The EU and New Social Risks: The Need for a Differentiated Evaluation

This paper looks at the EU’s role in designing viable policy solutions that may help modern welfare states to cope with the challenge posed by the emergence of “new social risks”. As an important example, we analyse the impact of one specific European policy, the Parental Leave Directive. We focus on both the European decision-making and the domestic implementation process in all 15 member-states, revealing that the Directive induced significant policy reforms in the majority of member states and thus facilitated the reconciliation of work and family life for many working parents. Drawing on the experience of a number of other EU Directives from the field of new social risk policies, however, we conclude by arguing that not all of the factors identified in this case apply to the area of regulating new social risks in general. Instead, we argue that the EU does not treat new social risks in a systematically different way than other social policy issues covering “old” social risks, and we make the case for a differentiated approach to studying the EU’s role in the political regulation of new social risks.