Europe 2020 and the European Semester signal a major change of direction in EU social policy with new governance arrangements, policy orientations and politics. This paper analyses 290 Country Specific Recommendations and 29 interviews to answer two questions: 1) What type of social policy is being advanced by the EU at present? 2) How are EU social actors able to advance EU social policy under current conditions? It argues that the degree of progress in EU social policy in the European Semester (2011–15) has been conditional and contingent. EU social policy is more oriented to supporting market development than it is to correcting for market failures. We explain these developments by a combination of factors including the strong agency exerted by some social actors in a context of constraint, the moderation of expectations and the adoption of strategic practices by key actors, and political divisions among the Member States.

This article explains the relaunch of the European Union's (EU) economic reform agenda in 2010. After repeated delays during 2009, the European Commission scaled back its initial plan for a revived social dimension and instead proposed a strengthened governance architecture of economic surveillance. Using the multiple streams framework we argue that the new Europe 2020 strategy which emerged is a product of two overlapping policy windows which opened suddenly in the problem stream (the Greek sovereign debt crisis) and politics stream (shifting institutional dynamics). This created a window of opportunity for skilful policy entrepreneurs to 'couple' the three streams by reframing the existing Lisbon Strategy as the EU's exit strategy from the crisis. The article contributes to understanding policy change under conditions of ambiguity by demonstrating the causal significance of key temporal and ideational dynamics: the timing of policy windows; access to information signals; and the role of policy entrepreneurs.

The aim of this article is to analyse the nature and significance of the recent European Union (EU) poverty and social exclusion target, which has become part of the EU’s new 10-year strategy, known as ‘Europe 2020’. It situates this analysis in the politics of social policy, at both transnational and national levels. The agreement on the target proved to be momentous and also contentious for the key actors involved – the Member States, the European Commission, the European Parliament – all of which were forced to change their position at some stage of the negotiations. The agreed target – to lift at least 20 million people out of poverty and social exclusion by 2020 – is ambitious and novel in an EU context. The analysis undertaken here underlines its specificity and some weaknesses. First, the target was the result of a political opportunity seized upon by a number of pro-social policy actors (some in the European Commission, the Parliament, certain Member States as well as non-governmental organizations), rather than an agreement to further Europeanize social policy. Second, the target is a compromise in that it is constituted quite diversely in terms of whether it will succeed by addressing income poverty, severe material deprivation and/or household joblessness. Third, the target allows much leeway in response by the Member States, in terms of both which definition they will use and what level of ambition they set for their target. As such, the target risks both incoherence as an approach to social policy and ineffectiveness in terms of precipitating significant action by the Member States to address poverty and social exclusion.

Building on blame avoidance analysis, this article develops a method to assess the reactivity, sequencing and efficacy of defensive responses by officeholders facing a crisis of personal blame, analysing cases drawn from four advanced democracies. It tests the hypotheses that officeholders: react by positive action rather than non-engagement when blame levels are high; respond in a 'staged retreat' sequence; and can reduce the level of blame they face from one day to another through choice of presentational strategies. The article applies event history analysis to test the sequencing hypothesis and time series cross-sectional models to test the reactivity and efficacy hypotheses. The analysis shows that officeholders tend to respond actively when blame levels are high, that to some extent their responses tend to follow a staged retreat pattern, and their interventions have a systematic effect on the next day's media blame level only if they take the form of personal statements. BLAME AVOIDANCE IN POLITICAL CRISES AND SCANDALS: IS THERE ORDER BENEATH THE APPARENT CHAOS?This article aims to contribute to a new generation of research on blame avoidance. It challenges the commonly held view (as put forward by Barker 1994, for example) that the course of events in political crises and scandals is typically unpredictable, chaotic and unmanageable, with events running out of control and no underlying regularities. That view is reflected in a range of sometimes contradictory proverbs about political scandals. For example, it is claimed that active media management is the key to success (as in the oft-quoted maxim of former Nixon aide Roger Stone, 'Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack' (Labash 2007)) or alternatively that initial non-response is the best strategy given short media attention-spans (Hood 2011, pp. 58-59). Others suggest that 'the cover-up is worse than the crime', or that efforts at spin are ultimately self-defeating (Kurtz 1998).The analysis of blame avoidance in politics is beginning to allow us to bring more systematic evidence to bear on such claims. Although ideas about the handling of blame in politics stretch back to Machiavelli and beyond, the modern analysis of blame avoidance is barely 30 years old, starting with Kent Weaver's (1986) seminal contribution. It brought together observations about negativity bias (Lau 1985) and political behaviour (Fiorina 1981) to develop a perspective that cut across several political science subfields such as voting and political behaviour, public administration and public policy (see also Hood 2002Hood , 2011). Weaver's basic claim was that politicians tend to give greater weight to potential blame (for losses) than credit (for gains), consistent with insights from prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979).There have since been some theoretical explorations of blame avoidance, but most empirical studies have been qualitative, particularly in the welfare state literature (e.g. Pierson 1994;Lindbom 2007 Dixon et al. 2013; Olsen 2015, pp. 469-79); ...