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Until recently, we knew very little about the role of populist governments in EU decision-making. The "crucial case" of refugee distribution within the EU demonstrated that their behaviour was ruled by unpolitics: they rejected formal and informal rules of decision-making if these were not conducive to their preferred outcome, they rejected traditional means of ensuring compromises, and they rejected solutions to perpetuate crises. However, to what extent is unpolitics a phenomenon unique to migration--an area prone to (nativist) populist capture? This thematic issue compares the behaviour of populist governments in the Council of the EU across different policy areas. The goal is to better understand under which conditions unpolitics is more likely to manifest in EU decision-making. We argue that unpolitics is intrinsically linked to vote-seeking strategies, where populist governments use EU decision-making to mobilise domestic audiences. Hence, unpolitics is more prone to "high gain" and "low risk" issues, since they can be more easily politicised. Unpolitics is also more likely to manifest in venues that act as a tribune, where populist actors can directly speak to domestic audiences. Finally, since unpolitics relies on the mobilisation of voters, it is essentially a two-level game largely determined by domestic political and socioeconomic conditions. Overall, we see that, although the EU institutions have proved relatively resilient, unpolitics is gradually unsettling and hollowing out norms, institutions, and discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union's climate policy is considered quite ambitious. This has led to a growing interest among political scientists investigating the European Parliament's ability to negotiate such ambitious climate legislation. These studies generally focus on the voting behaviour of members of the European Parliament, which allows us to know more about their positions when it comes to accepting or rejecting legislative acts. However, we know surprisingly little about how they debate and justify their positions in Parliament. In these debates, members of the European Parliament not only identify the problem (i.e., climate change and its adverse effects) but also discuss potential solutions (i.e., their willingness or ambition to fight and adapt to climate change). In addition, plenary debates are ideal for making representative claims based on citizens' interests on climate action. Therefore, this article aims to understand how climate policy ambitions are debated in the European Parliament and whose interests are represented. We propose a new manual coding scheme for climate policy ambitions in parliamentary debate and employ it in climate policy debates in the ninth European Parliament (2019-present). In doing so, this article makes a methodological contribution to operationalising climate policy ambition from a parliamentary representation and legitimation perspective. We find debating patterns that connect quite detailed ambitions with clear representative claims and justifications. There is more agreement on what to do than how to get there, with divides emerging based on party, ideological, and member-state characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of the inter-institutional balance of powers has been a constant feature of the European integration process. Therefore, this thematic issue reopens these theoretical and empirical discussions by looking at an underexploited angle of research, namely the impact of rule change on policy outputs. We offer a discussion on how to theorise rule change, actors' behaviour, and their impact on policy outputs. We also examine the links between theory and methods, noting the strengths and weaknesses of different methods for the study of institutional and policy change. We draw on the contributions of this thematic issue to delineate further paths to push forward the current frontiers in EU decision-making research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European elections of May 2019 have been labelled 'a fateful election for Europe'. Although the outcome was disappointing for Eurosceptic and populist forces, polarisation and politicisation will make life in the ninth (2019-2024) European Parliament (EP) more complicated. The article shows that, while the EP might not be more Eurosceptic after the elections, it is certainly more complicated. First, hard Eurosceptics became the fifth political force in the EP, falling just behind the Greens, which is likely to give them a stronger voice and more leeway in parliamentary life. Second, polarisation makes it more difficult to build stable coalitions, which has a direct impact on the EP's chances to be effective in inter-institutional negotiations. Third, although mainstream parties continue to use the 'cordon sanitaire' to exclude those deemed 'undesirable', with the increase of populist forces inside mainstream groups, it has become more difficult to define who belongs to this group. Finally, it considers the implications of polarisation for the role of the EP within the broader political system of the EU, especially now that it has ceased to be a phenomenon unique to Parliament. Polarisation poses a major challenge for the future life of the European Union and prompts us to think in terms of partisan alliances across EU institutions rather than see institutions as monolithic black boxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trilogues have become 'normal' structures in European Union (EU) decision-making but their functioning, based on secluded decision-making, makes it difficult to understand how institutional positions are formed and managed and which actors are better positioned to influence policy outputs. These are, however, important questions because, first, a coherent position in trilogues (one that withstands the scrutiny of the Council) enhances the European Parliament's (EP) chances of achieving a favourable outcome following negotiation; second, because it has become more complicated to find a common position within the EP due to increased levels of politicisation and polarisation (especially in the form of Euroscepticism) in EU policy-making. Therefore, this article focuses on preparatory bodies preceding trilogues and the role they play in building Parliament's positions. With the shift of political conflict from plenary to committees and now to shadows meetings, the latter have become de facto decision-making bodies. Not only do they serve to mediate intra-institutional conflict but also to anticipate Council and Commission positions. This article compares the use of shadows meetings in politicised and non-politicised issues. With the use of ethnographic data provided by participant observation and elite interviews, we aim to provide explanations on how these new instruments serve to informally manage politicisation, focusing in particular on the advantages of insularity in highly publicised negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A history of totalitarian governments and state surveillance appear to have made Germans sensitive towards the uses of personal data. Because of such concerns, Germany often acted as an obstacle to security measures requiring personal data at the EU level. However, there has been a recent sea-change in Germany over EU Passenger Name Records (EU-PNR), a measure that requires the personal data of airline passengers for security purposes. Many in Berlin have moved from lukewarm at the time of the first EU-PNR proposal in 2007 to advocating it in 2014. The article draws on Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) to examine this change in position, comparing two government coalitions – the CDU/CSU–FDP (2009–13) with the CDU/CSU–SPD (2013–) – to show how actors within the CDU/CSU have acted as policy entrepreneurs to ensure agreement on EU-PNR. It is argued that the composition of governmental coalitions can act as a central condition that facilitates or hinders the success of policy entrepreneurs. While the position of the FDP blocked any progress on EU-PNR in the former coalition, policy entrepreneurs used the willingness of the SPD to show voters their support for tougher security measures, thereby ensuring Germany’s support for EU-PNR. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study uses rationalist and constructivist explanations of co-decision in the European Parliament (EP). It seeks to understand the change in the policy preferences of the EP during negotiations on the 'Returns' directive - dealing with the voluntary or compulsory return of irregular immigrants. This article shows that the introduction of co-decision contributed considerably to the EP's change of stance on immigration policies. A long-standing advocate of civil liberties in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ), the EP was expected to raise the standards of protection for third-country nationals. In view of the inability of the EP to construct a more liberal policy, the study uses two institutionalist approaches to understand why the EP was unsuccessful in raising the standards. Therefore, the approaches aim at identifying the logics and layers of change. The empirical application of the models highlights the necessity to integrate rationalist and constructivist understandings of co-decision in order to understand motivations for policy change. Synergies in the direction of change also point to the importance of institutional motivations, in order to understand major changes in the policy preferences of the EP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the months leading to the end of the transitional period (January 2005), most academics and actors involved in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (ASFJ) expected the introduction of co-decision as the normal decision-making procedure in this area to change the balance between security and liberty. The involvement of the European Parliament as a co-legislator was thought to be a positive aspect, since this institution had persistently adopted a pro-civil liberties stance. Since then, this question has not been systematically tackled in the literature and consequently the impact of co-decision on the AFSJ remains unclear. However, in 2007, Maurer and Parkes looked at the securitised policy-image governing European asylum policy in order to understand why the European Parliament had been unable to redress the balance and establish civil liberties as a priority. Following their line of reasoning, this paper develops the functional and substantive dimensions introduced by these scholars, in order to explain why the European Parliament, and especially the LIBE committee, has been equally unable to change priorities in the fields of irregular immigration and data protection. I argue that the persistent weakness of the European Parliament in the functional dimension, i.e. the need to legitimise its presence in negotiations dealt with under co-decision, has made changes in the substantive dimension difficult to attain. In those areas were the substantive dimension is weak, as was the case in the Returns directive, the need to legitimise the presence of the EP creates more polarisation among the members of the LIBE committee. In those cases where there is a strong substantive alternative in the LIBE committee, as was the case in the Data retention directive, change is hindered by the Plenary, which establishes the strengthening of the functional dimension as a priority for the institution. In both cases the introduction of co-decision led to the persistence of a securitised policy-image and the impossibility of engaging in conflict expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]