Support for Digitalization Policies: Evidence from EU’s Next Generation Program
Silja Häusermann (University of Zurich)
Digitalization policies are becoming increasingly economically and politically relevant, but we know little about public opinion towards these policies. We use the case of the EU’s Next Generation (NG) program, aimed at expediting digitalization in Europe via spending close to 800,000 million euros in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, as a substantively and theoretically important example to test rival theories about the political fault lines these policies may entail. In particular, we contrast expectations that follow from considering digitalization policies as a case of knowledge economy/social investment policies to those that consider this policy as classical instances of state intervention and market regulation. We gathered new survey data from five EU countries (Germany, France, Sweden, Poland, and Italy) with detailed new measures on knowledge about the Next Generation program, support for digitalization policies, expected economic impact, and perceptions about the main beneficiaries. Our findings suggest that these policies are most clearly supported by voters of mainstream parties and least favoured by supporters of radical and populist parties. Preferences are structured more along political lines thank along socio-structural categories or group-specific economic interests.
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Bringing the State Back In? Administrative Legacies in Modern Welfare States: Bureaucracy and the Expansion of Social Security in 20th Century France A Case Study
Daniel Fernandez Serrano (EUI)
Why are generous welfare states not necessarily interventionist? In Europe, such welfare states often exhibit two distinct features: autonomous pension funds based on capitalization and independent education providers. I argue that these traits are shaped by historical legacies, particularly the role of state bureaucracy. In my thesis, I analyze the impact of bureaucracy on welfare state expansion across Europe, but for this short presentation, I focus on the empirical material collected through archival work in France, covering the period between 1930 and 1945. Here, I demonstrate how public bureaucracy influenced welfare expansion in two critical ways: by creating a rigid tier of non-independent pension funds and fragmenting welfare provision along professional lines, which ultimately hindered universalism—what I term centralized particularism. This thesis applies theories of state bureaucracies from Latin America to a European context and contributes to the literature on "bringing the state back in," emphasising how state structures shape the expansion of welfare in specific and path-dependent ways.
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