Paper Titles & Abstracts

In 2010, 'Europe 2020' was introduced to replace the Lisbon Strategy. As a governance architecture, Europe 2020 retains its predecessor's emphasis on inducing change in EU member-states' policies often without introducing EU legislation. The literature on Europeanisation aims at establishing causal relations between EU policies and domestic change and it is therefore particularly useful for the assessment of Europe 2020's effects on EU member-states' policies. This paper contributes to this research agenda by advancing our understanding of the conceptual relation between EU and national policy that precedes Europeanisation, the causal mechanisms through which Europeanisation produces policy change and the research strategies that allow us to establish the causal significance of the EU for domestic change in policy areas where EU stimuli are non-justiciable. Section 'I' shows that the notion of 'misfit' is problematic in policy areas without EU legislation and argues that it would be conceptually more accurate to speak of 'discrepancies' between EU and national policy. Section 'II' shows that while numerous causal mechanisms have attempted to explain Europeanisation in policy areas without justiciable EU stimuli, some are based on assumptions that are empirically inaccurate and all remain under-theorised and require further development before they can be tested empirically. Section 'III' argues that within-case methods and especially process-tracing provide greater leverage for causal inference and demonstrates how this method might be applied to research on the Europeanisation of employment policies, to which one of the core targets and one of the flagship initiatives of Europe 2020 pertains.