Moral Economies of Employment Policy as Neoliberal Policy Feedback: A Comparative Longitudinal Qualitative Reanalysis of France and the UK

Vila-Henninger, Luis Antonio [UCL] Dupuy, Claire [UCL] et al.

Our paper addresses this question by investigating whether there is evidence of neoliberal policy feedback in the form of moral economies. As a case study, we analyze citizens’ fairness judgments of different elements of employment policy in the UK and France by reanalyzing semi-structured interview data from the mid-1990s (Belot) and focus group data from the mid-2000s (CITAE). As neoliberal reforms to employment policy varied over time and between France and the UK, we investigate whether different moral economies emerged and change in each country during this ten year period. As moral economies are normative, we investigate how citizens pair neoliberal fairness judgments of different components of employment policy design with other key principles of neoliberalism: 1) market individualism, 2) market liberty, and 3) human capital. We focus on employment policy because it is a type of policy to which respondents from these two different data sets were similarly exposed. Our paper addresses a gap in the empirical literature as well as helps to synthesize the public policy literature with the moral economy literature. The result is that we apply public policy literature to develop a framework for analyzing popular political norms that allows us to focus on how specific components of policy design (target population, instruments and rationale) translate to different political norms—and moral economies in particular. This then enriches the analysis of moral economy as a form of “normative policy feedback” (Rothstein 1998; Svallfors 2006; Koos and Sachweh 2017).