European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 46

Second Tier, Second Thoughts

interest rates, etc., see before) can be seen
as an external force that set in motion the
discussions about private pensions. The
debate on the regulation of capital markets
as well as that on the sustainability of private
pension products in times of low interest
rates has increased the attention to the
issue of how the market of private pension
plans could be liberalized throughout
Europe. Second, and more importantly,
the theoretical framework suggests that
we are currently in the midst of the
fascinating period of the policy process in
which different actors try to politicize or
depoliticize the issue, in which they try to
advance a certain framing of the problem
and in which certain policy solutions are
put forward, discussed, dismissed, and reinserted to the debate. In our case at hand,
for the regulation of a pan-European
market for private pensions, the European
Commission has asked EIOPA to
manage these discussions by inviting the
stakeholders to give their views about the
plans. While the behavior of the European
Commission itself can be seen as a form
of strategically depoliticizing the issue by
creating a new agency (and delegating
“away” the policy problem), the structured
process of inviting comments allows us to
clearly see the positions of the different
stakeholders and their attempts to frame
the issue in the most suitable way.

Furthermore, using the insights
from the last section, our theoretical
expectations about the main cleavages
between the stakeholders can be refined.
Providers of private pension plans will
probably weigh their opportunity to gain

market shares and profitability from a
pan-European capital-based pension
product against the risk of losing out
to new competitors in a much more
integrated market. The result of this
calculus should vary according to the type
of provider (e.g., insurers versus pension
funds), according to the size of providers
and last but by no means least according
to the degree of specificity of their
business model (i.e., how attuned they are
to certain national pillar arrangement of
pension policy and the respective habits
of customers). Speaking of customers,
the most important distinction between
them ought to concern their attitude
toward the trade-off between the safety
of and returns on their accumulating
capital. (Surprisingly often, self-appointed
consumer advocates claim that there is a
single optimal preference in this regard
instead of a legitimate width of personal
approaches.) Political stakeholders10 can,
on the one hand, be expected to broker
between providers’ and customers’
interest in their respective member states
and to focus on common ground between
these, which again points to the degree
of fit between the current national pillar
arrangement and a prospective panEuropean complement. On the other
hand, their intrinsic interests in tax
revenue and their normative attachment
to specific policies will quite probably
come into play.

The positions taken by the
stakeholders in putting forward a certain
understanding of the problem at stake
and the roles played by EIOPA and the

10

It is noteworthy that Ministries responding to the call for advice exclusively come from smaller member states. Apparently, bigger ones rely on different, more direct channels of influence.

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