Paper short abstract:

This contribution investigates how social policy expertise in Europe has become entangled with the politics and science of comparative indicators. Focusing on practices and networks related to European data sets, it shows how the process of constructing indicators entails new policy issues

Paper long abstract:

This contribution investigates how social policy expertise in Europe has become entangled with the politics and science of comparative indicators. Focusing on the epistemic practices and networks related to some important comparative data sets (the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions [EU-SILC]); the European Union Labour Force Survey [EULFS]), and the European microsimulation model EUROMOD, it aims to show a) how social policy expertise in Europe has evolved into a governance network of calculating experts operating on comparative indicators; b) how this has rearticulated the realms of (scientific) knowledge and political decision-making. By setting up common data-infrastructures, procedures, and networks of expertise, these networks of calculative experts and policy-makers formulate EU policy categorisations, co-define what counts as national policy "problems," and make suggestions for new policy orientations; c) how the process of constructing cross-nationally comparative indicators is tangled up with scientific as well as political struggles, on account of differences in national legislation, conceptualization and statistical procedures. Standardised indicators are meant to simplify complicated information, yet also obscures the contingency of information and the assumptions that are implicit in the process of constructing indicators.