The introduction of the European Semester has changed the structure of EU socio-economic coordination. One of the changes involves the content and legal basis of country-specific recommendations (CSRs), which may be interpreted as resulting from further integration and interaction of different coordination mechanisms (Armstrong, 2013). The legal basis has expanded from soft Integrated Guidelines to the more binding Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) as well as the Macro-economic Imbalances Procedure (MIP). Moreover, economic and fiscal coordination has started addressing social policy issues at a rather large scale (Bekker, 2015).
However, EU coordination is not necessarily a static set of procedures and outcomes (e.g. Ferrera, 2014). For instance due to learning effects, the recent streamlining of the European Semester or the installment of the new Commission, the content, legal basis and role of CSRs might be changing. This paper aims at categorizing and interpreting such evolving CSRs. Using qualitative content analysis techniques, it first categorises all CSRs that have been communicated to member states between 2012 and 2015. It classifies the socio-economic topics the CSRs address as well as determines their legal background. Second, the (evolving) role of the CSRs is viewed from their use in preventative and corrective stages of coordination mechanism in order to answer questions such as whether or not they serve as a basis for guiding member state policies in a more detailed manner in the corrective Excessive Deficit Procedure or the Excessive Imbalance Procedure, or whether they play a role in the budgetary scrutiny of the Two-Pack.
