Sunday, March 16, 2014
Governor's (Omni Shoreham)
The economic crisis has created a paradox, especially at the European level: Despite pure market mechanisms and competition as an organizational logic has received fundamental criticism, with the financial crisis, economic actors (namely companies and their interest groups), defending these regulatory approaches, seem to have gained in power and their policy options strengthened. In order to understand this paradox a better knowledge of the roles played by economic and social actors in EU decision-making seems important. Drawing on public administration change literature we investigate whether the relative power of economic and social actors has shifted in terms of EU decision-making. Although a ‘problem pressure’ approach could have predicted European social policies becoming more relevant in order to cope with the crisis, daily news suggests that the crisis has triggered new policy mechanisms which have removed social policy from the priorities of the EU political agenda. Our paper tries to systematically contrast the ‘problem pressure’ hypothesis with the ‘end of social Europe’ hypothesis by focusing especially on the changing role of the European Commission and the power relationships among European institutions, we present new empirical data contributing to these questions from different perspectives and sources: First, interview material on the perceived strength of different portfolios inside the Commission. Second, changing ideological composition of the College of Commissioners as well as economic versus social DGs and third the increasing intergovernmentalist turn in European policies and its impact on European social policy.
