Working with the EU: How Discourses Shape the Application of EU State Aid Rules

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• Author: Bernard Steunenberg,Pieter Zwaan
• Date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13491

Working with the EU: How Discourses Shape the Application of

EU State Aid Rules

BERNARD STEUNENBERG

1

and PIETER ZWAAN

2

1

Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

2

Institute for Management Research, Radboud University,

Nijmegen, Netherlands

Abstract

State aid rules are an important part of the European Union’s (EU) competition policy that aims to

ensure a fair competition in the common market. These rules directly affect national and

sub-national governments of member states, which are sometimes confronted with different and

opposing claims about what to do. The question is how implementing civil servants interpret

and resolve these claims in practice. In this article, discourse analysis is applied to identify how

civil servants apply and interpret state aid rules based on empirical research in the Netherlands.

The main f‌inding is that, even within the existing regulatory framework of one member state,

the application of state aid rules is understood differently based on the discourses we identif‌ied.

We describe the content, dissemination amongst civil servants and the relationship of these dis-

courses with compliance. The article shows that discourses matter and help to understand how

state aid rules are applied.

Keywords: compliance; discourse; European Union; Q methodology; state aid

Introduction

The control of state aid is considered a vital policy instrument to regulate the European

Union’s (EU) common market. By specifying the conditions under which state aid can

be allowed, EU legislation limits the subsidies, investments and provisions of favourable

f‌inancial conditions that member states may use to intervene in the ‘common’market.

Despite the far-reaching consequences of this policy, the literature on the politics of state

aid is still ‘at a relatively early stage of development’(Doleys, 2013, p. 24; cf. Kassim and

Lyons, 2013; Schito, 2021). So far, it has focused largely on the development of the pol-

icy regime (e.g., Akman and Kassim, 2010; Cini, 2001), its impact on the targeting of na-

tional state aid policies (Blauberger, 2009b; Botta and Schwellnuss, 2015; Franchino and

Mainenti, 2016; Hölscher et al., 2017; Schito, 2021; Zahariadis, 2013) or the role of the

Commission (and its interaction with member states) in enforcing the rules (e.g., Alves

et al., 2021; Finke, 2020; Smith, 1998; van Druenen and Zwaan, 2022; van Druenen

et al., 2022). Less work is done on the practical application of state aid rules in member

states (Franchino and Mainenti, 2016; Lindstrom, 2021).

The application and enforcement of EU state aid rules are structured by the so-called

state aid notif‌ication procedure. The EU prohibits state aid under Article 107 of the Treaty

on the Functioning of the European Union. The Treaty, however, allows for several

exemptions. How and when these exemptions apply is not always clear. Member states

must therefore, in principle, notify the Commission of aid plans and await approval. Over

the last decade, the need to do so has become more limited, by providing more clarity

JCMS 2024 Volume 62. Number 1. pp. 242–261DOI: 10.1111/jcms.13491

© 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wile y&Sons

Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits useand distribution in any

medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modif‌ications or adaptations are made.

about certain exemptions. In these cases, notif‌ication is no longer needed. The importance

of this f‌ield is illustrated by its size: in 2018, member states spent 120.9 billion EUR on

state aid (European Commission, 2019). Despite the notif‌ication procedure and the strong

enforcement powers of the Commission, the application of EU state aid rules remains un-

certain. Ambiguity of the rules and its different exemptions, amongst others, seem to lead

to diff‌iculties and different practices of applying the rules amongst implementing civil

servants. The Dutch knowledge-hub ‘Europa Decentraal’reported that out of a total of

589 questions about implementing EU rules from decentralized governments, 31% (181

questions) were related to state aid rules (Europa Decentraal, 2019).

In this article, we therefore explore the practice of working with EU state aid rules by

analysing how EU state aid rules and the broader setting affecting this practice are

interpreted by implementing civil servants. In doing so, we focus more specif‌ically on

the role of discourses, which we understand as ‘… a shared means of making sense of

the world embedded in language’(Dryzek, 2000, p. 18). For the purpose of this study,

we treat a discourse as ‘a system of statements’that enables but also limits certain ways

of talking and thinking about a topic (Parker, 1992, in Phillips et al., 2004). These state-

ments may def‌ine or evaluative certain topics and/or prescribe certain courses of action.

As such, discourses outline appropriate and sensible ways to act (Phillips et al., 2004).

Whilst discourse ‘helps to shape social practice’, it also ref‌lects these practices (Mulderrig

et al., 2019, p. 11).

In this study, we study discourses to analyse how civil servants understand policy, in-

cluding its problems and solutions (e.g., Dryzek and Berejikian, 1993; Hajer, 2002). We

do not aim to uncover and analyse how these discourses are (re)produced or received or

how they are affected by the socio-political context. Although we do not deny that

discourses may ref‌lect power structures, which can be critically assessed (e.g.,

Fairclough, 1992; Mulderrig et al., 2019), our focus lies on uncovering different dis-

courses, their dissemination amongst civil servants and their relationship to compliance.

1

We focus on differences in discourses amongst provincial and municipal policy off‌i-

cials in the Netherlands involved in the application of state aid rules, because we would

like to know whether differences in implementation are related to different discourses. Al-

though there are very different ways of analysing (differences in) discourses (Phillips

et al., 2004), including uncovering storylines (e.g., Hajer, 2002) or identifying policy

frames (e.g., Rein and Schön, 1996), we selected Q methodology (Brown, 1993) as a

helpful tool for comparative research, especially when extensive data about statements

are used.

2

This reconstructive methodology (Dryzek and Berejikian, 1993, p. 50) allows

us to identify clusters of statements shared by Dutch civil servants, which can be

interpreted as discourses. Based on our empirical analysis, we f‌ind the existence of three

discourses about the implementation of state aid rules.

3

Furthermore, we show how dis-

courses are disseminated and whether actors’identif‌ication with specif‌ic discourses

1

In this way, and by connecting discourses to social practice, we differ from a more linguistic tradition of discourse analysis.

2

For our analysis, we use 48 carefully selected, different original statements from the concourse on state aid application.

These statements are subsequently scored so that we can determine whether and how these statements are related and

can be interpreted as a discourse (see the next section).

3

The results presented here are a reanalysis of data collected by Soetekouw (2018), for which we found a different solution.

In addition to the Q study presented in this article, we also reanalysed data collected by Vogel(2019), who uses statements

from only open interviews as input for the scoring by participants in the second round. The solution based on that dataset

broadly follows the solution we discuss in this article.

Working with the EU243

© 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wile y&Sons

Ltd.