Are socially minded actors too weak in EU policy-making?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As in other federal systems such as the United States or Canada, social policy within the EU is not the purview of a specific institution but is shaped in a fragmented way by a multiplicity of actors (Leibfried & Pierson 1995). These sometimes form alliances in public policy networks and communities and depend on each other in the framework of the multi-level governance that characterizes the EU. Yet, beyond legal prerogatives and institutional dynamics, the making of EU social policy is the product of underlying political struggles. As highlighted in the previous chapters, the area of social policy has always been one of symbolic projection for normative debates around social justice and soli¬darity among European citizens and states. Thus, the pursuit of a (more) “Social Europe” has been historically supported by some actors and resisted by others. And those struggles have been in flux. In the early days of EU integration in the 1950s and 1960s, entrepreneurs of social policy at the EU level actively promoted the emergence of a distinct body of EU social law (Fertikh 2016). Although representatives of trade unions were relatively marginalized in the new architecture of the EEC (compared to that of the ECSC), lawyers, experts and officials within the Directorate General (DG) of the European Commission for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (EMPL) have drawn on specialized knowledge to build a transnational policy field, which was nevertheless perceived as relatively weak compared with other areas such as competition policy, finance or trade. These actors engaged in inter¬pretation struggles over the Treaty of Rome, intrinsically rooted in economic liberalism with the assertion of the four freedoms, and progressively succeeded in asserting a space for embryonic European public policy in the social realm (Fertikh 2017). Some 60 years on, what does it look like? Today's literature is populated with contrasting assessments of the EU institutions and their role vis-à-vis social policy. The EU Commission has been depicted as a social policy entrepreneur (Pierson 1996; Wendon 1998) or as an agent focused on market-making and liberalization (Crespy & Menz 2015a).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".