Search

In the wake of the pervasive digitalisation of industry, the disruption of global supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a geopolitical race for the development of artificial intelligence models, the European Union has pivoted towards promoting 'digital sovereignty' across the technological stack. The paper looks more specifically at the cloud layer and analyses the draft European Union Cloud Services Scheme (EUCS) launched by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity in December 2020. While EUCS is a highly technical scheme, the attempt to include digital sovereignty provisions in it provoked unexpected controversies around who pushes for 'digital sovereignty', why, and how feasible it is. The paper argues, first, that distributive conflicts between member states have led to strong objections towards including digital sovereignty provisions in EUCS. Second, diverging national preferences have also played out in horizontal inter-institutional conflicts around competences between the European Commission and the European Parliament. All in all, the paper makes a novel empirical contribution by studying the overlooked case of EUCS. Theoretically, it bridges the growing literature on digital sovereignty with classic theories of EU integration to identify key factors hindering the translation of digital sovereignty discourses into policy within a broader context of limited technological capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the allure of 'European digital sovereignty' as an official European Union (EU) strategic objective, it remains unclear whether this discourse has driven concrete changes to EU external action policies, particularly those leveraging cyber instruments. This question is explored vis-à-vis three policies which have enabled the EU to pursue its digital sovereignty objectives in practice: the Cyber Diplomacy Toolbox, external capacity building (CCB) assistance initiatives, and the 5G Toolbox. Drawing upon extensive archival research and elite interviews, the paper finds that, while European digital sovereignty discourse influenced comprehensive changes for the 5G Toolbox process, it failed to drive policy changes to the Cyber Diplomacy Toolbox and external CCB assistance initiatives. To explore this variation, the paper considers institutional and ideational factors particular to EU external action over the 2017–2022 period. Overall, the study contributes both to contemporary debates about European digital sovereignty and its relationship to EU cyber instruments and longstanding work on EU foreign policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have placed a renewed strain on the economic governance of the European Union (EU). The European Central Bank (ECB) was a key player in the EU's response to the crisis induced by the pandemic. This paper adopts a theoretical approach focused on policy learning to explain how and why the ECB responded to the crisis in 2020–2021. By drawing on speeches, newspaper articles and interviews with policy-makers, the paper finds that the ECB was able to rely on earlier crisis experiences in the euro area in forming its response to the pandemic crisis. Although the sovereign debt crisis and the pandemic crisis had both similarities and differences from one another, the ECB was able to engage in inter-crisis and intra-crisis learning. Its learning concerned objectives, instruments as well as an awareness that timely and forceful response was crucial, so that the member states and other EU institutions had time to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the long-term trajectory and the recent acceleration of the conflict over the rule of law in the EU. It focusses on the motivation of the two governments in Hungary and Poland to challenge European core values increasingly aggressively even directly at EU level despite the threat of significant material costs to both countries. Putting forward a Gramscian understanding, we argue that this radicalization is the result of a counter-hegemonic strategy that aims at replacing the liberal order with a new, nationalist, ultraconservative, Christian order on domestic and European levels. The paper traces core elements of this strategy which are either disputed or underestimated in existing literature, most importantly the pursuit of a core ideology and the massive and long-term investment into winning moral and cultural leadership through the penetration of civil society which precedes and complements electoral strategies and autocratic institution building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public attitudes towards the free movement of workers in the European Union vary substantially between countries and individuals. This paper adds to the small but growing research literature on this issue by analysing the role of national welfare institutions. We investigate the relationship between the degree of 'institutional reciprocity' in national systems of social protection and attitudes to EU labour immigration across 12 European countries. We do not find evidence of an effect of institutional reciprocity on opposition to EU labour immigration among the public at large. However, institutional reciprocity appears to matter for economically vulnerable groups. We identify an interaction effect indicating that higher degrees of institutional reciprocity in national social protection systems, and in unemployment insurance systems specifically, are associated with lower levels of opposition to EU labour immigration among unemployed people. Hence, reciprocity in welfare state institutions appears to shield free movement from opposition, at least among vulnerable groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union's (EU) Common Commercial Policy (CCP) is more fragile than the label 'exclusive competence' suggests. Ratification conflicts have increased since the 1980s and have further intensified in recent years. Simultaneously, the EU's trade competence witnessed a progressive expansion in consecutive treaty reforms. In recourse to the 'failing forward' (Jones et al., 2016) argument, this paper argues that recurring failure and progressive integration have been equally constitutive elements in the CCP's historical development. The substantive expansion of the international 'deep trade' agenda repeatedly laid bare the gaps in and fuelled intergovernmental conflict over the scope of the EU's competences. Over time, these instabilities acted as a catalyst of integration, supporting supranational entrepreneurs' quest for – and member state governments' acceptance of – further yet ever-incomplete delegation. The paper thus demonstrates that, under certain conditions, the failing forward argument is applicable even to the EU's historical core of regulatory market-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernst Haas initially formulated neofunctionalism as a theory of incremental regional polity formation, treating crises as anomalies. Subsequent revisions of the theory incorporated crises as recurring phenomena. This paper introduces a novel conceptualisation and analysis of recent European Union crises, framing them as effects of and challenges to its regulatory polity. It distinguishes between 'failures' and 'attacks', aligning them with the capacity and community-building dimensions of polity formation. Failures, rooted in capacity deficits, prompt capacity development to sustain common policies, varying with international interdependence among member states. In contrast, attacks arise from contestations of constitutive values, necessitating community demarcation through enhanced unity among defenders and exclusion of attackers. The speed and scope of demarcation depend on the attacker's membership position. Through a comparative analysis of the euro, migration, Covid, Brexit, rule of law, and Russia crises, the study illustrates and substantiates its theoretical argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European administrative networks (EANs) are groups of national administrative organizations which are established to improve national-level implementation of European Union (EU) law. This paper addresses a key question concerning these networks: what drives interactions within them? To this end, the paper adds a dynamic political perspective to institutional hypotheses. It tests the resulting hypotheses using a most likely case, interactions in the European Migration Network (EMN) in the wake of the 2015–16 refugee crisis. Using social network analysis, it shows that two domestic political incentives are associated with interactions: the problem pressure experienced by member states following the 2015–16 refugee crisis and post-2015 declines in popular support for immigration. Our analysis also reveals that interactions occurred among member states with similarly high levels of government effectiveness. In sum, we show that EANs can provide significant added value for their members in politicized policy areas, although their utility may vary between network members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have applied theories of European integration to interpret crisis-led policymaking processes and integration outcomes in the EU. However, there has been little attempt to appraise the analytical leverage offered by major integration theories as a function of different crisis pressures. We theorize that diverse combinations of crisis pressures generate four decision-making scenarios in the EU, each of which can be ascribed to different combinations of analytical insights from neofunctionalism, intergovernmentalism, postfunctionalism, and federalism. We illustrate the value of our framework in relation to four EU crises concerning the euro area, refugees, Brexit and Covid-19. Overall, the paper makes a theoretical contribution to advance the debate on crisis-led integration in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public consultations are used by regulatory agencies for input into their decisions and provide an opportunity for interest groups to voice their concerns. However, researchers emphasised that interest groups are also active before consultations, when drafting regulatory rules. Public consultations might be the tip of the iceberg, with influence during early rule drafting stages looming beneath the surface. This paper looks into interest group behaviour during rulemaking by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Combining datasets on interest group access to rule drafting workshops (N = 538) and interest group behaviour in consultations (N = 42,595), the paper assesses what those that help draft rules do during public consultations. Strikingly, only a minority of these groups participate in consultations afterwards. Those that do participate, however, make active attempts to change regulation. These findings do not differ for different interest group types or at different levels of salience. Public consultations are therefore actively used by insiders, emphasising their importance for providing input in the rulemaking process. However, as many of those that draft rules do not participate in public consultations, the impact of many vital interest groups exists beneath the surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the European Union's good governance initiatives under its sustainable development agenda affect ratification of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries. The theoretical framework argues that the likelihood of ratification is influenced by adjustment costs a signatory faces in implementing EPA provisions. We focus on the level of corruption as indicative of adjustment costs. In partner countries where corruption is high, EPAs that stipulate the lowering of tariffs and improved sustainability standards would clash with the interests of ACP elites and result in hefty adjustment costs. Empirical analysis of 78 ACP countries supports this argument. Results show that the likelihood of EPA ratification is lower in ACP countries with high levels of corruption. They support prevailing theories of self-selection into international agreements, where a given signatory is more likely to ratify agreements close to its institutional status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reputational theory holds that an agency's reputation is a valuable political asset. However, since Daniel Carpenter's influential contributions, reputational studies have focused on reactions to reputational threats, rather than on reputation as such. Therefore, there is a curious lacuna at the heart of reputation studies: A lot is known about reactions to reputational threats, but fundamental questions about reputation per se are left unexplored. This paper investigates the dimensionality of the reputational concept, its variation across types of audiences, and its consistency across agency subunits. This is done in the context of the EU Commission, the core executive institution of the European Union. While this case is interesting in itself, its main value is to suggest what a research agenda focusing on the core building blocks of reputational theory might look like. Our survey of actors in the EU's Transparency Register provides mixed, but mostly supportive evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not only the states of the European Union (EU) that are heterogeneous in many respects, but also the regions existing within them. In this paper, we make use of a conjoint experiment on a particular type of technocratic solidarity – joint procurement of medical countermeasures (JPMC) – to explore how old and new regional-level heterogeneities affect public support for such type of solidarity. To this end, we exploit an experimental dataset, covering five EU countries at different phases of the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020. Our experimental results show that a broad policy scope, allocation based on need and EU governance all raise support for JPMC. Moreover, economically weaker regions and areas more severely hit by the pandemic exhibit stronger public backing for JPMC. Turning to the link between regional heterogeneities and specific design features of JPMC, evidence suggests that wealthier regions display greater public backing for a broader scope of the policy. Thus, our results suggest that public preferences for technocratic solidarity are generally strong, but also depend to some extent on regional collective rationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crises of core state power integration have produced two ideal-typical ideas of the EU polity. The regulatory polity encourages national self-reliance and regards EU institutions as rule enforcers. The redistributive polity builds on transnational solidarity and the creation of EU-level capacities used for burden-sharing. We study the politics of this development on mainstream parties in Germany, a least-likely case for EU polarization and support for the redistributive polity. We analyse 1,594 policy positions taken in the Bundestag between 2002 and 2019. Employing logistic regression, we show that German mainstream parties' integrationist consensus is perforated by disagreements about the nature of the EU. Whereas mainstream left parties embrace solidarity, mainstream right parties cling to self-reliance even in crises. Our paper demonstrates that mainstream parties' socio-economic positions remain relevant for their substantive EU support and that this rift provides voters with a meaningful choice between different normative conceptions of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the updated version of our dataset, which is the third iteration of the Decision-making in the European Union (DEU-III) dataset. We outline the DEU project before describing the dataset in detail, including the case-selection criteria, and the definitions and operationalisations of the main constructs. The paper discusses the integration of the dataset with other variables that are used in many of the contributions to this special issue and other studies. Finally, we describe validity and reliability test of the DEU-III dataset as well as some avenues for its future use by scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict is one of the most fundamental concepts in the interest group literature. The more conflict there is, the less likely it is that interest groups can impact policymaking. In this paper we systematically explore whether some types of conflict affect interest-group influence more than others. More precise whether conflict among organizations that are perceived by policymakers as homogenous ('internal conflict') is more detrimental for the influence interest groups have on policymaking than conflict among groups that are not perceived by policymakers as homogenous ('external conflict'). Empirically we focus on four cases of EU policymaking with varying levels of internal and external interest group conflict. Our case studies highlight that agreement among similar types of lobby organizations is a necessary condition for these groups to influence policymaking, while external conflict still provides much opportunities for interest groups to influence policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the 'failing forward' framework can contribute to explaining developments in EU competition policy, a policy domain where supranational and national forces have interacted over more than sixty years. The concepts of incompleteness of reforms and forward momentum, which are at the core of this framework, have been adapted to reflect the realities of this policy. In this area, the decentralisation of responsibilities to the national level does de facto correspond to a forward momentum towards a more effective competition policy enforcement. The globalisation and the digitalisation of the economy, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, pose new challenges. However, as it can count on strong supranational institutions and on its indispensability for the preservation of the single market, EU competition policy should be able to adapt to the changing environment, without risk of disintegration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Next Generation EU (NGEU), the new temporary program (2021-2026) decided by the European Union (EU) to deal with the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, represents a substantial break with respect to previous EU responses to economic crises. After identifying the discontinuity introduced by the NGEU compared to the governance response to the sovereign debt crisis of the early 2010s, the paper investigates the conditions under which a new paradigm of economic governance would emerge and not remain simply a major one-off, when the EU should deal with an exogenous shock. Those conditions are conceptualised in terms of three trilemmas. The possibility of the NGEU becoming the harbinger of a new paradigm of economic governance will depend on the solutions of those trilemmas – favouring the EU supranational institutions, promoting a new policy mix in fiscal policy, and implementing national reforms coherent with the EU's aims notwithstanding national electoral cycles. The solutions are then evaluated according to the 'Monnet Compatibility Test' (MCT) which implies coherence between the institutional, economic and political features of the new economic governance arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A seemingly continuous stream of crises in Europe has turned scholarly agendas towards assessment of the EU's management of crises. Those assessments vary widely, depending on the analytical focus and criteria used. This paper introduces three assessment criteria drawn from crisis research that pertain to the detection of a crisis, the mobilization of necessary resources, and the nature of the public debate about critical choices made in times of crisis. We relate these crisis management insights to long-standing debates in European integration theory to help link traditional crisis management assessments with EU-focused theorizing. The article offers a framework for assessment of the EU's performance as a crisis manager. We illustrate the utility of the framework with a brief application to the EU's response to Covid-19. We assess the EU's performance in positive terms: the Union acted quickly after a somewhat slow start and was very effective in mobilizing a variety of resources. At the same time, we note that major policy choices were made without a significant public debate about potential effects on the future character of the Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy makers are under political pressure to adopt policies that achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Reaching net zero is a demanding challenge requiring durable policies that last; that is, withstand short-term turbulence. However, there is a lack of clarity in the existing literature on both the conceptual meaning of policy durability and its empirical manifestations. This paper distinguishes between three central dimensions of policy durability and uses them to shed new light on the long-term evolution of EU climate policy. It reveals that the EU has addressed the relationship between policy durability and policy flexibility by working iteratively across and between different policy elements (instruments, programmes, goals, etc.). In revealing these patterns, it addresses a greatly neglected feature of policy design processes: the dialectical relationship between durability and flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to the debate on the state's role in helping domestic firms to internationalise, this paper compares the divergent performance of the Italian and Spanish telecommunications incumbents Telefonica and Telecom Italia (TI). Telefonica has grown since the early 1990s to become one of the largest telecommunications utilities worldwide, while TI is now a small firm controlled by the French media group Vivendi. This divergence occurred even though both the Italian and Spanish government implemented an activist industrial policy strategy aimed at favouring the internationalisation of, respectively, TI and Telefonica. The paper shows how these contrasting outcomes can be traced to the different regulatory power relationship between the state and domestic blockholders in the two countries. The findings shed light on the factors that lie behind the successful internationalisation of inward-looking firms active in regulated sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU has long pursued relatively ambitious climate and energy policies, often against the backdrop of what has been termed the EU 'polycrisis'. This paper introduces a special issue which seeks to develop a better understanding of why, how and with which consequences the polycrisis and EU climate and energy governance have influenced each other. It draws on a novel framework of five broad crisis trends underlying the polycrisis. Most of the contributions suggest that EU climate and energy governance have advanced significantly despite, and sometimes even because of, the crisis trends. The countervailing effects of the trends and the effectiveness of actors' strategies to advance EU policy against opponents go a long way to explaining this puzzling finding. As the EU seeks to fully decarbonise itself by 2050, interactions with the crisis trends are likely to intensify in ways which future research could fruitfully investigate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic led to an important reconfiguration of economic governance in the European Union towards deeper economic integration. This fits uneasily with predictions of an inevitable political 'lock-in' stemming from a responsibility–responsiveness dilemma, or an inexorably constraining politicisation. Investigating the evolution in discourses on and policies of economic governance in the EU, the papers in this collection approach the relationship between prevailing notions of responsible and responsive government as socially constructed and critically contingent upon politicisation processes. The special issue explores the reconfiguration of economic governance in the EU through multi-level analysis of politicisation, ranging from citizens' attitudes to conflicts over central banking mandates, using a variety of methodological toolkits. As the collection shows, the shift towards investment, fiscal sharing, and green transition in the new recovery programme followed the emergence of a form of 'responsive responsibility' dating back to the aftermath of the euro crisis and which has led to the incorporation of responsiveness imperatives in prevailing notions of 'responsible government'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divisive politicisation of inequalities among the member states in the EU is the lowest in member states where one would expect the highest level of domestic demand for it, and it is highest in member states in which one would expect much lower demand. In this paper, we argue that the territorially fragmented structure of political representation in the EU creates the incentives for politicians to engage in blaming the other states and adopting us-vs.-them positions in the national, as well as in the EU arena. Regulatory and monetary integration among economies at different levels of development provides fertile ground for such politicisation. Yet, the ability to engage in such politicisation while ruling a peripheral country is crucially shaped by that country's form and level of economic dependency on the economies of the European core. The consumption-led and credit-based growth model of the South is much more exposed to crises and suddenly increasing levels of dependency, whereas the FDI-based growth models in the Eastern peripheries provide for much larger room for politicising dependency and cntesting the alleged dictate of 'foreign powers' and EU institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vital political opposition is one of the cornerstones of democracy, yet we know surprisingly little about the conditions that shape it. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive assessment of the drivers of parliamentary opposition in European Union (EU) politics in five countries: Denmark; Germany; Ireland; Sweden; and the United Kingdom. Based on an extensive hand-coded data set of 7,520 statements made by members of parliament (MPs) during both plenary sessions and deliberations during European Affairs Committee (EAC) meetings, we examine how institutions and party characteristics shape two types of oppositional behaviour: the expression of critique and the presentation of alternatives. We find that both factors are important for understanding to what extent, and how, opposition is voiced in national parliaments. Oversight institutions' strength and a party's degree of Euroscepticism jointly function as significant determinants of the likelihood that MPs will express opposition in the form of critique. However, when it comes to the likelihood of offering alternatives, oversight institutions' strength fails to explain variations in the share of alternatives, while degree of Euroscepticism remains a significant predictor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the 'making' of Capital Markets Union (CMU) through the theoretical lens of 'actor-centred constructivism', by considering the 'policy narratives' that bureaucratic actors have employed strategically to promote the project. It is argued that two main narratives were articulated by the European Commission in order to mobilize the political support necessary to push forward CMU and reduce potential opposition to it. The first narrative was to boost the size and internal and external competitiveness of European Union capital markets. The second narrative was the increased funding to the real economy, especially to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and infrastructural projects. The Commission used these narratives instrumentally in 'framing' CMU as a positive-sum game, rather than a zero-sum game with potential winners and losers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses Latvian economic policy during the period 2008-2014 when the country was simultaneously subject to three European Union (EU) economic governance frameworks - the European Semester, the Balance-of-Payments programme and the Maastricht convergence criteria (for euro adoption). Through in-depth process tracing based on public policy documents, interviews with senior officials in Riga and Brussels and the press, the paper finds that the Latvian government cherry-picked and instrumentalized EU economic policy targets and overachieved in them. In contrast to the literature depicting the European Commission as a neoliberal actor which systematically undermines social protection, the paper shows that against the backdrop of fiscally austere national authorities, the Commission instead played the role of social policy advocate, repeatedly calling for stronger measures to help the poor. Shedding light on the limits of one-size-fits-all governance, the findings of the Latvian case have significant implications for EU economic governance more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are some of the lessons learnt from a decade of crises in European integration? EU studies scholars have set themselves the task not only to gain a deeper understanding of the many aspects of the process of European integration, but also to inform the EU policy debate so that lessons can be learnt from the past. This special issue brings together some of the best papers from the European Union Studies Association's 2019 conference in Denver, Colorado. Three themes emerge from the collection: the effect of crises on changing modes of EU governance, the impact of domestic politics and public opinion on EU policies, and the growing influence and relevance of the EU's supranational legal framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a conceptual framework of policy deception to help identify, analyse and explain Brexit as a policy fiasco. The framework casts light on the political use of the device of an in/out European Union (EU) referendum by David Cameron. The paper develops the argument that the referendum did not offer a binary choice between two policy options for the United Kingdom's (UK) relationship with the EU representing different, but commensurable preferences, because one option was 'baseless' in that it was unfounded in any policy analysis. The label of policy deception usefully reveals that many of the political, process and programme failures at the heart of the Brexit fiasco have their roots in the referendum. We conclude that the concept of policy deception contributes usefully to emerging work on why the Brexit policy fiasco occurred, and is likely to be a fruitful topic for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of interest groups in the regulation of the European audit market, clarifying patterns of business influence in European Union policy-making. Building on recent innovations in measuring policy preferences, the conditions are analyzed under which interest groups were most successful in attaining their preferences during the policy-making process. Existing methods for measuring interest group influence are refined by disaggregating the unit of analysis from the level of a unitary policy dimension to distinct issues featured in a single legislation and by differentiating between large firms and SMEs rather than assuming homogenous business interests. The results indicate that issue dynamics are central factors in determining interest group success: while larger coalitions seem to be more advantageous to large firms compared to SMEs and public authorities, high issue salience decreases the success of large business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wallonia demonstrated the importance of regional actors for EU trade policy. What remains, however, of regional involvement when politicization subsides, as after CETA and TTIP? Our paper provides a framework that allows a prediction of involvement after politicization. It posits that the interaction of three factors is decisive: politicization (short-term), preferences (medium-term), institutions (long-term). The more regional actors dispose of institutionalised channels of voice and the more they develop endogenous preferences, the less impact for politicization. We demonstrate this interplay in the cases of Austria, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Italy. Whereas regional involvement in Spain and Italy is driven near-exclusively by politicization, the German and Austrian Länder will remain cooperatively involved even in its absence. The Belgian regions, in turn, are in a process of gradual institutionalization. Our study demonstrates that regional actors remain a force to be reckoned with in EU trade policy, but some more so than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2019 the European Union adopted the first pan-European investment screening framework, thus joining the bandwagon of growing investment screening mechanisms around the world. This article explores why the European screening framework was adopted swiftly and with no politicisation, even as the negotiations unfolded against the background of heightened politicisation of trade and investment policy. The paper develops three expectations: (1) converging member state preferences; (2) securitisation of investment policy; and (3) Commission entrepreneurship. It then explores them empirically through process-tracing, drawing on extensive interviews with the actors involved. We argue that the European Commission played a pivotal role. To avoid falling into another strand of politicisation and to defuse political mines, the Commission engaged in a 'pre-emptive depoliticization' strategy that shortened the policy process, limited the number of actors involved, and justified the policy options in a legalistic framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mantra of 'take back control' has become a staple of eurosceptics across the European Union. At the centre of the slogan's message is a call to arms against the (perceived) challenge that EU membership represents for national sovereignty. In this paper, we theorize that supranational decisions taken by the European Court of Justice can increase 'polity scepticism' – increased opposition to the EU and decreased satisfaction with national democracy – by cueing citizens regarding the effects of EU integration on the perception of diluted sovereignty. Empirically, we leverage quasi-experimental evidence to support our theory, establishing that ECJ rulings have a significant causal effect on euroscepticism and dissatisfaction with democracy. The implications of our findings suggest that EU institutions seeking to ensure compliance with the rule of law and EU norms should proceed with caution. Interventionist action may backfire by increasing scrutiny of the EU's legitimacy and undermining polity support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies an innovative mechanism of how the EU's internal policies could lead to policy adaptations within international institutions. Having authority over the single market, the EU regulates important market actors whose behaviour is oftentimes crucial for the effectiveness of global cooperation projects. By intentionally or unintentionally creating a vertical regulatory conflict with an international institution, the EU might influence the behaviour of European market actors in a way that it undermines the effectiveness of the international institution. To preserve its effectiveness, the external institution is forced to adapt towards European internal policies to dissolve conflict and to enable mutual compliance for European market actors. The potential of the mechanism is explored in two cases: The EU's externalisation of data protection to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the externalisation of European fundamental rights to the UN Security Council. The process tracing finds that the EU is able to carve out authority from international institutions under specific conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case salience data are prominent in the US judicial politics literature. By contrast, such data is not available for most other courts. With the continued judicialization of politics in the EU and the CJEU's growing importance, court decisions could increasingly receive public attention. Inspired by US case salience data this paper provides insight into new data on newspaper coverage of 4357 CJEU decisions in eight EU broadsheets. Asking under which conditions newspapers report on judicial decisions, the article links theoretical expectations about the public salience of court decisions with empirical data on CJEU case salience. Multi-level regression models show that the salience of CJEU decisions varies depending on the standing of courts in national political systems, case characteristics, inter-institutional conflict, and the Court's public relations activities. These findings have implications for the perception and communication of the CJEU and provide initial insights into media attention for hundreds of CJEU cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes recent trends of democratic backsliding within the European Union (EU). While some scholars highlight threats to the rule of law and judicial independence as the key development and problem, others focus on elite discourse and partisan competition. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the essence of democratic backsliding by analyzing changes between 1990 and 2019 on key indicators of democracy – polyarchy, liberalism, participation, deliberation and egalitarianism – documented in the V-Dem dataset, within the European Union. We find that democratic backsliding at its core is structured by a deterioration of the quality of deliberation. Deliberation is also the component where EU member states differ amongst each other the most and which has featured the greatest deterioration in recent years. We conclude by spelling out the implications this has for EU policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the evolution of food safety policy at the level of the European Union (EU) from a discourse-analytical perspective. First, the article traces the political saliency of food safety since the food scares of the late 1990s, such as ‘mad cow disease’, and explores the consequent breakdown of the historically sedimented policy approach. Specifically, I highlight key moments of institutional transformation at the EU level by considering the role of scientific expertise and the meaning of national borders in the overall policy approach. Subsequently, the paper uses discourse analysis to address the mobilization of Europeanization in food safety policy since the 1990s, and identifies the ‘integrative nodal points’ that have helped sustain this policy discourse: notions of being a member of the food chain, of being a stakeholder, and of being a consumer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Policy convergence is an established theme in comparative political analysis. Policy convergence research certainly has the potential to add a fresh perspective to a surprisingly large number of active debates within European Union (EU) studies, such as those concerning Europeanization, globalization, policy transfer and ‘new’ modes of co-ordination. However, it remains a very heterogeneous research field, dominated by American comparativists. With some exceptions, the term does not (at least yet) excite as much interest among scholars of the EU as perhaps it could. This commentary seeks to assess the extent to which the papers in this special issue succeed in fashioning the broad issue of policy convergence into a cumulative and enduring body of work within EU scholarship. It finds that they do a great deal to define key terms and explanatory variables. However, the contributors concede the need to do much more to address the vexed question of causality and to feed their work into the mainstream of EU scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing interdependencies, national decision-makers have been reluctant to delegate healthcare competences to the supranational level in the European Union (EU). To overcome this impasse, EU institutions and member states have agreed on middle ground compromises by means of experimentalist governance. In this paper, we examine a tool of experimentalist governance in the making, i.e., the network formed by the cross-border healthcare expert group (CBHC) in the Patient Rights Directive. We ask whether interaction by means of transitive relations carrying trust, takes place and the extent to which domestic institutions, i.e., healthcare models, condition such interaction and thus learning. To examine network interactions, we use social network analysis on the basis of collected survey data on the exchange of information, advice and best practices within the CBHC network. We develop an Exponential Random Graph Model of the network to test the extent to which domestic institutions condition such interactions. For this, we conduct a cluster analysis and build a healthcare typology of EU27 plus the UK, Norway and Iceland, identifying five distinct healthcare types. We find that this type of networked governance brings EU healthcare cooperation forward, while domestic institutions greatly condition who interacts with and learns from whom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of policy styles in policymaking has attracted renewed scholarly interest in recent years. One of the central debates in this literature revolves around the question of how to reconcile archetype national policy styles with considerable differences in modus operandi across policy sectors. A sector-specific feature that is considered a key determinant of the manifestation of archetype national policy styles in the European Union is the degree of Europeanisation of policy sectors. This paper picks up this suggestion by addressing the question of whether and how Europeanisation affects the degree to which features of an archetype national policy style are manifest within a sector. We address this question by exploring sectoral policy styles in agricultural and food-related public health policymaking across three EU Member States: The Netherlands, the United Kingdom (England), and France. Our findings suggest that the degree of Europeanisation of a policy sector does prove an important condition that helps to understand the relationship between national and sectoral policy styles. More specifically, Europeanisation has the strongest effect when sectors face a higher adaptation pressure, i.e., when there is a larger misfit between sectoral regimes and EU-induced institutional demands. We suggest various promising avenues of future research on this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution introduces a selection of the best papers presented at the 2015 European Union Studies Association’s biennial conference. It uses these papers as a jumping off point to consider whether European Union (EU) studies suffers the same ‘gap’ with real-world problems that is seen to afflict some portions of the academy and to ask whether EU studies is at an inflection point. It argues that EU studies are closely linked to the substance of the European project. It identifies how the contributions to this collection speak to different aspects of the EU: closer co-operation; policy-making within a ‘normal’ political system; the implications of European integration for its member states. Given this link between the substance of the European project and the focus of EU studies, this contribution argues that the challenges currently confronting the EU – the lingering eurozone debt crises; the migrant/refugee crisis; the prospect of a British exit; and recent terrorist attacks – may mark an inflection point in EU studies. The reason is that for the first time ‘less Europe’ has emerged as a serious option in response to crisis. This possibility reignites questions of (dis)integration and calls into question the assumption the EU policy only accumulates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the European Union is not in active crisis, do we characterise it as experiencing a period of stability? What can scholars learn by studying the EU as it toggles in between the two? This special issue presents some of the best papers from the European Union Studies Association's 2022 conference in Miami, Florida. Two themes structure this collection. First, by temporally and conceptually locating the EU between stability and crisis, we see these contributions on EU policy, institutional evolution, financial resilience, and identity formation as a substantive reflection of the variety of emergent and ongoing challenges that comprise everyday uncertainty. Second, in showcasing contributions that study the EU in a variety of ways – as both a political actor and context, or site, of politics, this special issue aims to encourage a widening of the EU studies field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the Growth Model (GM) research program in comparative and international political economy by analyzing the impact of Brexit on London and other financial centers within the European Union (EU). Our key contribution is to demonstrate that for many countries, national growth models are really city-level growth models, and that this is directly observable in the relationship between GMs and their international financial centers. Such city-level GMs are possible precisely because they do not depend on, nor are they deeply integrated into, the rest of their national economy. To explain these observations, we draw upon insights from economic sociology and argue that 'place-specific social capital' and professional 'linked ecologies' make such internationally oriented city-level GMs highly robust to external shocks – even one as big as Brexit. Empirically, we develop this argument using financial firm-level data to observe the post-Brexit movement of assets, loans, and jobs in London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Paris and Frankfurt. We conclude with some observations on what a city-level GM perspective means for the study of comparative and international political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the policy developments concerning the Single Market in finance in the context of Brexit. Theoretically, we engage with two bodies of work that make contrasting predictions on European financial market integration and the development of European Union (EU) policies on financial regulation: one focused upon a neo-mercantilist 'battle' amongst member states and the other stressing the importance of transnational financial networks (or coalitions). Empirically, we find limited evidence of the formation of cross-national alliances in favour of the United Kingdom (UK) retaining broad access to the EU Single Market in financial services, the presence of which would have aligned with the expectations of analyses focused upon transnational networks. By contrast, the main financial centres in the EU27 and their national authorities competed to lure financial business away from the UK – what we explain in terms of a 'battle' amongst member states and their national financial centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is 'European Union Studies'? Answers to this question shape scholarly and public thinking about the European Union, and its member states and citizens. The articles in this special issue, devoted to the best papers presented at the 2017 European Union Studies Association biennial conference in Miami, sketch a perspective, which I call Global European Union Studies. This approach recognizes that European integration is embedded within a larger global story. It suggests that the European project sits in dialogue with events happening in other countries and internationally, affecting and being affected by them. It resituates the European experience as part and parcel of broader transformations taking place across the world. In terms of payoff, European Union Studies can transform its own understanding of the European Union, make connections to those studying other world regions as well as international phenomenon, and focus attention on pressing real-world problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]