Welfare states and social policy in the EU multi-level system

Welfare states and social policy in the EU multi-level system

Dynamics of change and persistence – and of far-reaching politicisation

…in national welfare states and social policy

The more heterogeneous a state’s society becomes, the more its welfare system comes potentially under strain: social policy has a key function in determining who belongs to a community and who does not. Particularly in times of economic strain and of political polarisation, the arenas where politics of social inclusion and exclusion are made become battlefields for contestation on larger political and societal questions.

These circumstances form the context and red thread of my research on national-level social policymaking and welfare-state reform or persistence. I study political regulation and politicisation processes with a particular focus on vulnerable/vulnerabilised and marginalised target groups of social policy, such as forced migrants (see my specific research project on the nexus of migration, incorporation and health policies),  women*, children and youth, and elderly. My research examines primarily the welfare states and social policies of Germany and Sweden, but also includes broader comparisons among European states.

…in EU social policy

The EU’s social policy differs in many respects from conventional definitions of (national) social policy, being principally regulatory and to a significant extent governed through soft-law mechanisms, whereas the power to decide upon distribution schemes remains in member states’ hands. Whereas the European Communities had very limited and fragmentary competences in the area of social policy to begin with, the social dimension of European integration expanded significantly already in the 1950s to 1980s, notably through different soft-law mechanisms such as action programmes and recommendations, and through the supranational activism of, amongst others, the Commission, the European Court of Justice, and notably the European Parliament.

In my research on EU-level social policy, I study the emergence of a European social dimension from a historical-sociological institutionalist approach, with a special focus on the ideas influencing actors’ behaviour: the area of social policy provided a stronger ideational dimension than any other Community policy area at the time. Through the promotion of European social policy measures, Members of the European Parliament as well as various actors within the Commission sought to present European integration as a project with a palpable positive impact on people’s lives. They hoped thus to increase public support for closer European integration (as well as their own related political actions), and to convince the member states’ citizens that the Communities were more than a mere technocratic, market-oriented construct. The emergence of a European-level social policy is thus closely linked to questions of democratic representation in and legitimacy of EU governance.

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