As Douwe Truijens and Marcel Hanegraaff have recently remarked (Truijens and Hanegraaff 2023), interest groups can play a very large role at the implementation stage of the policy cycle, potentially even reversing decisions made earlier in the cycle. And yet, they stress, the topic of interest group influence, and hence bias between actors with different degrees of influence, remains understudied when it comes to the domestic implementation of EU policies.

In our article, we go to the core of the question raised by Truijens and Hanegraaff, focusing on the implementation of the 2006 Services Directive, which mandated Member States liberalize many aspects of the operation of several professions and occupations, including opening up access to them.

Professions and occupations have received little attention in the interest group literature. When it has covered them, the literature has generally treated them as homogenous actors. However, by increasing competition, liberalization creates potential winners and losers within as well as between professions and occupations. This, in turn, raises the possibility of bias in implementation due to power differentials between and within professions and occupations.

Our article assesses whether and how these power differentials affected the implementation of the Services Directive in Greece between 2010 and 2018, when the country was under the external conditionality of its international creditors, the EU, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

We analyze the influence actors in two professions (lawyers and engineers) and two occupations (tourist guides and taxi drivers) had on the implementation of the legislation reducing entry barriers to their markets. We show that, even under very strong external pressures, some actors were, so to speak, indeed more equal than others. Lawyers and engineers, having significant resources to access policymakers, and within them groups representing the interests of the most powerful actors (such as big law firms and established engineering specialties) were better able to shape implementation of professional liberalization and even postpone it indefinitely, as was the case for engineers. Conversely, the opposition of taxi drivers and especially tourist guides was quickly swept to the side.

– Francesco Stolfi (Macquarie University) and Natalia Papamakariou (Greek Ministry of Economy and Development/General Secretariat for Industry, Greece)

– Stolfi and Papamakariou’s article is published in the Journal of Public Policy and is free to read until the end of 2023