Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Consequences of Regional Political and Economic Integration for Inequality and the Welfare State in Western Europe

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Around the world, societies are binding themselves together and building regional economies and polities. The phenomenon of regional integration is a dramatic social change with important sociological implications. This dissertation research aims to answer two key questions. First, what effect has regional integration in the European Union had on income inequality in European societies? Second, how has regional integration shaped welfare spending in European states? These questions matter because regional integration is pursued by many societies that find themselves enmeshed in dense global networks (e.g., the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Common Market of the Southern Cone, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), yet there is little scientific research on the consequences of regional integration. To resolve these research questions, this project (1) develops innovative measures of regional integration in consultation with EU experts at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research and elsewhere, (2) collects data from the European Union archives and the Union of International Associations, both located in Brussels, (3) compiles standard measures of income inequality and the welfare state, (4) uses time-series statistical analysis to estimate the association between regional integration and international income inequality and differences among welfare states, and (5) employs statistical techniques for panel data to analyze the relationship between regional integration and national income inequality and welfare spending. The broader impacts of this research include the following. This project will contribute new evidence on the consequences of regional integration, test hypotheses drawn from a variety of social science disciplines, and advance debates in multidisciplinary literatures on globalization, the welfare state, and income inequality. More generally, the project will contribute to our understanding of changes in the geographic scale of social action and the consequences of the institutionalization of new political and economic forms. This research also will develop new measures of regional integration that could be used by other scholars, the enhancement of international research networks, and the dissemination of policy-relevant findings on the consequences of regional integration.