Rethinking social pacts in Europe: Prime ministerial power in Ireland and Italy

The European Journal of Industrial Relations is the principal English-language forum for the analysis of key developments in European industrial relations and their theoretical and practical implications.

It embraces a broad definition of industrial relations and includes articles which relate to any aspect of work and employment. It publishes rigorous and innovative work on and from all European countries. All social science disciplines are relevant to its remit, and interdisciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged. A major objective is to foster cross national comparative analysis; for this reason, single country monographs are unlikely to be accepted unless framed by a strong comparative perspective. Work which relates European developments to broader global experience is welcome. Abstract:

In Ireland and Southern European countries, social pacts were widely seen as a mechanism to mobilize broad support for weak governments to legitimate difficult reforms in the context of monetary integration.

I retrace the politics of these pacts in Ireland and Italy to argue that it was less the condition of ‘weak government’ that enabled the negotiation of tripartite pacts, than the intervention of a ‘strong executive’: the prime minister’s office. Social pacts were pursued as a political strategy to enhance prime ministerial executive autonomy.

In the aftermath of the euro crisis, this means of enhancing executive autonomy has been replaced by the negotiation of grand coalition governments, with the exclusion of unions; but this continues the trend towards the prime ministerialization of politics.