JEPP Online

Independent scientific advice is highly valued by the Commission in preparing regulatory decisions. At the same time, there is broad agreement that risk assessment is rarely value free and hence requires involvement from private and public interest groups. In “Policy masquerading as science: an examination of non-state actor involvement in European risk assessment policy for genetically modified animals” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Sarah Hartley shows how the European Food Safety Authority together with the Commission eschewed the input provided by non-scientists and public stakeholders in preparing its policy decisions: “This study joins a growing number of cases suggesting experts move beyond influencing policy to actually making policy.”

To comply with the demands of EU accession, new member states see themselves compelled to revamp their constitutions, which often implies far-reaching constitutional changes. But political elites choose different strategies of constitutional change. According to Christer Karlsson, reformers can alter the explicit wording of their constitution or its implicit meaning. Their choice of strategy is not only shaped by the rigidity of constitutional amendment procedures and the number of governing parties that need to be brought on board, but also by how politicized the issue at stake actually is. Read the full story in his article “Explaining constitutional change: making sense of cross-national variation among European Union member states”, published in the Journal of European Public Policy.

National parliaments have been widely perceived as the losers of European integration, rubber-stamping legislation originating in Brussels. Ian Cooper’s article “A yellow card for the striker: national parliaments and the defeat of EU legislation on the right to strike” published in the Journal of European Public Policy disputes these assessments and demonstrates the potential of the Early Warning Mechanism, adopted by the Lisbon Treaty, to help national parliaments become “a collective force in European politics”. The article won the “PADEMIA Award for Outstanding Research on Parliamentary Democracy in Europe” at PADEMIA’s second annual conference.

Is the Eurocrisis here to stay? Wolfgang Streeck and Lea Elsässer highlight one of the main structural impediments to an economically and fiscally healthy Eurozone, the pronounced economic disparities between the Eurozone’s centre and its periphery. Read their recent article “Monetary disunion: the domestic politics of euroland” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn how the Eurozone’s entrenched internal heterogeneity may turn its future politics into an “ugly tug-of-war over entitlements and obligations to international financial solidarity”.

While citizens’ identification with the EU tends to be quite shallow in normal times, prospects for identifying with the EU in times of crisis are expectedly thin. Alina Polyakova and Neil Fligstein show that citizens from the EU member states hit hardest by Europe’s recession tend to disfavour European solutions and instead turn to their national governments to protect them from austerity advocated by supranational authorities. Read their recent article “Is European integration causing Europe to become more nationalist? Evidence from the 2007–9 financial crisis” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to explore how Europe’s financial and economic crisis has shaped EU citizens’ (dis-)affection for European integration and their national identities.

What shapes they dynamics and trajectories of EU integration? While the question is as old as the European integration project, new answers are abound: ‘New intergovernmentalists’ re-discover the dominance of governments at the expense of supranational actors; the principle of ‘ever closer union’ has had to give way to differentiated integration; and mass publics put constraints on what kind of European policies elites can negotiate in Brussels and at home. Philipp Genschel and Markus Jachtenfuchs argue that these developments reflect a common cause: the integration of core state powers, by which they mean “the increasing involvement of EU institutions in key functions of sovereign government including money and fiscal affairs, defence and foreign policy, migration, citizenship and internal security.” Read their recent article “More integration, less federation: the European integration of core state powers” to understand how the integration of core state powers has not consolidated a nascent European federation, but instead fuelled the EU’s fragmentation.

Months of bruising negotiations among EU leaders to avert economic and financial collapse in Greece may have prevented ‘Grexit’ (for now), but they have not eliminated the possibility of ‘Graccident’. Snap elections in September restored a parliamentary majority led by SYRIZA and allowed Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to silence dissidents within his own party. Yet, any attempt to implement the reforms and meet the creditors’ demands still hinges on the capacity of a weak Greek administration and the Prime Minister’s resolve to overcome domestic resistance. Read George Tsebelis’ analytic narrative “Lessons from the Greek crisis” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to gain an inside view into the political dynamics of Greece’s third bailout negotiations and learn about the conclusions European policy-makers can draw therefrom.

The current “refugee crisis” has led to a lot of soul searching among EU officials and policy-makers in the member states about the effectiveness of the EU’s common asylum policy, resulting in calls for reform and a “fair” system of burden sharing. But what do we actually know so far about the impact of the common asylum policy? How has it affected member states’ asylum policies and the distribution of asylum seekers across the EU’s member states? Dimiter Toshkow and Laura de Haan have shown in an article published in the Journal of European Public Policy in 2013, that “there is evidence for limited convergence but not at the lowest level, and the convergence is not sufficient to erase the unequal burden of asylum applications and admitted refuges carried by the different European states.” Read the article here. Read also Natascha Zaun’s article “Why EU asylum standards exceed the lowest common denominator”, recently published in the Journal of European Public Policy.

When the Swiss police arrested seven FIFA top officials on corruption charges, astonishment arose less from the possibility that members from FIFA’s inner circle were implicated in criminal activity, but rather from the fact that law enforcement authorities finally agreed to investigate allegations that FIFA was characterized by endemic corruption. FIFA – the world’s governing body of football – has been portrayed in many news outlets and commentaries as an omnipotent organization shunning regulatory control and conducting business according to its own rules. Arnout Geeraert and Edith Drieskens claim that this portrayal is not entirely accurate, arguing that FIFA as well as Europe’s governing body of football, UEFA, are indeed subject to public regulation. They identify the European Union as an actor with the instruments and capacity to limit these organizations’ self-rule. Read their recent article “The EU controls FIFA and UEFA: a principal–agent perspective” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn how the European Court of Justice and the European Commission curtail FIFA and UEFA’s autonomy through monitoring, sanctioning and steering.

Public disillusionment with elite politics is a well-known feature in contemporary democracies. But when policy-makers themselves get disenchanted and even cynical with the workings of the policy process, something seems to be at odds. John Boswell and Jack Corbett argue that unlike ordinary citizens, who are disillusioned with policy processes they do not fathom, policy-makers “are disaffected because they understand all too well how the policy-making ‘game’ is played”. Read their recent article “Stoic Democrats? Anti-politics, élite cynicism and the policy process” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn more about the origins of political elites’ cynicism and its challenges to the practices and institutions of democratic governance. Read also their recent blog post on the article published on Democratic Audit UK.