Socialising the European Semester? The limited influence of Danish social partners on EU policymaking
Main
Abstract
Many scholars have debated the role of social policy in the new economic governance after the financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis. While some researchers argue that social policy continues to be subordinated in favour of the economic imperative, others observe a partial but progressive socialisation, both in terms of EU policy outputs (i.e. more focus on social policies) and the governance procedure (i.e. more participation of social actors). This article contributes to this debate by providing a national perspective. Specifically, it investigates whether procedural socialisation at the national level leads to output socialisation at the EU level. Based on two case studies from Denmark during the European Semester, this article finds that despite their active participation, social partners have had no noticeable influence on the Commission’s Country Reports or Country-Specific Recommendations. The results indicate that procedural socialisation may not easily translate into output socialisation. The article argues for more nuanced insights into the socialisation debate.
Details
Socialisation, European Semester, Social partners, Social policy, Denmark
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Material published in the JCER is done so under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with copyright remaining with the author.- Articles published online in the JCER cannot be published in another journal without explicit approval of the JCER editor.
- Authors can 'self-archive' their articles in digital form on their personal homepages, funder repositories or their institutions' archives provided that they link back to the original source on the JCER website. Authors can archive pre-print, post-print or the publisher's version of their work.
- Authors agree that submitted articles to the JCER will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the JCER.