigkeit, die Gesundheitsdienstleitungen jedoch am Bedarf der Versicherten orientieren. Aber es gibt in den Systemen mit sozialer Krankenversicherung auch jeweils unterschiedliche, historisch gewachsene Bruchstellen mit dem Solidarprinzip (z.B. Versicherungspflichtgrenzen, die bestimmte Berufsoder Einkommensgruppen von der Versicherungspflicht ausnehmen; Beitragsbemessungsgrenzen). Anders als etwa in Osterreich (Talos/Obinger 2006) oder Frankreich (Hassenteufel/Palier 2007), die ebenfalls zu den Landern mit sozialer Krankenversicherung zahlen, wurde in Deutschland und den Niederlanden in jungeren Reformprozessen stark auf Wettbewerbselemente gesetzt.3 In beiden Landern fanden in den letzten Jahren zudem Gesundheitsreformen statt, die mit wichtigen Prinzipien im System der sozialen Krankenversicherung brachen (Leiber 2006; 2007, vgl. auch Abschnitt 3).

Vereinbarkeit von Wettbewerb und Solidarität in der sozialen Krankenversicherung? Gesundheitsreformen in den Niederlanden und Deutschland

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Simone Leiber

Papers

Vereinbarkeit von Wettbewerb und Solidarität in der sozialen Krankenversicherung? Gesundheitsreformen in den Niederlanden und Deutschland

Fit für die Zukunft: Vorschläge für eine moderne Sozialversicherung

The Battle over the Takeovers Directive

Complying with Europe: The EU Commission and (non-)compliance in the member states

EG-Richtlinien als soziales Korrektiv im europäischen Mehrebenensystem? Problemskizze und potentielle Wirkungsmuster