How much difference do Recovery and Resilience Plans make to member states’ fiscal and social policy?

With the NGEU package, the EU seems to have moved away from regulating national budgetary policy under the Stability and Growth Pact towards supporting member states’ fiscal policies under extreme strain from an ongoing pandemic. It entails an expansion of the Commission’s mandate and a paradigmatic change of its role: from the agent of fiscal surveillance to the broker of EU-financed public expenditures. This change could be described in terms of experimentalist governance (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008, Zeitlin 2016), although not all characteristics of the policy process fit the prescriptions. This literature has an optimistic view of how the form of governance leads to better policy. In order to scrutinize this proposition, we draw a distinction between experimentalist governance of member states’ fiscal policies and an experimental union in fiscal policy. Experimentalist governance focuses on the differentiated exercise of authority through agreed metrics and peer review. An experimental union focuses on how dispersed authority can respond to moments of crisis and how this response affects loyalty in an extremely diverse union (Kriesi et al 2021). We analyse the thrust of Recovery and Resilience Plans for a select number of country cases both in terms of process and substance. We focus on hidden and overt social policy reforms because they would mark the change to previous EU fiscal regulation. To put the alternative starkly: does improved function follow experimentalist form, as experimentalist governance scholars assume; or does the form of the NGEU follow the intended function of top-down reform in the experimental union? The latter entails the possibility that the NGEU ‘bribes’ administrations into reforms with weak longterm impact.