United in Diversity? EU Social Policy After the Euro Crisis

The Juncker Commission put European social policy up on top of the EU’s agenda again with Juncker in 2014 pledging for ‘a social triple A rating’. While some scholars point to a certain renaissance of the European social policy which shows in projects likethe social investment package or the European Pillar of Social Rights (Zeitlin and Vanhercke 2017; Garben 2018), others claim that the EMU reforms during the crisis “created a regime in which neoliberal policies became structurally entrenched” (Scharpf 2014). We argue that this debate on post-crisis Social Europe is characterised by two blind spots: First, the literature mainly focusses on the European Semester and coordinative EU social policy, while mostly neglecting the dynamics in the areasof regulative and distributive EU social policy. Second, although it is widely acknowledged that EU social policy is a policy area of differentiated integration (Leibfried 2015), the literature mainly treats it as a homogeneous policyfield. Based on this observation the article answers two questions: (1)Have the subfields of EU social policy developed in a uniform way after the crisis or are there significant differences between the individual subfields? (2)Which factors drive the dynamics of post-crisis EU social policy and its individual subfields? In order to answer these questions, the paper applies a comparative case study design and analyses the dynamics of post-crisis policy change in four fields of EU social policy (FoM for workers, employment policy, health policy and family policy). The analytical framework is inspired by the work of Falkner et al. (2016) which combines insights of the JDT model (Scharpf 2011) and the literature on policy change. The empirical analysis is based on a comprehensive dataset of regulative and coordinative policy instruments between 1999 and 2019 and more than 30 expert interviews with EU and member state officials, civil society actors and MEPs. Based on this researchdesign the paper shows that the specific interaction of problem pressure, actor constellation and decision-making procedures lead to different dynamics in the four subfields which then create different routes of post-crisis policy change. Our findings show that EU social policy does not move uniformly in one direction and that the two post-crisis concepts of Social Europe (social investment and EPSR) are differently relevant in the individual subfields. Therefore, we argue that research on EU social policyhas to be more sensitive to the dynamics within the different subfields in order to comprehensivelyrecognize challenges and formulate solutions for the future of Social Europe. The paper speaks to central questions of the CfP such as the ‘institutional and ideational foundations of social policies in the EU’ and the effect of the crisis on ‘Social Europe’.