Studying social partners through the lens of interest groups approach: limits and opportunities

Are social partners a (atypical) type of interest groups? To quote the Belgian Minister of Economy and Employment: "Social partners are not interest groups, their interest goes further than their own personal interest". In academic work as well, social partners seem most of the time to be treated distinctively from other interest groups, because of their particular features regarding State-society relations. For example, according to Visser (1998: 13) "the most interesting property of social concertation lies in the possibility that interest groups redefine the content of their self-interested strategies in a 'public-regarding way' ". This paper's purpose is to identify what are the differences and similarities between social partners and interest groups in order to determine to what extent it is possible to study social partners through the lens of interest groups and if such approach might be relevant. To foster this reflection, both literature on professional relations and literature on interest groups politics are mobilized

An increased role for seniority? Committee chair selection in the European Parliament (1984-2014)

Although European Parliament committee chairs play a salient role in the legislative process of the EU we know virtually nothing about how they are selected and whether policy specialization and the individual attributes of the MEPs matter in the process. This paper draws on a unique longitudinal dataset that includes all full committee members, information on their past committee experience and office in the first seven terms of the EP and data on their parties and national delegations. Despite the complex proportionality rules that govern the selection of committee chairs in the European Parliament and the interdependence between their distribution and the allocation of other legislative offices, I find that committee seniority and to a greater extent chair seniority shape the nomination of committee chairs. On the contrary, there is no evidence that national party delegations use chair selection to reward their most loyal members, while EPG leaders do become chairs more often than regular members

How not to be algorithmically governed like that? Digital, politics and data protection (by design)

The most compelling contemporary feature of what can be called the ‘digital’ is the continuous fabrication of data. Data are generally understood as the translation of people, behaviour, things and events into information on which knowledge can be established and action taken. As such, data have become not only a remarkable force in the production and control of societies, but also a force that has to be governed. In the European Union, ‘data protection’ is framed as the productive response to the potential tensions triggered by the digital in its fabrication of data. Born as a legal construct different from the notion of privacy, data protection is now presented as a way to reckon with the powers of data – governing them somewhat bio-politically: channelling their potential rather than preventing their fabrication. 2 Critical studies have hitherto rarely engaged with data protection, and when they do so, they either consider it as a mere lure or as a passive object, continuously overwhelmed by security and surveillance practices. Hence, there is a lack of critical analysis of data protection as a proper form of digital governmentality: both government – a continuous effort of dis/ordering – and mentality – the reflexive effort to make sense of the different forms of dis/ordering. The goal of this paper is to delve into the politics of data protection by focusing on the emergence of the so-called Data Protection by Design. Data protection by design can be tentatively defined as the project to enforce the respect of legislation and the protection of data subjects through the adoption of tailored technological and organizational tools. Given that this new tenet of data protection is still in the midst of political decision making, a critical inquiry of data protection by design allows us to analyse how some of the constitutive tensions of the digital are conceptualized, and tentatively solved. Moreover, the analysis of the emerging rationale of this new principle hints at the perverse political implications of the dream of ‘executable’ regulation, a particularly promising insight given the European and international drive towards a will to govern through (big) data

Connecting the dots: Conceptualising how actors approach multilateral negotiations inside a regime complex

Regime complexes have come to characterize the international governance of a variety of domains. With so much overlap between the different constitutive fora of a complex, both in terms of membership and issue area, action in one forum can affect an outcome in another. Such a dynamic presents a significant opportunity for actors to strategically act across the different fora of the regime complex. However, despite empirical hints that actors are keen to do so, the literature has thus far not considered how such activity would manifest itself in terms of a multilateral negotiations. With regime complexes increasingly present on the international stage, understanding how actors exploit them (or not) in the context of multilateral negotiations is an essential part of the study of international governance. This paper therefore fills this gap by bridging the literature on regime complexity and multilateral negotiations. It conceptualises how an actor might connect activity across different fora of the regime complex in order to achieve a preferred outcome in multilateral negotiations. Specifically, it develops particular connections that an actor might use across fora. In doing so, it identifies three potential influential factors for such connections: negotiation stages, functional overlap amongst fora, and the organizational structure of a given forum. The paper thus serves as a conceptual starting point for empirical research on actor behaviour in the negotiations within regime complexes