Prospects and Challenges for Discursive-Sociological Studies of the Europeanization of Equality Policies

Abstract

In this book we have aimed to strengthen the synergy between the gender equality and Europeanization research agendas, in order to better our understanding of policy change in the European Union (EU). It has been our argument that a better analysis of gender and other equality policies calls for the adoption of comprehensive and pluralistic approaches to Europeanization. These approaches are necessary to grasp the complexities of a field in which soft measures have abounded, actors’ interactions have been crucial to significant policy outcomes, and discursive usages have facilitated policy legitimation processes, social learning, and norm diffusion. Our choice of a discursive-sociological perspective to study Europeanization appeared essential to accounting for the multiplicity of factors affecting policy change on gender and other inequalities in Europe. Our intentions in Chapter 1, therefore, were not only to start our discussion from a common state of the art, but also to outline a plausible research agenda. This included paying attention to different levels of analysis (actors, discourses, meanings, usages, learning mechanisms, conditionality effects, or institutional heritages), to the variety of policy sectors considered, and to the multilevel dimension of policymaking in the EU. Yet we opted for a relatively open perspective (rather than for a unified approach) in order to bring both research agendas closer together, thus encompassing most of the cognitive, discursive, institutionalist, and sociological approaches that have recently blossomed in the fields of European studies and gender policy analysis.KeywordsEuropean UnionDomestic ViolenceGender EqualityEuropean Union PolicyPluralistic ApproachThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.