Cognitive and normative discourse in EU approach to policy reform: the case of pensions.

The European Union’s ageing societies poses major policy challenges for pension systems. Since the economies and the societies of Member States are increasingly integrated, the success and failure of national pension policies and reforms have an ever-increasing impact beyond national borders. However, the ‘subsidiarity principle’ and member state autonomy over taxes, limits the EU’s power regarding pension policy. This paper explores the influence of the European Semester discourse on recent pension reforms in the Netherlands and Ireland. We draw on discursive institutionalism (DI) to understand further the nature and form of European Semester driven pension reform ideas and how they are communicated and acted on, in each country. Based on the evidence on pension reform in The Netherlands and Ireland, we find a divergence in effectiveness between cognitive and normative ideas in EU discourse and that cognitive ideas are privileged over normative ideas with respect to influencing pension policy reforms. While the focus of this research is pension policy, this study enhances our understanding of how the EU approach in terms of its discourse, influences national reform in policy areas where the ‘subsidiarity principle’ applies. We suggest that policymakers and other actors may very consciously choose one form of discourse over the other to negotiate their preferred pathway towards implementation.