Impatient politics and social investment: the EU as ‘policy facilitator'

ABSTRACT

Reorienting the welfare state towards social investment (SI) constitutes a complex and multidimensional challenge of policy recalibration and raises daunting political problems. The temporal mismatch between SI reforms and their returns requires a degree of ‘political patience’ on the side of both current voters and incumbent politicians which is not readily available in contemporary democracies. After reviewing recent debates about the policy and politics of the long term, the article analyzes the strategy pursued by the European Union (EU), with a view to assessing their degree of ‘conduciveness’ to SI recalibration. It is argued that the EU has indeed stimulated policy change at the national level, but that its potential as SI facilitator has been hamstrung by a number of weaknesses and shortcomings, especially on the discursive front. A more convinced and articulated endorsement of the social investment paradigm and a more focused attention to ‘capacity’ at the subnational and grass-root level should be the fronts to prioritize.

KEYWORDS:

• Capacity building
• discursive persuasion
• politics of the long term
• social Europe
• social investment

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Sonja Bekker, Anton Hemerick, Charles Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin and two anonymous referees for the comments received.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Maurizio Ferrera is Professor of Political Science, Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Italy.

Notes

1. The ‘Package' consisted of a main Communication on social investment, a Recommendation on child poverty and eight staff working documents on social investment-related topics. For a full list and references, see http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1044 (accessed February 2016).

2. The term ‘political patience/impatience’ is borrowed from Renshon (1977), who was among the first to discuss it in political science.

3. For a general and interesting discussion on blame attribution and policy reforms, see Wenzelburger and Hörisch (2016).

4. I leave aside a third condition identified by Jacobs: electoral safety, which is less pertinent for discussing the EU's role. My summary is based on Jacobs (2011) and Jacobs and Matthews (2012, 2015).

5. All the relevant documents can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1044 (accessed February 2016).

6. The author was able to track this change in his role as a participant to a consultative committee to the Commission.

7. See http://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/innovation/policy/social/index_en.htm (accessed June 2016).

8. See the Milan Declaration of October 2014 at http://www.eesc.europa.eu/?i=portal.en.events-and-activities-boosting-innovation-milan-declaration.33583 (accessed February 2016).

9. For an excellent and informed discussion of the paradigm and ‘uses' of social investment, see Hemerijck (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This article has been written in the context of the REScEU project (Reconciling Economic and Social Europe, www.resceu.eu), funded by the European Research Council (grant no 340534).