Youth Guarantee and Europeanization

The aim of this thesis is to examine whether the compliance with the Council Recommendation regarding Youth Guarantee and its impact on the policies of the Member States varies across different welfare state models. Persistently high youth unemployment rate has called for solutions. In 2013 Council has adopted the most ambitious measure regarding youth unemployment which called every Member State to create a national Youth Guarantee Scheme based on the provided guidelines. Review of these guidelines suggested that compliance with this Recommendation and its implementation may vary across the Member States in relation to the institutional fit. There is yet no comparative information on the compliance with the Council recommendation regarding Youth Guarantee and its impact on the policies of the Member States. Furthermore, overview of the empirical research regarding the institutional fit effect on the other EU measures regarding employment policies revealed conflicting results. Thus, comparative qualitative analysis of the implemented changes and the National Youth Guarantee Schemes was conducted for the Member States representing different welfare state clusters. The results of the analysis indicate that the variation of the impact across the Member States did not fully support the institutional fit theory. Results regarding the variation in compliance also do not fully support the institutional fit theory, but show higher potential explanatory power. Therefore, further research including other Member States is recommended.