CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Wewerka, Lisa |
|---|---|
| Title | Understanding a Public Body's Intervention in the field of Antidiscrimination in Times of Shifting Political Priorities |
| Summary | This dissertation investigates changes in the interventions of public bodies in the field of antidiscrimination in Austria, Hungary and Ireland to reveal why they evolved in different directions although they shared similar responsibilities. I look into all type of changes in their interventions such as their legal support, promotional work and advice to the government. By studying these changes in intervention, I address open questions in the literature relevant for scholars interested in regulation and equality institutions regarding the influence of policymakers, non-state actors and past policy commitments on changes in the interventions of public bodies. I elaborate on a new approach to study changes in a public body’s intervention by integrating different logics of action proposed by neo-institutionalist approaches and resource dependency theory. Previous approaches assume that bodies either follow their material interests or do not change their intervention because of their organizational culture defining appropriate intervention. I integrate these logics in a framework and assume that while material interests trigger changes, ideas and norms influence the direction of the subsequent changes. I theorize that change is triggered by policymakers impacting the material interest of the bodies. Yet, policymakers have limited control over the direction of the changes, as non-state actors or past policy commitments can impact the ideas and norms of the bodies affecting the changes in their intervention. I use a qualitative methodology to study changes in the bodies’ interventions through in-depth case studies and controlled comparisons. I selected the Hungarian and Irish antidiscrimination bodies for the analysis, as they experienced similar interferences by policymakers between 2008 and 2011 when the political priorities of their government shifted. Yet their interventions changed differently underlining the need to focus attention on the influence of non-state actors and past policy commitments. The Austrian body, on the contrary was an interesting case to include in the research, as it did not experience any interferences by policymakers, but also changed its intervention incrementally. The major findings, summarized in a model, demonstrate that the control of policymakers over a public body’s intervention in fields like antidiscrimination is mediated by strong non-state actors and past policy commitments, and increases with the severity of their interference. I show that the exchange of staff had a stronger destabilizing effect than changes in the budgets of the bodies. Moreover, the analysis shows that strong non-state actors and past policy commitments influenced the direction of the changes in the public bodies’ interventions depending on the severity of the interference of policymakers. If the body, like in the case of Ireland, is challenged but not completely destabilized by policymakers, strong non-state actors influence changes in its intervention. Different from that, policymakers’ interferences changing a body’s budget and staff, make a body more likely to adapt its intervention to past policy commitments and the agenda of the policymakers, as in the case of the Hungarian body. We learnt from the Austrian case that strong non-state actors are likely to continue to influence a body’s intervention when it has stable routines. |
| Supervisor | Krizsan, Andrea |
| Department | School of Public Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/wewerka_lisa.pdf |
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