Fighting Poverty and Social Exclusion in the EU

A Chance in Europe 2020

Matteo Jessoula, Ilaria Madama, Matteo Jessoula, Ilaria Madama

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367589424
• eBook ISBN: 9781317396260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the field of anti-poverty policies, the interplay between the Europe 2020 overarching strategy and the 'Semester' have marked major discontinuity vis-à-vis the Open Method of Coordination for social protection and social inclusion (Social OMC) of the Lisbon phase. This book therefore asks whether and how Europe matters in the fight against poverty and social exclusion by assessing the emergence and possible institutionalisation of a European multi-level, multi-stakeholder and integrated policy arena in the new institutional framework.

Supranational developments, multi-level interactions, as well as the strategy effects at the national level are analysed in six European countries - Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, UK and Sweden – with the aim to identify the key factors affecting the implementation of the Europe 2020 anti-poverty strategy.

This book will be of key interest to students, scholars and practitioners in social policy, political science and European governance, and more broadly to European Union politics, European integrations studies, sociology and economics.

1 Fighting poverty and social exclusion in the Europe 2020 framework

An introduction

Ilaria Madama and Matteo Jessoula

In the field of anti-poverty policies, which have constituted a major brick of ‘social Europe’ since decades (cf. Armstrong 2010), the EU’s overarching strategy Europe 2020 has actually marked a major discontinuity vis-à-vis the Social OMC of the Lisbon phase (2000–10). Not only did the new strategy provide an institutional framework – the European ‘Semester’ – for stronger (at least formally) integration between social – mainly anti-poverty – policies and the broader European framework for financial-economic governance. It also replaced the vague objective of ‘eradicating poverty’, included in the former Lisbon Strategy, with a possibly less ambitious but more realistic and potentially more incisive quantified poverty target. Lifting at least 20 million people out of poverty and social exclusion by 2020 is, in fact, one of the five targets as well as the main social innovation of Europe 2020. In order to reach the quantified poverty target, a new flagship initiative, the ‘European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion’, was also launched and a key link between the new strategy and European funds was introduced: in the 2014–20 multi-annual financial framework, Member States (MS) are actually required to allocate at least 20 per cent of European Social Fund’s resources to combating poverty.

As a result of these novelties, the Europe 2020 institutional framework may potentially entail a quantum leap for the EU’s action in anti-poverty policies or, to put it differently, the fight against poverty and social exclusion could be given ‘a chance’ in the Europe 2020 framework. In fact, the new strategy was initially welcomed by the literature as a promising step towards a stronger social Europe (Marlier et al. 2010). However, later contributions have cast doubts on the effectiveness of both the new strategy – and more generally the EU – in combating poverty and social exclusion (Pochet 2010; Copeland and Daly 2012 and 2014; Armstrong 2012; Peña-Casas 2012), due to limited progress along several dimensions (cf. Bouget et al. 2015; Frazer and Marlier 2016) and especially towards the target which seems, in fact, unreachable. The latest Eurostat figures show that, in 2016, there were 117.9 million Europeans at risk of poverty and social exclusion: a considerable reduction from the peak of 123 million in 2012, but still 700,000 more individuals than in 2008, taken as the reference year when the strategy was designed.

Nevertheless, shifting from outcomes to processes, other scholars have recently argued that the social dimension within the European Semester has been gradually ‘socialized’, after timid beginnings in 2010–11 (Zeitlin and Vanhercke 2018). Such contrasting views suggest that the possible ‘re-coupling’ between the EU’s economic and social dimensions (Ferrera 2009, 2015) – which is at the core of the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth – needs further empirical research and overall assessment – as does the risk of further ‘de-coupling’.

The volume thus aims at investigating whether and how Europe matters in the fight against poverty and social exclusion within the Europe 2020 institutional framework. More precisely, the volume asks about the emergence and possible institutionalization of a multi-level, multi-stakeholder and integrated policy arena to combat poverty and social exclusion entailed by Europe 2020. To this end, supranational developments and multi-level interactions, as well as effects at the national level, are explored in six European countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK and Sweden. Since we expected that the impact might vary substantially across the six cases, the book also aims at identifying the key factors affecting the implementation of the Europe 2020 anti-poverty strategy at the domestic level, ultimately assessing whether the fight against poverty in Europe has actually ‘been given a chance’ within the Europe 2020 framework.

In the next sections, we first briefly summarize the main findings of the literature focusing on the process of European integration and consequent impact at the national level, with particular reference to the field of social and anti-poverty policies (Section 1.1). Building on this literature review, we then present the analytical framework, case selection and method (Section 2.1), as well as the main questions and research hypotheses (Section 3.1). The fourth section concludes this introduction by illustrating the structure of the volume.

1.1 Social Europe and domestic policy change

Since the mid-to-late 1990s, in the new scenario of ‘semi-sovereign welfare states’ (Ferrera and Rhodes 2000; Leibfried 2001; Hemerijck 2006), the assessment of the European influence on domestic social policy change has been at the core of two main strands of comparative welfare state research.

First, the classic strand of Europeanization studies has investigated MS adaptation to European legislation and binding acts, thus focusing on hard and direct EU measures aimed at steering national social policies and domestic implementation patterns (cf. Falkner et al. 2005). Building on the main finding that European integration has an impact – though uneven – on MS’ policies, politics and polities, some studies have also aimed at identifying the causal mechanisms through which Europe prompts domestic changes (cf. Börzel and Risse 2003; Caporaso 2007). The presence of some ‘misfit’ between European rules and national patterns is seen as the ‘necessary but not sufficient condition’ for expecting the EU’s impact on domestic settings. If the goodness of fit (Green Cowles et al. 2001) determines the magnitude of ‘adaptational pressure’ exerted by EU processes on MS, several mechanisms influence national pathways and drive MS’ responses in terms of compliance/non-compliance. Scholars have thus conceptualized a number of key factors for domestic compliance since they may facilitate change and adaptation. The list of mediating factors is broad (Radaelli 2000). However, following Börzel and Risse (2003, p. 4), ‘causal mechanisms can be collapsed into two logics’. Informed by a rationalist-institutionalist logic, the first set of factors to explain change (or stability) in the case of misfit includes: on the one hand, macro-institutional features such as number of veto points and veto players, centralization of political system, majoritarian vs. consensus democracies, fragmented vs. cohesive party systems; on the other hand, the presence of supportive formal institutions such as ad hoc commissions or ministerial agencies (cf. Caporaso 2007). Within a sociological-institutionalist framework, the second set of factors that facilitate or inhibit domestic change in case of misfit concerns socialization and learning processes. More precisely, the emergence of norm entrepreneurs, a cooperative political culture and/or other supportive informal institutions are understood as the main mediating factors enhancing the potential impact of the EU’s action at the national level. It must also be noted that the two logics and related factors are not mutually exclusive: they can in fact work in parallel, or even co-exist in a mutually reinforcing dynamic (Börzel and Risse 2003).

Turning to the second strand of literature addressing the ‘Europe matters’ hypothesis, several scholars have acknowledged that, especially after the launch of the Lisbon Strategy in 2000, the EU’s influence is not limited to legally binding regulations.¹ Thus, the analytical focus shifted on the potential, and the limits, of policy coordination mechanisms based on ‘soft law’ in the ‘Social OMC’ framework. The intense academic debate on the issue has produced contrasting assessments of the effectiveness of OMC processes to prompt national social policy developments in line with common objectives and/or supranational guidelines and recommendations. Some authors have emphasized the weakness of the Social OMC, suggesting that both its non-binding nature and the lack of sanctions have hampered the attainment of commonly agreed objectives (i.e. Barbier 2005; Armstrong 2006). Others have interpreted the lack of coercion as a fruitful condition for the unfolding of experimentations and learning processes through deliberative forms of governance, while respecting MS heterogeneity (for a review, cf. Heidenreich 2009) as well as sovereignty.

To a large extent, empirical findings show that, allowing for substantial national and sector-specific differences, these governance solutions have an impact on several dimensions of change at the domestic level, despite the lack of binding impositions (cf. Heidenreich and Zeitlin 2009). In this respect, a number of causal mechanisms through which soft governance processes affect institutional change at the national level have been identified as relevant (Zeitlin 2009), among which mutual learning and socialization processes, jointly with the activation of soft sanctions, including ‘naming, shaming, and faming’ (Kok 2004). More recently, some studies have underlined the importance of national political actors’ creative and strategic exploitation of the various European resources (cf. Jacquot and Woll 2003; Graziano et al. 2011) by emphasizing the importance of domestic politics as a key filter for the EU’s influence on MS’ policy trajectories. Although mediated by other factors – including national elite and public attitudes towards Europe and the degree of policy fit/misfit (Graziano et al. 2011) – the ‘creative appropriation’ of European resources by national political and social actors has, in fact, been defined as ‘the strongest mechanism of OMC influence on national social and employment policies’ (Zeitlin 2009, p. 231).

The non-binding, soft nature of OMC coordination, however, makes the EU’s impact more difficult to capture and isolate because: (i) it unfolds gradually; (ii) it rarely impacts on policy decisions, rather affecting ‘less tangible’ elements such as ideas, values and procedures; and, as argued by Barcevičius et al. (2014, p. 35); (iii) when processes of soft coordination are considered, ‘influences on policy-making must be “domesticated” – that is must pass through national policy processes and be adapted to national contexts – before feeding into Member State policy decisions’.

This branch of literature therefore comes with two main and opposite risks: on the one hand, the risk of downplaying EU-related factors in explaining domestic change; on the other, causal over-determination. As argued by Lehmkuhl (2007, p. 342), the disentanglement of the net effect of Europe from other factors and the re-entanglement of mutually supporting or inhibiting factors remain at the top of the Europeanization research agenda. Therefore, to avoid making ‘EU influence a cause in search of an effect’ (Graziano and Vink 2007, p. 9), research strategies must be designed carefully – both analytically and theoretically – and are required to rely on several methods, such as in-depth process tracing and careful triangulation of empirical evidences.

2.1 Capturing Europe 2020 effects: analytical framework, case selection and methods

Building on the main research findings about the EU’s social policy governance, the analysis presented in this volume rests on two fundamental, as well as cautious, assumptions. First, in order to assess the effectiveness of soft governance tools – such as European coordination mechanisms in the social policy field – the main focus should be on processes – thus shortening the causal chain – and eventually outputs (i.e. policy reforms), rather than on outcomes (i.e. poverty trends). Second, it can plausibly be argued that, in the presence of non-binding governance mechanisms, the chances to reach the targets – here, the Europe 2020 poverty target – are likely to depend on the emergence of a European ‘policy arena’ characterized by: (i) actual multi-level interactions with effective steering power of EU institutions; (ii) open and recurrent stakeholder involvement at various levels of government; and (iii) not merely formal, but real integration between anti-poverty and economic-financial policies in the overall governance framework.

Accordingly, this volume combines a focus on developments at the supranational level with fine-grained analysis of the effects produced by the Europe 2020 strategy and related initiatives in six European countries – Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the UK. Case selection relied on three criteria: (i) the countries are representatives of the five welfare models in Europe – Continental, South European, Post-Communist, Social-democratic and Liberal (cf. Ferrera 2012); (ii) they are characterized by very different systems of minimum income protection; and (iii) they have been differentially exposed to poverty (and unemployment) pressures since the launch of Europe 2020.

The analytical framework for exploring multi-level interactions and national cases relies on the toolkit developed by the Social OMC literature with the aim of capturing changes entailed by the soft mechanism of policy coordination. More precisely, it builds on the analytical framework outlined by Barcevičius et al. (2014) to identify both proced...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Fighting poverty and social exclusion in the Europe 2020 framework: an introduction
• 2 Europe 2020 and the fight against poverty: from target to governance
• 3 Europe domesticated: anti-poverty policy in the United Kingdom under Europe 2020
• 4 The reluctant European: EU2020, ‘the poverty target’ and the Swedish welfare state
• 5 The German way: reaffirming sovereignty, while accommodating the EU anti-poverty strategy
• 6 The game of compliance: Polish anti-poverty policy and Europe 2020
• 7 Lucky timing and propitious conditions: Italy’s anti-poverty policy under Europe 2020
• 8 Implementing Europe 2020 in Belgium: a case of coordinated ‘hybrid’ governance for social inclusion?
• 9 Linking Lisbon and Europe 2020: the ‘peer reviews’ in the Social OMC
• 10 Conclusions
• Index