Title of th project:
European Social Policy from Paris to Lisbon:
Institutional developments and implications for democratic legitimacy

The project investigates how institutional developments in EU Social Policy affect the democratic legitimacy of decision-making in this field of European governance. The point of departure for this question is twofold: First, through the inclusion of the Social Protocol into the annex of the Maastricht Treaty (9/10 December 1991), the Social Dialogue was institutionalized as an instrument of decision-making, as the European federations of trade unions and employers have gained the right to enter into negotiations on framework agreements, which can then be adopted as European directives by the Council. Second, the introduction of the European Employment Strategy (1997) and the adoption of the „Open Method of Coordination“ on the Lisbon Council (22/23 March 2000) established a new process of soft coordination through the adoption of common goals, the setup of indicators, and the formulation and regular evaluation of National Action Plans, which has recently been extended to the fields of social inclusion and pensions reform. As a result of these innovations, a complex institutional arrangement has emerged in the field of European Social Policy, in which a ‚quasi-corporatist‘ arrangement complements the decision-making by the conventional EU institutions (Council, Commission, EP), while the setting of non-binding goals and standards is transferred to the exchange of views between Commission, Council and Member States in the framework of Open Coordination. In the evaluation of these rather rapid processes of institution-building, most studies focus on the functioning and results of single instruments or procedures, while an investigation of the implications of these processes on democratic legitimacy for the entire policy field is lacking. In the context of the doctorate program, this project focuses on current processes of reconstruction and re-definition of the contents related to the ‚European Social Model‘, as they are expressed in the Conclusions to the European Council in Lisbon.

To realize this task, the study is based on a historical institutionalist framework of analysis, reconstructing the development of European Social Policy in four phases from the First Social Action Programme (1974) to the present state, which allows for the comparison of different steps of institutional development as ‚cases‘. The democratic theoretic framework is taken from Christopher Lord`s and David Beetham`s analysis, which conceptualizes democratic legitimacy as the interplay of the setting of normative principles about the proper sources and standards of governance, and the analytical evaluation of processes of democratic legitimation, citizenship rights, and the performance of a political system. Apart from drawing from published literature and documents from the actors and institutions involved (documents by the Commission and other EU institutions, declarations by the Social Partners and other interest groups, studies by independent institutions like the Observatoire Social Européen or the Dublin Foundation), a number of interviews will be conducted with different actors of the policy-field.