Promoting the agenda for a social Economic and Monetary Union: Attention, credibility and coalition-building. Bruges Political Research Paper No. 37, November 2014

In the aftermath of the crisis, new instruments of economic governance have been adopted at the EU level. Until recently, these have been strongly dominated by what I assume to be the ECFIN coalition. However, at least since 2011, this coalition’s supremacy has been challenged by the competing coalition’s (EPSCO) willingness to rebalance the economic governance so that social concerns are better taken into account. Hence, drawing on the agenda-setting literature in the EU context, this working paper aims at retracing the process that has led to put this issue of the social dimension of the EMU on to the EU political agenda. Three hypotheses are made concerning the rise of this issue, the strategies employed by agenda-setters, and the policy subsystem of the economic governance. First, this study shows that the interest in this issue has been gradually fostered ‘from below’, at the level of the European Parliament and the European Commission. Second, due to its ‘high politics’ nature, this issue could only be initiated ‘from above’ (European Council) and then expanded to lower levels of decision-making (Commission). Specifically, DG EMPL has managed to attract attention to this issue and to build its credibility in dealing with it by strategically framing the issue and directing it towards the EPSCO venue. Finally, I analyze the outcome of this agenda-setting process by assessing to what extent the two new social scoreboards which form part of this social dimension have been taken into account during the 2014 European semester. The result of this analysis is that the new economic governance has not been genuinely rebalanced insofar as its dominant policy core remains that of the ECFIN coalition.

Lobbying in a transatlantic comparison: opportunity structures and lobbying content in the US and the EU

Despite vast literatures on interest representation in the United States (US) and the European Union (EU), few studies have tried to compare lobbying across the two cases. Those who do are interested primarily in the existence of different lobbying styles and distinguish between an aggressive pressure group approach in the US and a more consensus oriented informational lobbying in the EU. However, the origins of these differences have received little attention and references most often point to different political “cultures” and lobbying traditions. This paper takes issue with this cultural explanation and links the observed lobbying styles with differences in the design of the political institutions that private actors have to interact with. It argues that divided policy authority in the US allows for interest group bargaining while shared policy competencies in the EU constrain not only policy-makers but also lobbyists to adopt a more consensus-oriented approach. The effect of political institutions on the form of lobbying, in turn, can have important implications for the comparison of different policy areas across countries, because the policy stances of private actors cannot always be assumed to be exogenous to the policy process in which they are active.