ABSTRACT National emergency laws restricting the entry of asylum seekers have become increasingly common across the European Union. This article investigates how the European Commission responds to such emergency regimes that derogate from EU asylum and migration law, and which combination of factors explains the variation in its responses. Using a diverse case study design covering Austria, Hungary, and Poland since 2016, the study traces how the Commission’s response shifted from rejection to forbearance and ultimately to accommodation, leading to the partial Europeanisation of exceptional practices under the 2024 asylum reform package. Building on research on legal forbearance and compliance, the article argues that the Commission’s behaviour depends not only on rational cost–benefit calculations but also on how it perceives the nature of each crisis, and the trust in the member state involved. The findings point to a broader institutional shift, as the Commission seeks to preserve its authority by redefining the boundaries of compliance.

ABSTRACT The refugee crisis of 2015–2019 exposed deep tensions within the EU's compound polity, generating episodic bursts of political conflict and contestation over policy issues. This paper, drawing on punctuated politicization, conceptualizes politicization as an episodic feedback system linking three demand-side forces, namely problem pressure, public salience, and political pressure to the politicization of policy issues inside the EU's policy process, specifying the mechanisms that generate punctuated patterns observed in prior research. With an innovative dataset based on Policy Process Analysis, a Bayesian vector error-correction model traces both short-run shocks and long-run equilibria among the four variables. Results show that in the refugee crisis, public salience operates as a key enabling condition, as asylum surges politicize EU decision-making only when they trigger parallel surges in public attention; politicization itself cannot self-perpetuate, failing to affect public attention or asylum inflows absent continued external reinforcement; and political pressure activates countervailing forces, as gains for radical-right parties are followed by lower salience and fewer asylum applications, revealing a self-limiting feedback loop that drives the system back toward equilibrium.

ABSTRACT Regulatory agencies provide input in the policymaking efforts of their executive principals. While doing so, agencies test the political waters for proposed policies and collect insights by consulting with stakeholders in developing their proposals to principals. Engaging with stakeholders may give agencies the tools to improve the input they provide and enhance agencies’ authority in the eyes of the principals that rely on them. This paper assesses how agencies’ engagement with stakeholders affects their authority, specifically when convincing principals of their policy advice. We focus on the procedure of developing EU Implementing and Delegated Acts. We study whether 1) the kind of stakeholders that EU agencies have involved in developing their drafts and 2) how agencies’ signalled responsiveness towards stakeholders affects how quickly the European Commission takes their drafts on board. Furthermore, 3) we show whether politicisation changes these effects. Our study contributes to the literature on (EU) agency authority and reputation as we show whether ties with a broader stakeholder audience provide agencies with the tools to enhance de facto policymaking power. Furthermore, we contribute to the study of stakeholder engagement by showing what kind of engagement with stakeholders benefits public actors most.

ABSTRACT Immigration poses a fundamental challenge for the European Union, with deep political divisions complicating efforts to achieve effective collective governance. One proposed response is multidimensional responsibility-sharing, in which member states engage in European migration governance through different types of contributions aligned with their capacities and preferences. To what extent can such an approach overcome Europe’s divide on immigration and mobilise public support? Drawing on original survey data from six EU member states, we assess the potential for multidimensional responsibility-sharing by first mapping citizens’ evaluations of different contribution types and, second, analysing whether these preferences reflect countries’ positions in the migration regime or individual ideological orientations. Our findings show broad support for responsibility-sharing and clear differentiation between contribution types: refugee relocation is least preferred, whereas financial contributions and joint border control are more widely accepted. Preference patterns, however, are remarkably consistent across member states and driven primarily by ideology rather than structural characteristics of national contexts. Consequently, the scope for complementary national specialisation in European migration governance is limited. While multidimensional responsibility-sharing may facilitate political adoption of a common policy, it provides limited practical leverage for overcoming Europe's divide on actual contributions to European migration governance.

ABSTRACT How can government elites influence public support for EU crisis policies? Policy legacies (memories of ‘deeds’, i.e., policy interventions of the EU) are one such crucial channel, but so far we have little evidence of their effects. By contrast, the literature has marshalled solid evidence on cueing (‘words’, i.e., how politicians talk about the EU influences citizens’ policy attitudes). We look at a crucial policy which may have a lasting legacy: the adoption of the pathbreaking NGEU package during COVID-19. We operationalise policy legacy with past policy satisfaction and by priming individuals with information about the positive and negative effects of the policy. We operationalise cues by randomly assigning individuals to conditions where they are exposed to messages from their national government. Overall, we observe a negativity bias for both policy legacies and cues, underlining the fragility of positive legitimacy-building efforts through both policy legacies and cues. While the effects of cues and legacies may compound, they do not seem to depend on each other. Concerning effect heterogeneity, EU trust and attitudes towards EU integration moderate the effect of cues and legacies but not left–right political ideology. Finally, cue effects are also stronger in creditors states.

ABSTRACT Under what conditions does public participation in supranational policymaking help the European Commission strengthen its legislative agenda-setting power and minimise the change of legislative proposals by European legislators? We answer by explaining how public participation shapes the EC’s agenda-setting power through strengthening (weakening) the input, output, and process legitimacy of legislative proposals. We argue that key features of public participation, such as the extent and diversity of participation, the expressed levels of stakeholder support, and the overall openness of the public consultation regime, are markers of the input, output, and process legitimacy of EC policymaking and legislative proposals. We test our argument on an original dataset, exploring the link between public participation and agenda-setting success measured as text similarity between proposed and adopted legislative acts. We find that stakeholder support during policy legitimation increases the probability of agenda-setting success. This is strengthened when legislative proposals are positively evaluated by more diverse actors, which increases proposals’ output legitimacy. Features of public participation during the policy formulation stage do not covary systematically with levels of text similarity between proposed and adopted text. We find no systematic association between the openness of the consultation regime and the scope of legislative change.

ABSTRACT This article examines the flexibility of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). It asks under what conditions modifications to the original National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) have been accepted by the European Commission and the Council. In theoretical terms, the article revisits the nature of NRRPs as tools of EU economic governance. By drawing on applications of contracting theory to multi-level governance, it argues that NRRPs are best understood as contracts establishing mutual duties and enforcement mechanisms between the different layers of the EU polity. As with any contract, NRRPs face a trade-off between abiding to the original commitments versus being adaptable to implementation contingencies and exogenous shocks. The article studies how the RRF’s performance-based financing system has navigated this trade-off in practice. Based on a dataset that includes all revisions introduced in the 27 NRRPs between 2021 and 2024, the article shows a degree of designed flexibility due to ‘objective circumstances’ based on Article 21(1) of the RRF Regulation. Yet, the qualitative analysis of these changes unveils a broad interpretation of the latter, which opens the door also to ‘emergent flexibility’. Ultimately, contractual governance is a guiding normative aspiration rather than a legal reality.

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the transformation of European Union (EU) industrial policy from market-oriented to securitised approaches. We argue that external pressures – the weaponization of economic interdependence and security-driven industrial policies by China and the United States – enabled the European Commission to reframe industrial policy through a security lens, making interventionist measures politically acceptable despite long-standing opposition from market-liberal Member States. Our theoretical contribution specifies three mechanisms through which securitisation transforms EU governance without treaty change: (1) bureaucratic shifts creating new coordination bodies focused on economic security; (2) procedural shifts from ex-post competition enforcement to ex-ante risk screening and emergency powers; and (3) coalition shifts that co-opt business opposition by framing intervention as necessary to protect, rather than distort, the Single Market. Through four case studies – the EU Chips Act, the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, Important Projects of Common European Interest, and the Critical Raw Materials Act – we demonstrate how the Commission acts entrepreneurially to deepen integration in a core state power domain. However, securitisation has outpaced formal legal change: fiscal constraints and persistent Member State divisions limit the EU's ability to match U.S. and Chinese scale, revealing both the possibilities and limits of securitised industrial policy.

ABSTRACT The legitimacy of public service institutions hinges on their impartial nature. However, actors such as judges, scientists and police officers have been accused of either left- or right-wing bias around the world. This study examines the relationship between public perceptions of ideological bias among different types of public service professionals and levels of trust in their respective institutions. To this end, we collected original survey data in five European countries (Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, and the Netherlands) measuring citizen perceptions of ideological bias (left or right) among the actors of six public service institutions: scientists, teachers, journalists, judges, police officers and civil servants. We find that bias perceptions are widespread and are linked to lower levels of trust in institutions in two distinct ways. In a stacked cross-institutional analysis with respondent fixed effects, higher perceived absolute bias and greater perceived ideological distance both correspond to lower levels of trust, with the latter pattern appearing more robust across countries and institutions. We conclude that while citizen attentiveness to actual biases can function as a healthy corrective, bias perceptions may also reflect an undesirable politicisation of institutions, with detrimental effects for the legitimacy of liberal democracy and its institutions.