Rethinking social pacts in Europe: Prime ministerial power in Ireland and Italy

Abstract

In Ireland and Southern European countries, social pacts were widely seen as a mechanism to mobilize broad support for weak governments to legitimate difficult reforms in the context of monetary integration. I retrace the politics of these pacts in Ireland and Italy to argue that it was less the condition of ‘weak government’ that enabled the negotiation of tripartite pacts, than the intervention of a ‘strong executive’: the prime minister’s office. Social pacts were pursued as a political strategy to enhance prime ministerial executive autonomy. In the aftermath of the euro crisis, this means of enhancing executive autonomy has been replaced by the negotiation of grand coalition governments, with the exclusion of unions; but this continues the trend towards the prime ministerialization of politics.

When Do Countries Implement Structural Reforms?

“…We have not found plausible results and therefore we exclude that area of analysis as we think that its complexity would deserve a separate analysis (e.g. Regan, 2016 Overall, our findings largely support the view that weak initial conditions, an adverse macroeconomic environment and external pressures lead to a higher reform stance. Moreover, the results also suggest that reforms happen both in times of fiscal tightening and loosening, and during periods of low interest rates.…”

‘Zones of contention’ in industrial relations: Framing pluralism as praxis

“…Notwithstanding, BusCo respondents questioned the depth of worker influence and voice achieved during the social partnership years (1987–2009). Moreover, neoliberalism and marketisation intensified in Ireland after the 2008 financial crisis and the social partnership’s collapse in 2009, though again, less so than in the UK (Dobbins and Dundon, 2016; McDonough and Dundon, 2010; Regan, 2017). Furthermore, Ireland has not enacted union recognition legislation, arguably a key pluralist public policy measure (Dobbins et al., 2020).…”

“…A key national-level difference between cases is that while the Thatcher government implemented a unitarist neoliberal revolution in the UK, Ireland adopted a softer, more pluralistic ‘social partnership’ model until its breakdown in 2009. Social partnership collapsed after the 2008 financial crisis, largely due to public sector cost-cutting strategies and austerity (Dobbins and Dundon, 2016; Regan, 2017). Union power in Ireland has diminished, but not as sharply as in the UK.…”

Frontier of control struggles in British and Irish public transport

“…Country contexts are important. In 1987, Ireland took a less adversarial path compared to Thatcher’s confrontational neo-liberal revolution in Britain, adopting a more consensual ‘social partnership’ model (Regan, 2017). Whether Irish social partnership granted real employee/union influence, notably at workplace level, is debated (Bach and Stroleny, 2013; Dobbins and Dundon, 2016; Doherty, 2011; Hickland and Dundon, 2016).…”