This thesis looks at the extent to which Irish social security policy outcomes and the process of social security policy making has been influenced by global factors and Ireland’s relatively high level of internationalisation. It asks, has Ireland’s immersion in the global economy impacted on the content or the process of mediating policy1? Using hypotheses developed from competition state theorists, it first examines whether Irish social security policy has recommodified and refocused towards the market. Having examined indicators relating to regulation, retrenchment, residualisation and activation/conditionality and defamiliarisation it concludes policy has shifted towards an ‘Irish style’ recommodification but has shifted less in this direction than might have been expected in a ‘competition state’ as internationalised as Ireland.\ud
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Understanding how this policy was mediated involves examining Irish governance and institutions, interests and policy discourse in the Irish social policy community and exploring whether governance processes were influenced or transformed by international economic and political processes. The thesis examines eight types of policy decisions and isolates explanatory variables that can help account for the trajectory of change. It identifies, over the two decades of the study, three distinct policy periods during which identifiable policy coalitions worked within the policy institutions to pursue different policy ideas. These periods are differentiated by degrees of ambition, openness, and capacity relating to policy change The key variable determining the different period was who held political power. The thesis concludes that within the broad scope o f policy permitted in a competition state that the consensus nature of the Irish policy system is confined to a relatively narrow set of policy options and that the complexion of the government is the factor determining the policy focus and the choices relating to type, scale and pace of policy development