Comesion policy: the ideational dimension explaining the change in comesion policy instruments across the 1988, 1993 and 2013

Cohesion policy was first instituted in 1988 to create economic convergence between the regions of the European Community so to provide them the capacity to equally compete in the Single Market. Since then, the policy has been reformed four times, and it is now conceptualized by the European Commission as the investment arm of the European Union. Many scholars have argued that the successive reforms have layered policy instruments upon policy instruments and that this has created living contradictions within cohesion policy. With this research, I aim at explaining how cohesion policy has evolved in the long-term. I will reconstruct the way in which cohesion policy changed in terms of eligibility rules, use of political conditionality, and its redistributive capacity. By using fuzzy set analysis, I will create a model that will allow me to measure the change both in kind and in degree in the period 1988-2013. In this way, I will be able to determine when and how policy change occurred. In the second part of the research, I will analyze the speeches made by the European Commission's key actors during three crucial reform processes (1988, 1993, 2013). I will focus on four distinct discourses that, according to the ideational literature on cohesion policy, may have a substantial role in driving the reform's debate. I will perform a frame analysis on an exhaustive set of speeches made by the President of the European Commission and the European Commissioner for Regional Policy in the 3 years period antecedent to the legislative process. The frame analysis will allow me to create saliency measures based on a coding scheme created for the analysis. I will then establish, through congruence testing, a) if the key actors' preferences are consistent with the policy change occurred in 1988, 1993 and 2013 b) how they conceive the reform process in relation to other policies of the European Union, Economic and Monetary Union in particular. In this way, I will be able to produce an original contribution both in the literature about cohesion policy and in the wider literature on European Integration.