PART V: LEARNING TO DEAL WITH DEMANDS FOR PARTICIPATION
V. FACILITATING AND CONSTRAINING FACTORS FOR POLICY TRANSFER
The presentation of the three trajectories toward the liberalization of the telecom market allowed us to identify the specific mechanisms of policy transfer at workin each country: in The Netherlands and in Switzerland, the reform process was largely initiated and guided by domestic economic and administrative actors and by legal experts, who mobilized knowledge about EU regulation or about policy developments in other countries. Although the learning process in The Netherlands was conducted on a broad basis and involved a high number of actors, the Swiss reform process for complete liberalization was more selective and technocratic, and it was clearly a single
* During the official consultation procedure, the trade unions expressed some criticisms of the draft and complained about the absence of any inclusive experts committee, but their position was not taken into account.
y An optional referendum was launched against the whole reform package by some representatives of left-wing parties and by some regional sections of the trade unions.
However, they failed to collect the 50,000 signatures necessary to organize a popular vote.
administrative actor (OFCOM) that steered the process of voluntary transfer.
In Austria, in contrast, change was mostly reactive to external coercive pressure. Domestic actors pushing for reform intervened only very late and with the support of the European Commission. To sum up, while Switzerland and The Netherlands fall into the category of‘‘normative isomorphism,’’
Austria can be characterized as a case of‘‘coercive isomorphism.’’
How can these different mechanisms of transfer be explained? As specified in the conceptual frameworksummarized in Table 1, we hypothesized that two major structural factors are particularly relevant preconditions for policy learning. On the one hand,economic opennessis assumed to influence the domestic interest configuration in favor of liberalization. Because an open economy is characterized by a strong export-oriented sector widely exposed to global pressure for competitiveness, companies, interest organizations, and even segments of the administration are expected to be particularly sensitive to changes in the external economic and regulatory environment. This pattern applies to The Netherlands and Switzerland, whereas Austria belongs to the social version of democratic corporatism with different structural conditions and a different domestic power balance. On the other hand, we suggested that membership in the EUwould act as an exogenous facilitating factor for policy learning because it imposes compliance and provides domestic actors of mem- ber states such as The Netherlands or Austria with expertise, reform models, and legitimacy. Both of these structural factors should have an influence on the configuration of actors and interests in the telecommunication policy sector.
After having applied the conceptual frameworkdeveloped above to the three reforms under scrutiny, we can now assess the relative importance of these two structural preconditions for learning and synthesize the major factors explain- ing the distinctive mechanisms of policy transfer (see Table 3).
The relevance of formal EU membership as a facilitating factor for learning must be strongly qualified. In Switzerland, a nonmember, telecom- munication liberalization had already become an issue in the mid-1980s. After the rejection of the EEA Treaty in 1992, conformity with developments in EU regulations was utilized by economic actors, the administration, and the government as an important argument for legitimizing reforms, even though no formal obligation for adaptation existed. Similarly, the reform process in The Netherlands was—at least in the beginning—to a very large extent driven by domestic political forces rather than by willingness to comply with forthcoming EU directives. The Dutch government developed an autono- mous national strategy of a‘‘managed duopoly,’’which failed, however, be- cause of internal divergences between the operators. By contrast, even though Austria as an EEA member had already been submitted to EU regulation from 1993 onward, it did only very lately follow the direction adopted by the EU. National political and administrative actors remained very passive and
hardly used the information disseminated by the Commission in order to prepare and implement domestic reforms. Moreover, the Commission inter- vened in this case more as a coercive agent than as a policy entrepreneur involved in a process of information and persuasion. These observations clearly question the relevance of formal EU membership as an explanatory factor for a specific mechanism of adaptation. This result supports findings of Levi-Faur (2004), who shows that telecommunications reform in EU member countries can, to a large extent, be understood as a direct domestic response to global economic and ideological developments, rather than as a mere adap- tation to EU regulation. In The Netherlands, where powerful domestic actors pushed for liberalization, the Commission hardly ever intervened directly in the process and direct EU pressure was not necessary for reform. Neverthe- less, the general importance of the EU as a catalyst for reforms channeling structural economic pressures for change and providing regulatory models must be noted. In all three countries, EU regulations were decisive for the extent and the timing of the reforms. Even in Switzerland, although a nonmember, the content of the legislative acts finally adopted clearly aimed at aligning national laws to EU directives and all three reform processes temporally converged on January 1998, the EU deadline for market liberal- Table 3 Mechanisms of Policy Transfer in The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria
NL A CH
Favorable structural factors
EU membership Yes Yes No
Liberal democratic corporatism
Yes No Yes
Domestic factors facilitating policy transfer
Presence of political actors mobilizing for reform
Yes (VNO-NCW, early demands)
No (IWT, very late)
Yes (USCI, early demands) Presence of norm
entrepreneurs
Yes (experts CAPT) No Yes (OFCOM)
International strategy of the national operator
Yes No Yes
Major mechanisms of policy transfer
Voluntary,
domestic learning
Coercivepressure of the EU and mimetism
Voluntary, domestic learning and conditionality CAPT, Commission for Advice on Postal and Telecommunication Policy; IWT, Interessengemeinschaft Wettbewerbsorientiertes Telekommunikationsgesetz; OFCOM, Office of Communication; USCI, Swiss Federation of Commerce and Industry; VNO-NCW, Federation of Dutch Industries.
ization.* Moreover, for the Austrian case, our empirical evidence contradicts the argument that the coercive effect of EU regulations can be neglected (Levi- Faur, 2004) because the Commission directly played a crucial role in the reform process. Key actors of the Austrian policy process affirmed that without the pressure exerted by the Commission, complete liberalization and independent regulation would not have been adopted for several years (Interviews VII and IX). These findings indicate that the EU Commission played a somewhatsubsidiaryrole to domestic actors: if the domestic con- figuration of actors and interests is unfavorable to change, the Commission can indeed come to play a decisive role in member states.yOur observations also confirm that Europeanization, as a more specific form of policy transfer, is a concept whose application should not be limited to political trans- formations in the EU member states. According to the distinction operated by Radaelli (2001), one can speakof‘‘vertical Europeanization’’(coercive) in the case of Austria and of predominantly ‘‘horizontal Europeanization’’
(through domestic learning) for The Netherlands, but for Switzerland as well.
The importance of national dynamics appears clearly in our three cases.
The adaptation processes in The Netherlands and Switzerland confirm the hypothesis about the importance of economic openness—regardless of EU membership—for the willingness of national actors to promote telecom liberalization. In both countries, business associations were already pushing in the early 1980s for a liberalization of the telecommunications sector because they considered it as an important factor for the global competitiveness of the national economy. The Swiss Federation for Commerce and Industry, for instance, disseminated publications on the benefits of liberalization and privatization, and Dutch business representatives and independent experts pointed at the rapid evolution in Anglo-Saxon countries in order to place the issue at an early moment on the domestic political agenda. Similarly, the traditional Dutch and Swiss monopolistic operators engaged in the early 1990s in international business strategies by joining Unisource, whereas the Austrian telecom operator did not pursue any similar strategy until late 1996.
Participation in Unisource accounts, to a large extent, for the fact that the Dutch KPN and the Swiss PTT were in favor of market liberalization.
The debate on the necessary liberalization of telecommunications markets launched by these domestic economic actors was pursued by Swiss
* Besides, Switzerland was submitted to EU conditionality regarding the international strategy of its operator.
y Schneider (2001,p. 70) comes to a similar conclusion concerning telecommunication reform in Italy compared with Germany and France. The effect of direct pressure for reform emanating from the EU Commission was enhanced because of strong domestic opposition against reforms from trade unions and parts of the administration.
and Dutch administrative and political elites. In The Netherlands, the government created several expert committees, which provided knowledge on international policy developments and thus came to act as norm entre- preneurs. The Swiss OFCOM mandated expert reports and was active in international telecommunication organizations such as the ITU and the IRG, where it tookpart in the collective learning process. Even though the organizational structure of the policy sector was largely similar in all three countries after 1993—all of them had created specialized bodies as parts of the administration or independent experts committees—it was only in The Netherlands and in Switzerland that these bodies really came to play the role of norm entrepreneurs. In Austria, where domestic economic claims for reform remained largely absent until 1997, the administrative actor in the field of telecommunications adopted a rather passive position toward liber- alization and never autonomously mobilized external expertise on the issue.
In contrast to the Dutch and Swiss cases, there was no learning process among the Austrian administration. In this case, external pressure by the EU Commission was much more decisive in accelerating the reform process, and this finally led to a form of mimetism and emulation through copying of the German legislation.
Cross-country differences in terms of economic structure, and the resulting various national configurations of actors and interests, largely explain the particular mechanisms of adaptation observed in the three countries. They cannot account, however, for all aspects of a country’s trajectory. Additional elements such as partisan variables or even the specific behavior of those involved also played a certain role. In The Netherlands, for instance, the right-wing liberal coalition in government in the 1980s favored the rapid adoption of the first steps toward liberalization. Conversely, the fact that the Austrian Ministry of Transport was directed by a minister of the SPO¨, a party with very close links to trade unions and the national operator, also contributed to the Ministry’s passive and reluctant attitude in the process of liberalization.
VI. CONCLUSION: FAVORABLE DOMESTIC ACTOR