Coalition building, organisational inertia and variation by content

- The struggle over European work and employment regulation

Paper by Mikkel Mailand & Jens Arnholtz

Within the social dimension of the EU what can be labelled ‘the regulation-sceptical actors’ in recent years have been strengthened and ‘the pro-regulation actors’ have been weakened. This results from a reduction in the number of socialist and social-democratic governments in the European Council and the weakening of these same political forces in the European Parliament. In addition, the Barroso-led Commissions have followed a more liberal leaning agenda than its predecessors and ETUC has lost bargaining power due to the weakening of affiliate members alongside challenges from the internationalisation of production and labour migration. The enlargements of the previous decade have also indirectly strengthened the regulation sceptical actors.

Previous studies of EU level decision-making processes in work and employment related areas have shown that, in order to maximize their influence, the main actors (mainly member states in the Council, the Commission and its ‘directorate generals’, party groups in the Parliament and the European social partners) tend to create coalitions. Hence, an understanding of the role of coalitions is the key to describe and explain EU-level decision making and will help to find out who wants what, why, and to what extent they get their priorities through on the European stage. These changes are expected to have influenced the recent development of ‘Social Europe’.

Therefore, the aim of the paper is to discuss 1) whether the strengthening of the regulation-sceptical actors has had an impact on the scope and content of regulation and 2) the extent to which a regulation-sceptical coalition and a pro-regulation coalition have successfully influenced decision-making processes.

The sources of the article are in-depth qualitative studies of processes and outcomes of eight cases of European work and employment regulation within the three areas of employee involvement, employment policy and posting from the years 2004-12.

It will be argued, firstly, that the expected impact of a ‘slowing down of Social Europe’ - or even a full stop – is seen in only some of eight cases analysed. In these cases, the regulation sceptical actors have mainly blocked legislative initiatives with regard to the social dimension. Yet, sometimes the lack of progress towards new regulation can also be explained by failure in the strategies of the pro-regulation actors. In other cases, the impact of the stronger regulation sceptical actors is not seen or is less profound than could be expected. Two mechanisms can help explain the outcome in these cases: Successful resistance and coalition-building from pro-regulation actors and/or a certain form of organisational inertia linked to the actors search for legitimacy, especially the Commission’s need for a stronger social profile in order to be reappointed.

Secondly, it will be argued that coalitions only seem to have been played a role in some of the cases. In general, coalitions seem less stable and solid than described in the previous research. While there are contours of pro-regulation and regulation-sceptical coalitions, content specific institutional interests often stand in the way of the formation of stable coalitions.

The full paper was presented at ILERA European Congress 2013, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 20-22 June 2013 and at the SASE conference, Milan, Italy, 27-29 July 2013.