Speaking social Europe: A paradigmatic shift in the European Commission Presidents’ social policy discourse?

This article presents an original analysis of the social policy discourse at the European Union level by focusing on the language used by European Commission Presidents when addressing social issues. Through an empirical analysis based on a semi-supervised machine learning approach, we consider the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of European social policy Vol. 31; no. 4; pp. 365 - 379
Main Authors Vesan, Patrik, Pansardi, Pamela
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.10.2021
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Academic disciplines
Cognitive style
Discourse
Language
Language policy
Language usage
Languages
Pandemics
Presidents
Rights
Social issues
Social policy
Speeches
Tribunals & commissions
Variants
Europe
social policy image
European Social Policy
Discourse
policy change
European Commission
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Summary:This article presents an original analysis of the social policy discourse at the European Union level by focusing on the language used by European Commission Presidents when addressing social issues. Through an empirical analysis based on a semi-supervised machine learning approach, we consider the entire corpus of speeches made by Barroso and Juncker from 2010 to 2018 and we classify all sentences according to three possible variants of social policy language: social-retrenchment, social-investment and rights-based language. We argue that the focus on these languages allows us to understand whether the ‘fiscal consolidation discipline’ narrative, which dominated in the aftermath of the Great Recession, has been challenged over the years by the recourse to alternative ‘social policy images’. The results confirm a significant shift in the overall configuration of social policy discourse between Barroso and Juncker. This shift has been mainly characterized by an increase in the use of rights-based language and a decrease in the use of social-retrenchment language, which however has not been completely abandoned. Therefore, the recalibration of EC’s speeches on social policy has not been abrupt but has instead been incremental. The article concludes by discussing preliminary interpretations of the observed trends and their potential implications in terms of ‘discursive legacy’ in the post-pandemic era.
ISSN:0958-9287
1461-7269
DOI:10.1177/0958928721999596