The Political Economy of Policy Vacuums: The European Commission on Demographic Change

ABSTRACT

Supranational organisations can only confront politico-economic issues that are recognised as important. Typically, issues gain recognition either when they provide an external shock to the system, shaking political actors into action, or when they are framed as important in policy networks concerned with developing the appropriate scientific approach. Ideally political and scientific actors align in creating pressures to recognise the issue as salient and to mobilise organisational responses. Issues differ in their capacity to be driven by both political and scientific pressures, creating crisis management, technocratic, and reform agenda outcomes. Here we explore a further variation, where pressures around an issue are insufficient, creating a policy vacuum. We examine one such policy vacuum in Europe: demographic change. This issue belongs to no particular Directorate-General in the European Commission, but is subject to policy frames from DG EMPL and DG ECFIN. Without sufficient political and scientific pressures, no particular policy position is occupied and advocated despite recognition of the issue’s importance. We discuss the role of policy vacuums and the need for their identification in political economy research.

KEYWORDS:

• Demographic change
• agenda setting
• European Commission
• policy vacuums
• expert networks

Acknowledgements

We thank Frederik Lisberg for his excellent research assistance. Thanks also go to Jacob Hasselbalch, Matthias Matthijs, and colleagues from the Department of Organization at CBS for their comments on earlier drafts and in seminar presentations.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Leonard Seabrooke is Professor of International Political Economy and Economic Sociology at the Department of Organization of the Copenhagen Business School. His research focuses on transnational governance and professional networks, with a focus on tax, finance, and demographic issues.

Eleni Tsingou is Professor with special responsibilities in International Political Economy at the Department of Organization of the Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on transnational governance and expert networks, with an empirical focus on financial policy and demographic and medical fertility.

Johann Ole Willers is a Doctoral Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and is affiliated with the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. His current work is concerned with institutional theory, cybersecurity, and the study of professions.

Notes

1 Quoted in ‘Demographic time-bomb: Finland sends a warning to Europe’, Financial Times, April 3 2019, available from: https://www.ft.com/content/8ebb54bc-5528-11e9-91f9-b6515a54c5b1 (accessed May 1 2019).

2 The dependency ratio is defined as all people outside the working age population (0–14 years and above 65), relative to the 15–64 cohort (EC 2012, p. 27); it is projected to increase from 52.6% in 2015 to 71.6% in 2040 (Eurostat 2017). The old-age dependency ratio (defined as the age group of 65 years and above relative to the working age population of 15–64 years) (EC 2012, p. 27) is projected to increase from 28.8% (2015) to 46.4% (2040) (Eurostat 2017). Simultaneously, the cohort of the so-called oldest old (85 years+) is growing at the fastest rate.

3 While we highlight political crises in this quadrant we appreciate that the crisis management literature does include cases concerned with the handling of natural disasters and long-term crises such as climate change that have a strong scientific element. How crises are handled also includes a temporal dimension within this literature, such as the distinction between ‘fast-burning’ and ‘slow-burning’ crises (‘t Hart and Boin 2001) that has recently been revisited (Coman 2018, Seabrooke and Tsingou 2018).

4 The dataset is based on publicly available information from these reports. We coded the individuals involved, including their occupation, affiliation, and educational background (by discipline). Following data management protocols for projects funded by the European Commission the dataset has been anoymised; we do not include it here as the network illustrations become abstract.

5 Six out of the ten highest scoring external experts on the betweenness score have links to the network. This indicates that members of this sub-network are well-positioned to broker and exert control over information flows within the larger network by linking several sub-groups. This Population Europe group of experts is also relatively homogenous.

6 The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the Vienna Institute for Demography, the French Institute for Demographic Studies, the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, the Barcelona Center for Demographic Studies, and the Oxford Institute for Population Ageing.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 Societal Challenges: [grant number 649456].