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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how statistical harmonisation enabled EU anti-poverty policy despite limited competences. Harmonised statistics made poverty comparable across Member States while masking national differences, enabling EU-level coordination and constructing poverty as a shared European problem.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how statistical harmonisation and comparative indicators enabled the emergence of EU anti-poverty policy despite the Union’s limited formal competences in this area. While poverty reduction remains primarily under Member State authority, EU institutions have gradually constructed a supranational policy space through harmonised data systems and comparative indicators that render national situations commensurable.

Drawing on STS and the sociology of quantification, the paper conceptualises these arrangements as part of a calculative infrastructure – a socio-technical system of datasets, statistical procedures, indicator frameworks, and benchmarking interfaces that enable the production of comparable knowledge across national contexts (Bowker & Star 2000; Kurunmäki et al. 2019). Rather than treating harmonisation as purely technical, the analysis shows how it emerged through negotiations among the European Commission, Eurostat, national statistical offices, and policy actors over definitions, methods, and measurement.

The paper traces this development from early attempts to compare poverty across EEC countries in the late 1970s to harmonised survey data and EU-wide indicators linked to common policy targets. Central to this process was output harmonisation, which allowed Member States to retain autonomy over national measurement while producing comparable results. While enabling comparison, this arrangement also obscured methodological differences between national statistical systems.

The analysis argues that EU anti-poverty policy emerged through calculative pragmatism, a compromise between comparability and national autonomy. Through processes of commensuration (Espeland & Stevens 2008), these metrics made poverty visible as a European problem and enabled forms of governing at a distance shaping policy debates without direct legal authority.