Negotiated and Effective Constraint? Structural Reform and Social Policy in the European Semester

Responses to the crisis of the Eurozone have led to the set up of the European Semester, a mix of hard law (with the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure) and soft coordination and surveillance of social issues (with a dedicated scoreboard). From a policy point of view, a main tenet of the European Semester is the commitment of Member States to conduct “structural reforms”. Recent research has revealed a partial “socialization” of both the policy process and outcomes of the European Semester (Zeitlin and Vanhercke, 2014) in terms of a greater involvement of actors defending social policy priorities. But we still know little about how this has actually shaped reform. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is therefore to unpack the politics of “structural reforms” in two ways: first, we examine the meaning and framing lying behind this catch-all term; second, we map the interactions between the relevant EU and national actors to find out how ideas circulate, are being negotiated, and to what extent the European Semester constraints national policy making. For doing so, we compare five contrasted Member States (in terms of debt levels and national politics), namely Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. Empirically, we look at the country specific recommendations and conduct interviews with policy makers in order to elucidate which type of constraint is exerted through the European Semester.