The CJEU’s Take on the Coordination of Social Policies in the EU - A Qualitative Vignette Study

This paper sketches the use of qualitative vignettes to explore how judges, Advocates General (AGs), and référendaires at the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) perceive the EU’s policy coordination mechanisms, notably the European Semester. I highlight that the guidelines and recommendations adopted through the European Semester constitute a type of soft law that sets policy objectives and is backed by compliance-inducing mechanisms. However, the CJEU has been reluctant to address the constitutional questions posed by the EU’s intergovernmental coordination of policies. Therefore, I designed three hypothetical case scenarios to explore the following questions: Does the Court, i.e., its members and employees, see a need to review policy coordination mechanisms to limit executive power excess? Are policy coordination documents considered a legitimate resource for judicial reasoning? In the first section, I will introduce these research questions. In the second section, I will provide a brief overview of existing vignette studies, and in the third section, I will elaborate on my vignettes. As I have yet to conduct the interviews, I conclude with a few observations from my pilot study and with reflections on potential pitfalls.