Social citizenship as a marble cake: The changing pattern of right production and the role of the EU

Abstract

The launch of the European Pillar of Social Rights has reinvigorated the debate on the role that the European Union can exercise in the sphere of subjective rights. Such debate has traditionally focused on the limits of the current social acquis, considered unable to create fully-fledged European social citizenship, that ultimately remains limited to the right to reside and freely move within the EU and enjoy social rights as nationals. Conversely, this article argues that the gradual expansion of the EU’s social acquis has slowly but clearly started to disconnect social rights from their exclusive national foundations, leading to the emergence of a new marble cake pattern of right production, which to a large extent reproduces the trajectory of federal polities. To capture this development, this article proposes an original analytical framework to dissect the notion of social rights as bundles of power resources (normative, instrumental and enforcement), which enable individuals to claim and actually receive material benefits in order to cope with a codified array of risks and needs. By shifting the attention from the formal dimension (laws and their enforcement) to its concrete practice (access and outputs), our conception connects the concept of social citizenship more directly to what ultimately matters for life chances (individualised material benefits) as well as for the social and political bonds of a community (the rights-based claim and experience of social protection). In so doing, we move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state as the only producer of social entitlements and are able to appreciate the increasing relevance of the European Union as a provider of power resources and guarantor of policy outputs.

Invisible social Europe? Linking citizens’ awareness of European cohesion funds, individual power resources, and support for the EU

“…The second section reviews the empirical literature on CP and support for the EU and develops a heuristic schema to spell out the implied causal mechanism. The third section substantiates this analytical framework with theoretical insights from the power resources approach proposed by Ferrera et al (2023) and formulates the hypotheses. The fourth section details the data and methods.…”

“…Against this backdrop, this article addresses the question of whether and how citizens' awareness of EU social programmes can foster support for the European integration project. Specifically, by building on Ferrera et al (2023: this special issue), we emphasise that, in the multi-level institutional setting of the EU, programme visibility is crucially bound to instrumental resources that make EU social rights concrete in local welfare provision, thus enabling EU citizens to become aware of the existence of the European social dimension. The visibility of EU social programmes strengthens individuals' awareness of power resources stemming from EU social rights, while nourishing citizens' perception of being heard by the EU and, ultimately, possibly contributing to make them more loyal and supportive of the EU.…”

“…Starting from these considerations, we delve deeper into the micro-foundations of the complex relationship between European social programmes and individual perceptions of the EU. To move beyond Osterloh (2011), we build on the resource-based conception of social rights proposed by Ferrera et al (2023). In this framework, programme visibility is closely linked with 'instrumental resources', that is, effective resources aimed to make the material provision of social rights concrete, from the basic information about social programmes to minimise non-take-up, to the necessary administrative capacity to provide, for example, quality job-search and training services.…”

“…Theorising the linkages between the visibility of social programmes, individual power resources, and support for the EU As discussed above, studies exploring the multi-level relationship between EU programmes and individual attitudes disregard the micro-foundations of the relationship between, broadly speaking, EU social rights and individual perceptions of the EU. We seek to substantiate this mechanism by relying on Ferrera et al (2023), who provide an original theoretical and analytical framework to unpack the notion of social rights into its internal components. In doing so, they shed light on the relevance of instrumental resources, namely those that provide support and procedural channels for making and satisfying social claims.…”

“…But it is also true that different institutional arrangements structure the type and amount of information on which citizens rely to assess government performance and party positioning on social policy (Gingrich, 2014: 565). In this regard, the EU's peculiar multi-level 'social space' is problematic (Ferrera, 2005), as it is characterised by (a) supranational social interventions (binding regulatory standards, cohesion funds, spending programmes such as the various 'social guarantees' (Ferrera et al, 2023), aspirational protocols and charters, and so on); (b) the European social governance, elaborating a specific social policy agenda and promoting convergence among domestic welfare systems through soft law and the socio-economic governance architecture to co-ordinate national policies (that is, the European Semester); and (c) national welfare states, often complemented by sub-national social systems. Supra-national interventions such as cohesion funds require the collaboration of multiple levels of government to be put into effect, as they are managed and implemented by regional or even municipal actors.…”