Caroline de la Porte

Copenhagen Business School · Department of International Economics, Government and Business

This article examines factors that could contribute to explaining variation in take-up of leave among fathers in the light of the EU’s Work–Life Balance Directive (WLBD). The WLBD seeks to equalize care responsibilities between fathers and mothers, especially through reserved leave, with high compensation. The article begins with a cross-country ov...

Vuggestuerne varetager en afgørende opgave i den danske velfærdsstat ved at danne ramme om udviklingen af børns tidlige kompetencer, samtidig med at de muliggør en forening af arbejde og familieliv. Trods denne status har daginstitutionerne gennem en årrække været udfordret af ressourcemangel, hvilket har påvirket kvaliteten af pasningstilbuddet ne...

The coronavirus pandemic has brought about a number of partly improvised, partly only temporary, but in every respect diverse and often unprecedented social policy measures in Europe. The edited volume provides an encompassing and longer-term analysis of social policy responses during the COVID-19 crisis in order to ask in which direction the Europ...

This article examines factors that could contribute to explaining variation in take-up of leave among fathers in the light of the EU's work-life balance directive (WLBD), which seeks to equalize care responsibilities between fathers and mothers, especially through earmarked well compensated leave. The paper begins with a crosscountry overview of ta...

This paper examines institutional change in father-specific leave - a centre-piece of the EU's work-life balance directive (WLBD) - from the perspective of gradual institutional change. The WLBD, a highly contentious directive, represents a litmus test for the possible impact of the European pillar of social rights (EPSR), on welfare state institut...

The European Union (EU) launched the European Pillar of Social Rights to improve social rights for EU citizens. However, little is known about the domestic dynamics of implementing these new rights. This article examines the implementation of the Work-Life Balance Directive in three member states with different policy traditions: Denmark, Germany a...

This working paper examines the potential of the directive on work-life balance (WLBD) to increase the role of fathers in care, and thereby, to enhance possibilities for mothers to retain and strengthen their link to the labour market. The main instruments through which the directive seeks to lead to enhanced social rights for fathers/second carers...

This book presents 23 in-depth case studies of successful public policies and programmes in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Each chapter tells the story of the policy’s origins, aims, design, decision-making and implementation processes, and assesses in which respects—programmatically, process-wise, politically and over time—and to wh...

This book presents 23 in-depth case studies of successful public policies and programmes in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Each chapter tells the story of the policy’s origins, aims, design, decision-making and implementation processes, and assesses in which respects—programmatically, process-wise, politically and over time—and to wh...

This book presents 23 in-depth case studies of successful public policies and programmes in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Each chapter tells the story of the policy’s origins, aims, design, decision-making and implementation processes, and assesses in which respects—programmatically, process-wise, politically and over time—and to wh...

Nordic countries are known for having extensive welfare services, a highly compressed wage structure owing to strong social partners, as well as effective regulation and governance in public administration. Various typologies capture aspects of the institutional features of families of nations across various policy areas, showing that there is a sp...

This paper investigates the regulation of publicly organized early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Denmark and Sweden, through the regulatory welfare state (RWS) framework. The analysis focuses on how alterations in funding and quality of care are shaped by governmental and nongovernmental actors at national and local levels of government. T...

This chapter focuses on why and how social investment has developed at the European Union level. The chapter identifies five main sequences in the development of the European social investment strategy. The perspective proposed by the EU institutions started with a focus on labor market participation (hence focusing on the skill mobilization functi...

Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policymakers’ main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented “social investment” policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive va...

This Special Issue focuses on how EU politics, policies and institutions, all nested in the past, have a bearing on welfare states in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this introductory article, we first provide a brief overview of the growing scholarship on the impact of the pandemic on both national welfare systems and EU policies....

In this article, we show that Next Generation EU (NGEU) is mainly a response to the economic and political imbalances left over from the Eurozone crisis. It is a pre-emptive intervention, especially targeted at structurally weak economies with rising Euroscepticism, to avoid costly ex-post bailouts as in the Great Recession. We demonstrate, using q...

The link to each of our articles is included. This collection of articles includes our reflections on social Europe, based on insights we have gained into the political dynamics, as well as policy outputs and outcomes across the EU. We offer different perspectives on developments of social Europe, current challenges, and possible future directions....

In this article, we show that Next Generation EU (NGEU) is mainly a response to the economic and political imbalances left over from the Eurozone crisis. It is a pre-emptive intervention, especially targeted at structurally weak economies with rising Euroscepticism, to avoid costly ex-post bailouts as in the Great Recession. We demonstrate, using q...

This article presents an analysis of why it was possible to reach an agreement on the Next Generation EU (NGEU), the EU's fiscal and policy response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, since the deal breaks with the norms of no common debt issuance and will result in significant redistribution across Member States through grants. Based on an in‐depth case st...

This article examines the implementation of the European Union’s (EU) work-life balance directive in Denmark and Poland through examining the earmarking of paid parental leave. This enables us to assess whether the EU could be emerging as a gender equalizing regulatory welfare state (RWS). Our analysis points to tensions arising when regulatory dec...

This paper identifies three ’harder’ – potentially more constraining – features of existing OMCs (employment and social inclusion), explains why they are ‘hardening’, and draws lessons for the Energy Union. The first ‘harder’ element is ‘EU benchmarks and national targets’, where the former signals EU commitment and sets direction over the medium t...

This paper analyses whether the EU could be emerging as a gender equalizing regulatory welfare state (RWS), through an examination of the tensions arising from the EU's work-life balance directive in two cases: Denmark and Poland. It examines the earmarking of paid parental leave, which has regulatory and fiscal elements. Drawing on the Europeanisa...

The ‘European Pillar of Social Rights’ (EPSR), consisting of 20 principles, was adopted as a solemn declaration by EU institutions in November 2017. This paper examines how the EPSR changes the EU social policy regime and how it could impact the ‘Nordic model’, focusing on Sweden and Denmark. The paper has four main conclusions. First, the EPSR pri...

The contribution addresses – through actor-centred historical institutionalism – why and how social investment (SI) emerged at the European Union (EU) level. SI policies built on the institutional basis of the policy co-ordination processes in employment and social inclusion, which originated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The pre-existent proc...

In all advanced democracies, policies related to the welfare state are the largest part of public policy activity. Cross-pressured by globalization, deindustrialization, rising public debts, demographic changes, permanent austerity and the rise of 'new social risks', welfare states in post-industrial democracies have entered a new phase of consolid...

Social investment (SI) is part of a strategy to modernize the European welfare states by focusing on human resource development throughout the life-course, while ensuring financial sustainability. Recognizing that this strategy was only partially implemented by the EU member states prior to the financial and Eurozone crises, this article investigat...

While fixed-term work benefits employers and increases the prospects of employability of various categories of workers, it is inherently precarious. The European Union (EU) directive on fixed-term work emphasizes the importance of equal treatment of workers on fixed-term contracts with comparable permanent workers and aims to prevent abuse of this...

In this concluding chapter the key findings of the volume are summarized and an outlook on the prospective development of the social dimension in the Eurozone are given. As the various country case studies in this book have shown, the EU has been unprecedentedly involved in national welfare state affairs, particularly in those countries that had to...

This book analyses how the European Union (EU) has affected welfare state reforms in the Member States most severely hit by the crisis. This introductory chapter contextualizes our contribution to the vibrant literature that has been published since the special issue on which this book is based has been in press. We further remind the reader of the...

In this chapter we develop a typology of European Union (EU) integration to capture how, to what extent and according to which policy aims EU involvement in Member States has altered with respect to labour market and social policy and what it signifies in terms of institutional change. On this basis, first we show that new instruments—the Six-Pack,...

This paper studies the Europeanization of media coverage of the European Union's (EU) socio-economic strategy, which is a crucial building block for developing a European Public Sphere. As the EU level increasingly influences public policy in member states, there should correspondingly be a more intense and visible media debate with attention for E...

This Special Issue examines the EU’s monetary, fiscal, and social responses to the sovereign debt crisis and analyses how the European Union (EU) has affected welfare state reforms in the Member States most severely hit by the crisis. This editorial introduction presents the severe crisis context in which the EU altered existing tools and developed...

In this article we develop a typology of European Union (EU) integration to capture how, to what extent and according to which policy aims EU involvement in Member States has altered with respect to labour market and social policy and what it signifies in terms of institutional change. On this basis, we show first that new instruments – the Six-Pac...

This article analyses the Europeanisation of national pension systems in Denmark and Italy. Through the analytical framework of a ‘two-level’ game, it analyses pension reforms in the two countries, which, in the wake of the crisis, breached EU budgetary requirements, and shortly after reformed their pension systems. The EU affects pension reform in...

This paper focuses on the changing boundaries of welfare between EU and national levels by developing a dynamic and actor-centred approach, where different groups of actors compete to influence the social and economic dimensions of EU social policy. The success of ideas and policies around welfare-state reform changes over time in line with socio-e...

This chapter focuses on the Social OMC in Denmark in 2006–2010, examining whether, and if so how, the OMC has influenced social protection (SP) reform. Denmark, alongside the other Nordic welfare states, has been considered a model for the rest of the EU, and has been active in ‘uploading’ social policy issues to the EU agenda (Kvist 2007). For exa...

Introduction In the 1990s a new approach to economic, employment and social policy emerged in the EU in the wake of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), to respond to low growth, to increase global competitiveness and to meet the challenges of ageing populations and new family patterns. An important component of this new approach was the European...

This paper adapts and then uses principal–agent (PA) theory to conceptualize and thereafter to analyse the EU-level development of the Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC), a crucial component of the Lisbon Strategy as a ‘governance architecture’. The PA model theorizes the continuous interaction and power struggle between the Commission (‘agent’) an...

This paper is a detailed analysis about the literature on the Social OMC from 2006-2010, focusing on how OMC research has been carried out. It specifically points to which theoretical framework/concepts are used, and how change is conceptualised and measured. It is organised in five sections. The first concerns visibility and awareness about the OM...

This article analyses the role of the OECD through its “Jobs Strategy” and the European Union (EU) through the “European Employment Strategy” in the development of macro-economic, employment and labour market policy in the Czech Republic. As a full member of the two organisations, the Czech Republic has been subject to their soft non-binding policy...

Participation through the Lisbon strategy: comparing the European Employment Strategy and pensions OMC The present article aims to shed light on the concrete implementation of the Lisbon strategy with regard to its governance framework and to participation (of social partners) in particular. The focus is on the European Employment Strategy (EES) (d...

The present article aims to shed light on the concrete implementation of the Lisbon strategy with regard to its governance framework and to participation (of social partners) in particular. The focus is on the European Employment Strategy (EES) (defined in the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 and then integrated into the broader Lisbon strategy that emerge...

The European Employment Strategy (EES) has sparked lively debates in political and academic circles. These have been particularly pronounced since the EES was identified as the flagship for the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The aim of this article is to review the blossoming academic literature on the EES. We begin by reviewing the strategy it...

This article examines the impact of the European Union's (EU) external dimension of social policy both in terms of discourse and practice and compares it with the social policy advisory activities of other global actors: the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The article evaluates how far the EU's external dimension of...

The open method of co-ordination's (OMC's) emphasis on transpar-ency, democratic participation and learning has led to a particular interest in this governance mechanism from the perspective of deliberative democracy. This article analyses the 'democratic' dimension of the OMC from a normative and an empirical perspective. We first present relevant...

This article addresses the question of the relevance of the most recent soft policy instrument of the EU, the open method of coordination (OMC), for organising actions at European level in politically sensitive areas. In addition to describing its origins and operational principles, we will compare its application to the areas of employment and soc...

The European Union has established an ‘open method of coordination’ (OMC) among the member states as a means of pursuing economic and employment growth coupled with greater social cohesion. The paper analyses the assumptions underlying this strategy, the manner of its operation and its implications for policy learning and for governance. It argues...

The European Union has established an "open method of coordination" (OMC) among the Member States, as a means of pursuing economic and employment growth, coupled with greater social cohesion. The paper analyses the assumptions underlying this strategy, the manner of its operation and its implications for policy learning and for governance. It argue...

The question that we would like to address in this paper is why an area so nationally embedded as pensions now (since 1999) appears to be one of the key issues on the European social agenda. The hypothesis in this paper is that it is not a dynamic that emanates from the social domain, but instead, from the economic area. It is not a classical spill...