Aside from a few exceptions (for instance Deutsch 1962 and Haas 1958), sociological works are relative newcomers to the field of European integration and more recently of European Union (EU) politics. Since the beginning of European integration in the 1950s, economists, jurists, political scientists and scholars in international relations (IR) have developed a vast body of literature on European integration. Since the end of the 1990s, a revival of sociological approaches has taken place with the introduction of sociological works into research in IR and European integration studies (Christiansen et al. 1999; Wendt 1999). Partly inspired by American sociologists like Erving Goffman and George Herbert Mead, this broad movement called social constructivism has succeeded in widening the scope of political science research and deepening several key issues such as those having to do with identity and discourse.
Society has been the traditional object of sociology. The field has focused on issues such as stratification into upper and lower classes, mobility in terms of circulation of people and groups and all forms of inequality. However, all human activity includes social aspects and can be successfully studied from a sociological perspective (see for a stimulating read, Berger 1963). In this chapter, I will discuss some of the intellectual tools that sociology can mobilize in the analysis of EU politics, and then follow with a closer investigation of some sociological research. To illustrate EU politics, I have chosen to concentrate on the European Parliament, the most democratic European institution, composed today of 751 members directly elected from the current 28 EU member-states. I will contrast the sociological approach and its advantages with more traditional research.
European integration has provided new objects of analysis for sociologists working on political issues and for political scientists with a sociological bent. Some of these scholars study transformations in European societies (Bartolini 2005; Medrano 2003) while others focus more on the European Union as a new polity (for useful overviews of English-language research, see Favell 2007 and Zimmermann and Favell 2011). Yet others have developed a more specific form of sociological analysis that has also been labeled structural constructivist (for analysis, see Ansart 1990; Bourdieu 1989; Kauppi 1996b; Manners 2007). This sociological perspective highlights the general and specific structures of power and competition that keep societies together by analyzing individual and group action. Some groups wield more power than others and rely on a variety of resources and institutionalized processes to protect their status and increase their power. In this chapter, I will outline some of the main points of this type of approach to EU politics that has also been labeled the Strasbourg school (for empirical research, see for instance Beauvallet 2007; Beauvallet and Michon 2010; Beauvallet et al. 2016; Campana et al. 2007; ErkkilƤ and Piironen 2013; Georgakakis 2002, 2012; Georgakakis and de Lassalle 2008; Kauppi 2005; Kauppi and Madsen 2008, 2013; Kull 2008; Madsen 2011; Mangenot 1998 and Michel 2006).
A sociological approach to EU politics involves the social factors that influence and shape EU politics. These can be studied at the level of the individual, the social group and the field of action1 involved. The link between individuals and politics is never direct. Individuals are always members of various groups and enact various social roles. Furthermore, individual action is conditioned and channeled by various institutions such as elections, political parties, parliaments and so on (March and Olsen 1984). Actors can be individuals, groups or even institutions (Mayntz and Scharpf 2001). All fields of action that encompass individuals, groups and institutions involve political aspects. The political field proper is formed of all the individuals, institutions and procedures that regulate politics in the traditional sense of the term.
Engaged in action in the world, individuals and groups mobilize available resources in their struggle for power. Following a classical definition, power is the ability to influence other peoplesā behavior (Weber 1968). This can be done through a variety of means: physical force, charisma, persuasion, blackmail, bad conscience and so on. Power limits and empowers (see for this conception, Lukes 2005). Agentsā scope of action is always constrained by a variety of social, economic, technological and other factors. Power empowers because individuals and groups, and even weaker ones in some circumstances (Havel 1990), can influence and even transform reality.
In this endeavor to study the human dimension of EU politics, sociological research has mobilized a variety of quantitative and qualitative research techniques. A central concern is the statistical analysis of the characteristics of the groups involved in European politics, such as Members of the European Parliament, European civil servants and judges of the European Court of Justice. Scholars have painstakingly collected this statistical material from a variety of sources, such as administrative directories and official EU almanacs. They have examined the influence of education, gender and political experience on political careers and group formation (prosopographic studies). These works have shown that certain social qualifications, such as degrees from elite schools or ministerial political experience, are necessary to make it to the top in European politics. Quantitative studies based on in-depth interviews of individuals, ethnographic fieldwork and discursive analysis of historical documents have complemented quantitative analysis. The perceptions and interpretations that individuals attach to their actions and to the institutions in which they operate have enriched the more numerical analysis provided by statistical analysis.
Instead of a theory, the sociological approach developed here serves as a heuristic device by which the scholar can mentally construct an object of research. As a tool of reflection, this device enables the scholar to analyze in a structured manner the phenomenon under scrutiny, in this case EU politics (see Kauppi 2005 for a more thorough analysis). Basing myself on empirical research, I divided the space under scrutiny along two salient dimensions: executive power/legislative power and supranational/national.
Both axes can be interpreted as representing characteristics of individuals, groups or institutions as well as power strategies and resources. In the case of the European political field, they represent different types of political resources such as executive-legislative (axis A) and European-national resources (axis B). Groups and individuals situated close to A1 would have at their disposal executive resources while those closer to A2 would have at their disposal legislative resources. Similarly, those closer to B1 would have at their disposal European sources of power whereas those closer to B2 would have national resources at their disposal. For instance, group one would be constituted of individuals with a lot of European executive resources, group two of those with significant amounts of European legislative resources, group three with national executive resources and group four with national legislative resources. These group features can then be correlated with other characteristics such as nationality, gender, education, political activities and so on. For instance, those with considerable European executive resources are more likely to be men than women. This same formal heuristic device (dimensions A1āA2 and B1āB2) can be applied to any research topic (see for instance Kauppi 1996a for analysis of French political and intellectual radicalism in the 1960s). Analysis of correlations and correspondence between various social variables provide the statistical extension of this heuristic device (see Bourdieu 1984 for a sophisticated application and Le Roux and Rouanet 2004 for further elaborations).
The European Union constitutes a kind of institutional superfield that is composed of a variety of smaller scale, relatively autonomous fields of action such as national political fields (the French political field, the Finnish political fieldā¦), institutional fields such as the European Commission and the European Parliament and specialized sectors of public policies (for instance defense, transport and social policy). Each field of political action is comprised of individuals, groups, institutions, procedures and policies. This complex architecture evolves and is variably structured. In the following section, institutions such as the European Parliament are taken as fields of action in which politicians engage.
Power and Resources
A sociological approach to EU politics seeks to link politics to broader social and cultural factors and processes at the level of the individual, the group and the fields of action. The object of a sociology of the EU is not the EU or its political institutions as such but rather the individuals who make up the EU and the interaction between individuals and, more broadly, the worlds in which they live (for elaboration see Kauppi and Madsen 2008, see also Chap. 2). Certain sociological concepts link all these levels (individual-group-institution-field) to one another, forming a prism through which EU politics can be analyzed. Institutionalization and specialization or professionalization are key terms. Institutionalization refers to the establishment of customs, practices and patterns of social interaction. Specialization and professionalization refer to the fact that society is becoming more complex and requires that individuals specialize in certain tasks through the creation of new professions such as those of the Member of the European Parliament (MEP) or the European Commissioner. Institutional role is another key concept. A role refers to the identity an individual has to acquire to be a competent actor. For instance, a French politician who is nominated to the post of European Commissioner in Brussels has to learn a new role that carries with it certain obligations and rights such as those of representing the EU and not France (for analysis see Egeberg 2006). In this case, the institution in question imposes certain values on the individual. However, if the institutional role in question is a new one, for instance a newly created Commissionerās post in charge of a new policy area, the individual creating the post (its first occupant) might have significant influence on the definition of the role in question. If, on the contrary, the institutional role is already strongly codified (institutionally regulated), individual influence is more modest. The formation of institutional roles is a key element in the broader process of socialization of individuals, of learning to act in a competent manner and of the institutionalization of policy sectors. Institutionalization involves the construction of roles and of organizational structures and procedures that regulate action and distribute power (see for a general presentation, Berger and Luckmann 1966). I would like to discuss more closely yet another sociological concept, that of resource.
An established way to study political power is to analyze the resources agentsā have access to. By resources I mean any kind of valued symbolic entity that can legitimately be used to influence outcomes in a specific field of action. Economic resources include money and other financial means, physical resources physical...