Regulating uncharted waters: The adoption of the EU platform work directive between lobbyism, uncertainty and politicization
Speaker: Sven Schreurs (EUI)
In March 2024, the EU legislature reached agreement on a much-debated Directive on improving working conditions in platform work (PWD). This law contains provisions to ensure the correct classification of people performing platform work and limit the use of algorithmic management – two questions that most national regimes have not, or barely, regulated before. Launched in December 2021, the initiative attracted intense lobbying from digital platform companies (seeking to sink or delay the directive) as well as trade unions (pushing for the automatic reclassification of platform workers) and divided the Member States into sharply opposed camps. After subsequent failures of the negotiations, a last-minute deal struck by the Belgian Presidency of the Council secured sufficient backing for the directive – which was adopted, in a historic moment, by a majority that included neither France nor Germany.
The directive sets a marked step towards (re-)regulating the ‘future world of work’. Compared to instruments such as the Platform-to-Business Regulation, the Digital Services Act and the AI Act, it pursues a much more worker-protective than market-making rationale. How can we explain the adoption of this novel regulatory approach, despite the political and institutional tensions that it elicited? Based on public and internal documents as well as interviews with policymakers, this paper reconstructs how the PWD was prepared, negotiated and enacted. Apart from the agenda-setting role of the Commission and the Parliament, the analysis theorizes and illustrates empirically how the available margin for supranational standard-setting is shaped by a logic of pre-emption, defined by the presence (or absence) of politicized regulatory responses to new socioeconomic phenomena at the Member State level.
Class, Country, and Cleavage: Inequality, Mobility and the Transformation of Electoral Politics over the Long Run (with Philipp Rehm)
Speaker: Torben Iversen (Harvard University)
Democratic politics is widely believed to be growing more contentious, reflected in a rise of hyper-partisan politics, in-group out-group polarization, and growing support for the populist right. But how does this shift compare to electoral politics in previous eras, and how can we explain long-run changes in voting patterns? We propose a theoretical model that focuses on the strategic interplay between government policies and voter value orientations, and we examine trends in voting behavior in light of the model using nearly the entire corpus of election studies for 21 democracies since 1948. We find that sociotropic voting, class voting, and ideological voting are closely linked to changes in inequality and intergenerational mobility. The model implies a tipping point which allows for the possibility that the postwar shift towards more inclusive and solidaristic politics is being replaced by a gloomy status defense equilibrium, but the long-run evidence suggests a more benign interpretation of a Polanyian second movement that may eventually drive democratic politics back towards a more consensual equilibrium.
Please register in order to get a seat and to receive the ZOOM link.