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hat are the consequences of the politicization of the European Union (EU) for the EU and European societies? While it is commonly assumed that politicization processes shape the EU, this book argues for the necessity to analyse politicization processes in terms of their consequences. It unpacks such consequences with a methodological pluralism which mobilizes conceptual approaches ranging from political sociology to intergovernmentalism and postfunctionalism. This book encompasses discussions on topics as diverse as public opinion, voting behaviour, public discourses, EU policy and policymaking, and European integration. These critical conversations make three key contributions to advance the scholarship. First, they show that both citizens and actors are reactive to the constraints and opportunities engendered by EU politicization. Second, they highlight how EU politicization produces differentiated consequences across countries, contexts, and issues. Third, the book strongly suggests that such consequences are best grasped in a dynamic way, reflecting on how episodes or strategies of (de)politicization are often complex rather than linear and systematic. Thus, our focus here shifts from analysing EU politicization processes per se, to in-depth empirical and normative analyses which grapple with their consequences.

This article aims to examine the effect of intra-institutional conflicts in the European Commission on the extent of changes made to legislative proposals in trilogue negotiations. We develop and test three hypotheses related to how conflicts within the Commission, namely that intra-institutional disagreements during policy formulation (h1), and potential conflicts with previous (h2) or subsequent (h3) colleges of commissioners, increase the number of amendments to the Commission's proposal adopted in trilogues. To test our hypotheses, we use a new dataset measuring the number of changes between Commission proposals and adopted legislation for 216 legislative acts negotiated between 2012 and 2019 by means of text-mining techniques. It is important to note that we control for differences between the Commission's proposals and the co-legislators’ positions in order to distinguish between an effect on preferences anticipation and on the negotiations proper. Our results indicate that intra-institutional conflicts affect the Commission’s anticipation of the co-legislators' positions. The effect on its behaviour in trilogues, that is, after the legislative proposal has been tabled, is less clear. Regarding the latter, only the number of Directorates-General involved is significantly linked with the number of amendments tabled. These findings suggest that while intra-institutional disagreements affect the Commission's role in trilogues, the range of preferences is more important than the intensity of conflicts.

How do members of regional parliaments engage in EU policymaking? This paper examines how and why members of the Walloon, Flemish and Brussels regional parliaments vary in their EU-contacting activities, by adapting a German survey. Belgium makes a relevant case, as the ‘in foro interno, in foro externo’ principle entitles regions to conduct foreign policy, including EU affairs in those areas they possess internal competency. Our data show that the level of EU-contacting activities of Belgian regional parliamentarians is overall low, mainly directed towards informational activities and taking place in the direct environment of the parliamentarians. The variation in EU-related activities is best explained by individual-level factors such as the perceived salience of Europe for their own careers, their perceived influence on EU policymaking and their position towards European integration.

Globalization, broadly understood as the worldwide integration of economic, political, and cultural domains of society, has become a central element of political competition in Europe. In this perspective, studies have investigated citizens' attitudes towards this phenomenon and the consequences of attitudes about globalization on political behavior. Despite this diversity of research, and the importance of globalization for political systems, no study has so far systematically reviewed the current literature on this topic. Yet, as globalization is a multidimensional phenomenon, scholars are likely to have extensively examined certain dimensions of globalization while they may have overlooked others. This imbalance would blur the overall picture of globalization provided by this literature. Hence, a comprehensive overview on the findings and shortcomings on the literature on citizens’ attitudes about globalization is missing. This paper aims to fill this gap by systematically reviewing the way in which scholarship has studied citizens' perceptions of and attitudes towards globalization, and what conclusions this research has drawn. By aggregating and comparing the results of existing research, the aim of this paper is not only to provide a clearer picture of how citizens perceive globalization, but also to identify key avenues for future research to improve our understanding of globalization, and as an extension, of political systems in the world.

This article traces the origins of European legislation during the legislative policy-making process. It identifies three phases where parts of the text of legislative acts can be developed: (1) agenda-setting; (2) intra-institutional decision-making and (3) interinstitutional negotiations, depending on whether the content of the legislation originates respectively in the Commission proposal, the co-legislators’ positions or trilogue negotiations. Using a newly developed text-mining technique which computes in which phase each word of a legislative act originally appears, the article examines the relative importance of each phase and explores how it is affected by interinstitutional conflict. Applying this method to 219 legislative acts adopted between 2012 and 2018, it finds that most EU legislation originates in the agenda-setting phase, and that the new content developed during trilogue negotiations is limited. However, the importance of the agenda-setting phase decreases in cases with high levels of interinstitutional conflict.

The adoption of EU legislation requires that the European Parliament (EP) and the Council agree on an identical text, which means that they have to reconcile their respective positions. Nowadays, the negotiations of a common text mostly take place in trilogues, secluded meetings in which representatives of the legislative institutions negotiate an informal compromise that requires a formal adoption by the co-legislators afterwards. In order to reach a compromise, trilogue negotiators have to make concessions, thus deviating from the positions of their institutions. However, they cannot make too many concessions either, otherwise their institutions will refuse their compromises. Against this backdrop, this PhD aims at explaining the concessions made by negotiators in trilogues. I answer this question through a mixed-method research design in which quantitative and qualitative research strands are independently conducted. Theoretically, the principal-agent model provided the framework for understanding the relationship between the co-legislators (as principals) and their representatives in trilogues (as agents). As a main conclusion, this research shows that while agents in trilogues are at the centre of negotiations, the concessions are not dictated by their preferences. On the contrary, both agents are primarily attentive to finding compromises with which both principals can agree. Moreover, the agents seem to develop little new content themselves in trilogues, but mainly make concessions by exchanging between the positions of their principals., (POLS - Sciences politiques et sociales) -- UCL, 2021

This article aims to examine the effect of intra‐institutional conflicts in the European Commission on the extent of changes made to legislative proposals in trilogue negotiations. We develop and test three hypotheses related to how conflicts within the Commission, namely that intra‐institutional disagreements during policy formulation (h1), and potential conflicts with previous (h2) or subsequent (h3) colleges of commissioners, increase the number of amendments to the Commission’s proposal adopted in trilogues. To test our hypotheses, we use a new dataset measuring the number of changes between Commission proposals and adopted legislation for 216 legislative acts negotiated between 2012 and 2019 by means of text‐mining techniques. It is important to note that we control for differences between the Commission’s proposals and the co‐legislators’ positions in order to distinguish between an effect on preferences anticipation and on the negotiations proper. Our results indicate that intra‐institutional conflicts affect the Commission’s anticipation of the co‐legislators’ positions. The effect on its behaviour in trilogues, that is, after the legislative proposal has been tabled, is less clear. Regarding the latter, only the number of Directorates‐General involved is significantly linked with the number of amendments tabled. These findings suggest that while intra‐institutional disagreements affect the Commission’s role in trilogues, the range of preferences is more important than the intensity of conflicts.

For policies to be legitimate, both the policy process and the underlying reasons must be transparent to the public. In the EU, the lion’s share of legislation is nowadays negotiated in informal secluded meeting called trilogues. Therefore, presentation of the trilogues compromise by the rapporteur to the European Parliament (EP) plenary is, arguably, one of the few formal occasions for ‘transparency in process,’ i.e., public access to the details of actual interactions between policymakers. The aim of this article is thus to examine the extent to which rapporteurs are transparent about trilogue negotiations when presenting legislative compromises to the EP during plenary sessions, and to assess whether the extent of transparency is linked to the extent of conflict between legislative actors and to elements of the political context related to rapporteurs. To this purpose, we coded 176 rapporteur speeches and, on this basis, concluded that these speeches poorly discuss the trilogue negotiations. Interinstitutional negotiations are discussed in only 64% of cases, and even when they are, the extent of information about trilogues is generally small. While we do not find support for an effect of political conflicts, some characteristics linked with rapporteurs are significantly related to transparency in process of their speeches. This is the case for their political affiliation and their national culture of transparence.

This paper aims to examine how rapporteurs defend, during plenary sessions of the European Parliament (EP), the compromises they negotiated with the Council. Subsequently, it also aims at explaining variations in arguments rapporteurs use. Within the EU legislative procedure, the EP plenary is the main forum for justifying policy choices vis-à-vis the public. Yet, nowadays with the rise of trilogue negotiations, debates in the EP plenary mostly concern files which have already been negotiated with the Council. As a result, such debates can hardly influence the content of the legislative acts. The presentations made therein by the rapporteurs of trilogues’s compromises constitute therefore the only public justification of the EU adopted legislative acts. The paper thus examines the discursive strategies and the types of arguments rapporteurs rely on when they defend –and try to build support for– the agreement they reached during trilogue negotiations. It focuses more particularly on analysing how these arguments do vary and explaining why. By doing so, we contributes to fill a gap in (European) legislative studies. Thus far, EP rapporteurs’ discourses have not been investigated, despite the key role they play during the legislative process. This paper also contributes to the debate regarding the democratic legitimacy of the European Union's legislative decision-making. The public justification of the policy choices made therein is indeed a key dimension of its democratic legitimacy. Practically, the analysis is based on two-step approach. First, using the interpretive approach of discursive institutionalism, 50 speeches out of the sample are qualitatively analysed. This step aims at identifying what types of arguments are used by rapporteurs and what words corresponds to the different frames. Then, the second step applies this inductively built dictionary to the remaining 200 articles of the sample through a dictionary analysis computed with R (software). The method

This paper aims to examine how rapporteurs defend the compromises they negotiated with the Council and also aims at explaining variations in arguments rapporteurs use. Within the EU legislative procedure, the EP plenary is the main forum for justifying policy choices vis-à-vis the public. Yet, with the rise of trilogue negotiations, debates in the EP plenary mostly concern files which have already been negotiated. Such debates can thus hardly influence the content of the legislations. The presentations made therein by the rapporteurs of trilogues’s compromises constitute therefore the only public justification of the EU adopted legislative acts. By examining the discursive strategies and types of arguments rapporteurs rely on, we contributes to fill a gap in (European) legislative studies. Thus far, EP rapporteurs’ discourses have not been investigated, despite the key role they play during the legislative process. This paper also contributes to the debate regarding the democratic legitimacy of the European Union's legislative decision-making. The public justification of the policy choices made therein is indeed a key dimension of its democratic legitimacy. The analysis first relies on interpretive approach of discursive institutionalism: 50 speeches out of the sample are qualitatively analysed. This step aims at identifying what types of arguments are used by rapporteurs. Then, the second step applies this inductively built dictionary to the remaining 200 articles of the sample through a dictionary analysis computed with R (software). Results show a depoliticisation trend in rapporteurs’ speeches although differentiated according to the different political group.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether internal dynamics of the Commission have an effect on the extent to which Commission's proposals are modified by the Co-legislators in trilogue negotiations. The empirical analysis is based on a new dataset in which the degree of changes Commission proposals and adopted legislation is measured for 111 early agreements negotiated between 2012 and 2016 using text-mining techniques. On this basis, several hypotheses, based on the literature on the intra-institutional decision-making of the Commission, are tested by means of multiple regression techniques.

In legislative policy-making several institutions need to agree upon the same text in order to adopt legislation. This means that these institutions must find a way to reconcile their initial disagreements. In the EU, the Council and the European Parliament (EP) are the co-legislators, which must find a compromise based on a proposal by the Commission. This paper aims at identifying the routes through which the positions of the co-legislators are integrated into a single legislative compromise. We identify three non-exclusive routes that lead to a legislative compromise: (1) anticipating of the co-legislators’ positions by the agenda setter; (2) exchanging concessions between the co-legislators; and (3) creatively searching for new solutions in the interinstitutional negotiations. We then examine the extent to which each route is used in the EU legislative decision-making, whether variation exists across legislative files and whether patterns can be identified. We develop a text-mining technique which computes in which institutional positions each word of an adopted legislative act originally appears. The results of the analysis indicate which percentage of a legislative act emanates from, respectively, the Commission’s proposal, the EP’s position, the Council’s position, or was added during trilogue negotiations. We apply our technique to identify the institutional origin of all legislative acts negotiated in trilogues between 2012 and 2018 (n=278). Subsequently, we examine whether we can identify certain patterns across legislative files in the results

Applying a principal-agent perspective on trilogue negotiations, this article examines how the rapporteur and the Presidency, as agents of respectively the European Parliament and the Council, are able to reach a deal with their fellow agent while avoiding an involuntary defection among their principals. Despite these intra- and inter-institutional constraints, early agreements can be concluded because agents execute two parallel tasks on behalf of their principals: representing them inter-institutionally and acting as the deal-facilitator intra-institutionally. We identify three ways in which the agents can combine these two acts of delegation and conclude an early agreement: (1) creating a tied-hand situation for themselves; (2) affecting the intra-institutional coalition formation by bringing in allies from the other institution; and (3) actively searching for signals from the principals and the fellow agent on the zone of possible agreement. We illustrate these dynamics through a case study of the policy-making process on the 2015 Decision on the Market Stability Reserve.

This article presents a newly developed ‘deviation index’ to measure, in a quantitative and standardized way, the extent to which the negotiators in trilogues (the rapporteur and the rotating Presidency) deviate from the instructions of the institutions they represent (respectively, the EP and the Council). Based on text-mining techniques, the index is applied to the entire set of trilogue decision-making processes in the 2012–2016 period (N = 111). The article then presents three examples of how the index can generate new insights about legislative policy-making in the EU. These empirical applications show that agents deviate more than minimally required to reach an inter-institutional compromise; that rapporteurs deviate in general more than Presidencies do; and that deviation is not affected by the support for the mandate or by the size of the agent.