| Abstract [eng] |
The classification of welfare states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) remains unresolved in the academic literature: different authors assign the region anywhere from one common model to four or five distinct types. This debate intersects with a new European Union financial instrument - the Social Climate Fund - under which all member states are required to submit Social Climate Plans by June 2025. These plans constitute concrete welfare policy documents formulated within the same EU regulatory context, providing an empirical opportunity to test which factors best explain the actual distribution of eco-social policy across CEE cases. This thesis aims to identify which welfare state functions dominate the eco-social measures in the Lithuanian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian Social Climate Plans, and which of three competing explanatory accounts - the EU instrument design template effect, the dominant welfare model lens, or the ruling government’s programmatic priorities - best explains the observed distribution. The study employs a comparative case-study design with three cases selected through a most-different cases sampling strategy: the cases were chosen to differ substantially across the dominant welfare model and the programmatic priorities of the drafting government. The eco-social measures in all three plans were coded according to the Sabato and Mandelli four-function framework - buffering, enabling, benchmarking, and consensus-building. Three testable hypotheses were formulated and assessed: H1 (EU design template effect), H2 (welfare model lens), and H3 (government programme priorities). The findings show that across all three plans the functions are distributed in the same order by frequency: benchmarking first, followed by enabling, then buffering, and finally consensus- building - with the consensus-building function remaining the weakest in all three cases and absent altogether in the Lithuanian plan. The empirical assessment indicates that the EU regulatory template prediction (H1) best matches the observed data in all three cases, although in the Lithuanian case H1, H2, and H3 all predict the same function ordering, leaving the three accounts empirically indistinguishable there. The Bulgarian case carries the greatest analytical weight, since H1, H2, and H3 predict distinct function orderings - and the actual ordering corresponds to H1. The thesis offers a threefold contribution: empirical - the first systematic classification of eco-social measures in CEE Social Climate Plans; methodological - the adaptation of Theodoropoulou and colleagues’ procedure to the Social Climate Fund context and its extension to a three-hypothesis comparison; and theoretical - the empirical testing of Mandelli’s institutional gateways hypothesis in the Bulgarian case. |
