Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper will present findings from research investigating the Europeanisation of Irish politics, policy and polity in the policy area of social inclusion. The findings from this research are important as we continue to have a limited understanding of the effect of the EU on member states through soft law and New Modes of Governance. There continues to be a lack of empirical work in this area and research that has been carried out has continued to yield conflictive findings. A major problem in this area of research has been the difficulty in assessing the EU's influence through soft law as researchers lacked a suitable analytical framework. The research of this paper was done by using an innovative analytical strategy in Europeanisation research that was based on a theoretical framework that linked Europeanisation with policy transfer and the Advocacy Coalition Framework and a methodological approach that combined document analysis and in-depth interviews with Q methodology. Thus, this paper has the potential to further much needed knowledge on the influence of the EU on member states through soft law and new modes of governance due to the unique analytical framework that was applied in the research.