EU Politics Research Articles

The (Small) State of the Union: Assessing the EU's Ability to Implement Its Global Strategy

The European Global Strategy (EUGS) is a significant document that came out at a critical time. Decision makers and scholars need to identify and assess the challenges the EU is facing in its effort to pursue its new Strategy. This paper addresses the lack of a tool for identifying those challenges and assessing the EU's ability to respond to them by introducing a new analytical framework based on the conceptualization of the EU as a small power in the international system, and the literature about the international relations of small states. The framework combines the factors that impact upon a small state's behaviour and performance in the international system and consists of the following elements: a) the EU's relations with the great powers in the system, b) developments in the EU's neighbourhood, c) the EU's politics, and d) the EU's reputation. After discussing each one of them, the paper contributes a comprehensive assessment of the EU's ability to implement its Strategy. It concludes that in order to implement its Strategy, the EU should respond to specific challenges. Therefore, the framework this paper introduces can improve our understanding of both the EUGS and the Union's strengths and weaknesses, shed some light on what measures should be taken for the Union to respond to challenges that lie ahead and be used as a yardstick to assess the Union's progress. Moreover, the framework can be applied to other areas of the EU's external action and contribute to both drafting better informed strategic documents and supporting their implementation.

Sharing Is Caring? Exploring the Relationship Between Preferences for Online Participation and Support for Solidarity Between EU Member States

The article explores the influence of online participation on individual-level support for burden-sharing measures among EU member states. The analysis is set against the backdrop of the discussion about solidarity in times of EU crises and follows an innovative approach by operationalizing social inclusion in the European Union via online participation. It is argued that the specific nature of the European Union favors the use of online channels for political information and participation, but that despite its inclusive potential, online participation does not necessarily mean public support for the European Union. Instead, we hypothesize that people who make more use of online participation channels—thus are supposedly better equipped to participate in EU politics—are more critical in their evaluation of burden-sharing measures. Based on a large-scale survey among EU citizens in late 2016, we conduct a regression analysis taking into account the influence of EU support and general considerations on solidarity. Results lend support to our hypothesis that people who participate in political affairs online do not express greater support for EU burden-sharing measures but are more critical. Results are interpreted as an expression of the constraining dissensus regarding EU politics: Negative effects are read as criticism of how solidarity in the European Union is implemented, not as opposition to solidarity in the European Union as such.

Parliamentary Administrations in EU Politics: The Sources and Impact of Diversity

National parliaments tend to delegate a range of tasks related to EU affairs scrutiny to their administrations. However, there is considerable variation in the extent to which national parliaments invest in EU affairs staff. This raises two questions: what is the source of this diversity, and what is its impact on the EU affairs scrutiny of national parliaments? This paper argues that greater investments in EU affairs staff are associated with public Euroscepticism, large parliaments and parliaments with strong scrutiny powers. A large EU staff is, in turn, associated with parliaments that are relatively active in EU affairs scrutiny. This is particularly true for the 15 EU member states that joined before 2004.

The Unintended Consequences of the Common Agricultural Policy for Local Communities – Reading EU Law and Politics in Ikaria, Greece

This paper discusses the unintended consequences for local communities of major EU-wide policies. It focuses on agriculture-related policies, namely on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with a secondary focus on animal welfare and food safety legislation. A case study of the Greek island of Ikaria is used to explore this theme. More specifically, the case examines the impacts from the implementation of these policies on the livelihoods of traditional goat pastoralists and their relationship with other inhabitants of Ikaria, as well as on the delicate ecosystem of the island. The effects of progressive reforms of the CAP and the introduction of stringent food safety and accompanying animal welfare rules illustrate the ways in which the law and politics of the EU intertwine and translate into unintended consequences such as environmental degradation and the erosion of traditional practices, leading to loss of community cohesion.

How citizens (could) turn into an informed public: Explaining citizens’ attentiveness for European parliamentary elections

Abstract Being attentive to European Parliamentary (EP) elections is a decisive prerequisite in becoming more knowledgeable about EU affairs as well as eventually participating in EU politics. Even though attentiveness to politics is a common way of acquiring political information en passant, empirical studies in this realm are scarce. By systematically integrating content analysis data (N = 6432 news stories) with a three-wave panel survey (N = 1497), this study examines the explanatory factors for citizens’ attentiveness to the 2014 EP election. OLS regression models demonstrate that turnout intention and political activity predict citizens’ attentiveness to the election. Media consumption of EU news marginally drives attention to the election.

Kryzys demokracji przedstawicielskiej zwiastunem końca Unii Europejskiej?

This article explores the role that legitimacy plays in EU. It begins by defining what democratic legitimacy means in the context of policy. The article argues for a broader understanding of legitimacy, based upon of the relationship between political information and political participation. The article then goes on to explore the extent to which democratic legitimacy exists at the European level and at the national level. The article concurs with existing assessments of European sources of legitimacy, namely that is a very little legitimization. This article asks what the role played by democratic legitimacy and what this legitimization can tell us about the nature of EU politics

EU issue voting and the 2014 European Parliament elections: a dynamic perspective

ABSTRACTEU issue voting in European Parliament elections has been shown to be highly conditional upon levels of EU politicization. The present study analyzes this conditionality over time, hypothesizing that the effect of EU attitudes on EP vote preferences is catalyzed as EP elections draw closer. In contrast to extant cross-sectional post-election studies, we use a four-wave panel study covering the six months leading up to the Dutch EP elections of 2014, differentiating between party groups (pro, anti, mixed) and five EU attitude dimensions. We find that EU issue voting occurs for both anti- and pro-EU parties, but only increases for the latter. For mixed parties we find no effect of EU attitudes, yet their support base shifts in the anti-EU direction as the elections draw closer. The overarching image, however, is one of surprising stability: EU attitudes form a consistent part of EP voting motivations even outside EP election times.

Patterns of Conflict and Mobilization: Mapping Interest Group Activity in EU Legislative Policymaking

Contemporary studies on interest group politics have mainly used single interest organizations as their central objects of study. This has led to a rich body of knowledge on the motivations of interest group mobilization, strategy development and even policy access and influence. The focus on single interest groups, however, has resulted in limited knowledge on aggregate patterns of interest groups’ activity. This article seeks to address this lacuna, by examining patterns of mobilization and conflict of interest groups’ activity in EU legislative policymaking. To do so, it adopts a unique policy-centred research design and an empirical assessment of policy mobilization for a sample of 125 EU legislative proposals based on extensive media coding as well as structured elite interviews. We find that levels of policy mobilization vary substantively across different legislative proposals and that political conflict between interest groups is remarkably low. This suggests that interest group conflict and mobilization contribute little to EU politicization and that in cases where interest groups voice opposing positions, conflicts do not occur between business and non-business groups. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of interest groups in EU legislative policymaking.

Governing by prizes: how the European Union uses symbolic distinctions in its search for legitimacy

ABSTRACT Since their creation and with an increasing intensity since the 1980s, European institutions have used prizes, labels and other distinctions as political resources to perform and legitimize their action. The purpose of this article is to make sense of this governance by prizes. It documents the occurrences, uses and meanings of European prizes and what it reveals of EU politics and policies. It shows how the EU mobilizes and updates the three usual functions of prizes as claim of centrality and authority by the prize-giver, creation of incentives and compliance for recipients and construction/solutions of/to social problems. The conclusion is that the European governance by prizes mirrors what happens at other levels of governance while adapting it to its politico-institutional singularity. The EU operates with its own logic of symbolic production but remains secondary to member states in the definition of hierarchies of honours and values.

When Optimism Fails: Liberal Intergovernmentalism and Citizen Representation*

AbstractLiberal Intergovernmentalism has a particular set of assumptions about the relationship between voters and governments. Either voters are content to trust their governments, because issues have low salience, or governments react to voters’ preferences. How far is this ‘supply side’ of the theory still valid in the newly politicized world of EU politics? This article discusses the assumptions about representation in the theory, and looks at the conditions under which the assumptions might still hold and what this means for EU politics today. If the representational assumptions still hold in this highly politicized EU world, then the theory would predict policy gridlock. On the other hand, if there is a growing gap between publics and elites, then the assumptions, and the related propositions about the democratic deficit, no‐longer hold. Either way, the inherent optimism of the theory is undermined.

Authority Under Construction: The European Union in Comparative Political Perspective

AbstractMoravcsik's liberal intergovernmentalism irrevocably upgraded the rigour of European Union scholarship by categorizing the EU as an international organization, and analyzing it in terms of general theories of international relations. The deepening of European governance has meant, however, that the EU today is better understood as a polity in formation, generalizable through the lens of comparative politics instead of international relations. Alongside the burgeoning literature on the EU's politicization, I advocate for comparisons to historical episodes of state‐building and nationalism, with particular attention to the role of culture and identity in shoring up, or contesting, political authority. Doing so allows us to better delineate the challenges presented by European citizens’ lack of impassioned attachment to the EU, while also informing a broader understanding of the populist backlashes occurring in the context of more global trends of transnational authority construction.

Converging towards Euroscepticism? Negativity in news coverage during the 2014 European Parliament elections in Germany and the UK

ABSTRACTIn the run up to the 2014 European Parliament elections, the new Spitzenkandidaten process and European-wide party campaigns were considered a mechanism to create a more engaged European public. However, right-wing Eurosceptic party groupings gained a significant minority of the seats in the 2014 EP elections. We place this in the context of media and public sphere dynamics of politicised EP elections that have given selective salience to Euroscepticism. We discuss two interrelated media biases that explain this convergence of public debates towards Euroscepticism: a media negativity bias in the selection and tonality of EU news and a media polity bias that privileges contestation of the constitutional make-up of the EU over political and policy-based debates. To investigate these media biases empirically, we analyse EP election news during the 2014 European Parliament elections, taking Germany and the UK as ideal-type cases. We find that the UK news demonstrates a strong negative bias towards the EU polity, whereas in Germany EP debates focus more strongly on EU politics and policies and in fact demonstrate a positivity bias with regard to assessments of the legitimacy of the EU polity.

The Participation of Slovenian Civil Society Organisations in EU Policymaking: Explaining their Different Routes

While discussing the inclusion of civil society organisations (CSOs) in EU policymaking, academic research has chiefly focused on EU-level umbrella CSOs and activities organised at the EU level. In this article, we show that the activities of national CSOs involved in EU politics are also relevant when it comes to EU policymaking. Some scholars note that national CSOs may use different routes to advocate their interests in EU policymaking. In this article, we take an empirical approach and examine the routes to which Slovenian CSOs are turning their attention and activities on EU issues during the policy formulation and policy implementation stages. The Europeanization process has transformed national CSOs to make them become involved in EU policymaking in different ways. The results show that, despite CSOs being characterised as weak in Central and Eastern Europe and as only rarely contacting EU institutions directly, they participate in EU policymaking by engaging in other ways: either through membership in EU-level umbrella CSOs or by becoming more active at the national level by directing their activities to national decision-makers. Some differences can also be observed among the policy fields under study.

Informal governance and legitimacy in EU politics

ABSTRACTInformal governance often holds an aura of the covert and exclusive – aspects that are difficult to square with the ideal of a democratic process. Unfortunately, existing analyses mostly focus on the effect of informal governance on transparency, ignoring other channels through which a political order may generate legitimacy. However, existing analyses quite often conflate different types of informal governance or consider predominantly its effect on transparency and accountability. This article argued that the relationship between informal governance and legitimacy is much more complex and to some extent even counter-intuitive. To see this, I distinguish three channels of legitimation – input, throughput, and output – and discuss how various forms of informal governance affect it. The article has implications for scholarly debates on the legitimacy of global governance, studies of informal governance, and practical implications for the reform of international organizations.

СТЕЧАЈ БАНАКА И ФИНАНСИЈСКИХ УСТАНОВА У ЗЕМАЉАМА КАНДИДАТИМА ЗА ЕУ ЗАПАДНОГ БАЛКАНА

The objective of this paper is to present the regulation of insolvency of banks and other financial institutions in some West Balkans countries (Serbia, Montenegro and FYROM) candidates for the EU membership and its development under the influence of the EU regulations. This question has become particularly interesting since the onset of the world financial crisis of 2008. Banks and financial institutions from the EU countries are among major players in financial markets. The crisis has shown that the models that have previously existed were not sufficient and did not enable an adequate level of cooperation between member states, in order to minimize the spreading of negative effects of individual insolvencies and problems of individual financial institutions across the EU and all over the world. Therefore, changes were needed in the regulations, and indeed, certain changes have been made. This paper tries to see and evaluate the enlargement of the EU which is currently not on top of the EU political and economic agenda, the candidate countries are in the process of adjusting their legislation and practices in order to be better prepared for negotiating with the EU, but also in order to make their respective economic conditions and markets more harmonized with the EU countries, therefore making them more attractive to potential foreign investors. We shall attempt to give a brief analysis of how several West Balkans EU candidate countries have reacted to the described changes in the EU regulations regarding financial institutions and handling their financial difficulties.

Subnational Government and Transnational Networking: The Rationalist Logic of Local Level Europeanization

AbstractThe involvement of subnational actors in EU politics has become an increasingly recognized facet of European integration. However, this highlights an interesting puzzle: subnational authorities in unitary and centralized polities usually lack the formal competence and have limited resources to engage beyond their territorial limits. Why, then, do they engage at the European level? This article addresses this question by exploring their motivations for participation in European transnational networking. These motivations are assessed against a Europeanization framework, exploring whether subnational authorities adopt the ‘logic of consequentialism’ or the ‘logic of appropriateness’ when engaging in transnational networking. The article argues that subnational authorities are rational actors, maximizing the opportunities presented by the EU without subscribing to its normative aims. In a context marked by financial pressures and Brexit, these findings provide a useful foundation for analyzing the on‐going EU–local relationship, and for explaining changes to subnational authorities’ approaches to European engagement.

EU politicization and policy initiatives of the European Commission: the case of consumer policy

ABSTRACTEuropean integration is increasingly contested in public. What are the policy consequences of this EU politicization? This article argues that politicization challenges the hitherto often technocratic mode of policy preparation in the European Commission. Increased public attention and contestation render the diffuse public a more relevant stakeholder for Europe’s central agenda-setter because future competence transfers to Brussels are more likely to be scrutinized in the public realm. This incentivizes Commission actors to generate widely dispersed regulatory benefits through its policy initiatives, particularly where an initiative covers publicly salient issues. Applying this expectation to 17 European consumer policy initiatives suggests that the Commission orients its policy proposals towards wide-spread consumer interest during periods of high EU politicization and issue salience. However, the mechanism is constrained by internal turf conflicts and anticipated Council preferences. These findings highlight that politicization entails both chances and risks for further, policy-driven integration in Europe.

Brexit and OTC Derivatives Clearing: The Role of Politics

In this paper, we argue that a drastic impact of Brexit on UK CCPs should in principle be avoided, for the simple reason that they have so far provided efficient clearing services to counterparties located in other EU countries, so that their disruption would not be in the interest of Europe as a whole. Nonetheless, we do not go as far as arguing that the relocation of part of the OTC derivatives clearing which presently occurs in London to other EU countries should be avoided as certainly inefficient. While believing that clearing efficiency would be optimized through concentration of the clearing services in a small number of clearing houses, we acknowledge that the information presently available on the EU clearing economy does not always support the status quo. We also admit that a relocation of part of the clearing business to other EU financial centres could be efficient in the long-run if given conditions materialize, such as the shifting of a substantial mass of derivatives transactions to one or more CCPs in the Continent at a reasonable cost. We further argue that EU and national politics could determine an impact of Brexit on OTC derivatives’ clearing that is disruptive of the status quo without bringing net social benefits. Indeed, the protection of national interests and local constituencies could prevail over an informed view of the efficiency and stability of the clearing industry, which would imply leaving the choices to be made in one direction or the other to market participants. As a policy solution, we advocate a reform of EMIR strengthening the supervision of CCPs, including those located in third countries, along the lines recently proposed by the European Commission. Nevertheless, we suggest some amendments to the Commission’s proposal that are directed to avoid the disruption of the clearing industry which would be caused by the proposed regulatory requirements. A similar reform would entitle not only ESMA and the national competent authorities, but also the central banks of issue, the ECB in particular, to effectively supervise third-country CCPs and protect the financial stability of the Union. Moreover, the central banks of issue would be able to provide liquidity to CCPs and their clearing members, particularly in stress situations. However, we advocate a clearer recourse to substitute (or comparative) compliance for third country CCPs and reject the idea of a location requirement that under the Commission’s proposal could be imposed to third country CCPs in extreme circumstances.

A Primordial Attachment to the Nation? French and Irish Workers and Trade Unions in Past EU Referendum Debates.

We aim to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics that are driving EU politicization and the rising Euroscepticism of workers and unions in the public sphere. One explanation frames the rise in Euroscepticism in cultural terms, emphasizing workers’ alleged primordial attachment to their nation. A second uses socioeconomic frames, linking growing Euroscepticism to the increasingly neo‐liberal direction of the EU. The weight of these competing frames in the referendum campaigns on the EU Constitution in France and the Lisbon Treaty and the Fiscal Treaty in Ireland cannot be measured easily, as the categorization of a phrase as socioeconomic or cultural is in itself subject to political classification struggles. We therefore presents the findings of an inductive lexical analysis of all Irish Times, all Le Monde and all worker‐ or union‐related articles published in almost all national media outlets during the mentioned referendum debates. This was made possible by the Alceste software package that allowed us to analyse very large corpuses of articles inductively. Our analysis reveals that socioeconomic terms dominated policy debates in both countries. The findings question existing EU politicization studies that were measuring the salience of different frame types by deductive analysis.

Recasting Pensions in Europe: Policy Challenges and Political Strategies to Pass Reforms

Recasting Pensions in Europe: Policy Challenges and Political Strategies to Pass Reforms