Why Free Movement? Assessing Policies and Rationales

Abstract

Since their early days in the 1950s, European institutions have devised a wide range of policies designed to encourage the free movement of citizens. These can be arranged within Lowi’s (1972) well-known classification of public policies as ‘constituent’, ‘regulatory’ or ‘distributive’. By contrast, there are no policies which encourage mobility that are of an openly ‘redistributive’ kind — that is, intended to shift resources from some social categories to others (Table 2.1).