Building Social Dialogue Institutions in Bulgaria: Between EU Conditionality and Domestic Social Actors

A literature review on the Economic and Social Council’s effectiveness and evaluation

“…However, it is perhaps Hassel (2009) who goes furthest in this respect, by classifying ESCs (and other NSDIs) according to categories of corporatism. On the contrary, most studies focus on specific experiences, discussing the conditions that led to the creation of the ESCs (Börzel, 2010;Börzel & Buzogány, 2010;Carneiro & Gambi, 2018;Çiçek & Öçal, 2019), explaining their limitations (Çelik, 2020;Cho, 2019;Kim & Van Der Westhuizen, 2017;Patschiki, 2016) and strengths (Fashoyin, 2009;Han et al, 2010;Regan, 2010), evaluating their degree of effectiveness (Santos & Gugliano, 2015), the conditions for their strengthening (Grosse, 2010;Hassel, 2009;Spasova & Tomini, 2013), the challenges they face in a globalised world (Guardiancich & Ghellab, 2020) and their relationship with sub-national ESCs (Inzunza-Canales, 2018;Pressacco & Rivera, 2015;Ramírez-Sáiz, 2013;Santos, 2016).…”

“…As for case studies of ESCs, these are usually concentrated in Europe: Denmark, the Netherlands (Cho, 2019) and Ireland (Regan, 2010) in Western Europe; Bulgaria (Spasova & Tomini, 2013), Poland and Estonia (Grosse, 2010), Poland, Hungary and Romania (Börzel & Buzogány, 2010) in Eastern and Central Europe. Outside Europe, the following cases have been studied: Brazil (Carneiro & Gambi, 2018;Patschiki, 2016;Santos & Gugliano, 2015), South Korea (Han et al, 2010), South Africa (Fashoyin, 2009) and Turkey (Çelik, 2020; Çiçek & Öçal, 2019), and also comparisons between countries: South Africa and South Korea (Kim & Van Der Westhuizen, 2017); Italy, South Korea and Brazil (Guardiancich & Molina, 2021).…”

“…On the contrary, the following are common: ethnographic techniques of data collection, such as participant observation, in-depth interviews, informal conversations and questionnaires (Guardiancich & Ghellab, 2020;Regan, 2010); and the analysis of written speeches, the rules governing ESC creation and functioning (Santos & Gugliano, 2015), the EU regulations promoting these institutions (Grosse, 2010), the minutes of meetings and details of agreements signed (Regan, 2010) and other documents (Ramírez-Sáiz, 2013). The studies also combine techniques: Santos (2016), for example uses participant observation and documentary analysis; Guardiancich and Molina (2021) combine an analysis of the results of a global survey of ESCs with detailed case studies in Brazil, Italy and South Korea; Spasova and Tomini (2013) resort to a bibliographical review and an analysis of newspapers, national and EU official documents, and semi-structured interviews with union and business representatives and foreign experts.…”

“…Encouraged by the achievements of the European social model, the EU has promoted ESCs to strengthen the processes of transition to democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (Börzel & Buzogány, 2010;Kohl & Platzer, 2007;Spasova & Tomini, 2013). This has been compatible with policies recommending tough regulations of neoliberal inspiration in a large part of Europe.…”

“…A first group of authors tend to consider above all the macro-exogenous factors. In this respect, a large part of the literature focuses on the group of ESCs created to meet the EU's convergence requirements in the 1990s (Spasova & Tomini, 2013). The formation of an ESC in Turkey, for example, can be explained by the possibility, although remote, of accession to the EU.…”