JEPP Online

National and international attention devoted to the German coalition talks earlier this year offers anecdotal evidence of the importance political parties and electorates place on governments’ legislative agendas. But once in office, can political parties actually exert control over legislative agendas in a fast-paced political and economic environment? In their article “Cross-national partisan effects on agenda stability” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Shaun Bevan and Zachary Greene investigate parties’ effects on agenda stability in six industrialised democracies over time. Shaun and Zachary argue that the stability of legislative agendas is subject to the state of the economy, transitions in government as well as the number of parties in a coalition government and the share of seats it controls in parliament. Their results suggest that parties tend to have strong effects on the stability of legislative agendas, yet constraints and incentives linked to the state of the economy, seat shares and number of coalition parties are particularly prevalent in the aftermath of partisan transitions in government. In light of their findings, Shaun and Zachary argue that even if voters are “unaware of parties’ detailed policy goals, using simple heuristics such as party labels and economic conditions, [their] perspective suggests that citizens can form relatively sound expectations on parties’ behaviors in office.”

The EU is often regarded as a beacon of human rights. But given the strain human rights commitments imply for member states’ sovereignty, why is it that almost all EU member states faithfully comply with fundamental civil liberties? In her article “Willing and able? A two-level theory on compliance with civil liberties in the EU” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Julia Schmälter argues that member states’ willingness and capability are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the EU’s near-universal respect for civil liberties. Julia identifies three substitutable forms of capability conducive to compliance with civil liberties, namely judicial capability, executive capability and democratic experience. Where either of these conditions is complemented by a political system of checks and balances, a strong civil society or a member state’s active participation in an international organization, full compliance with civil liberties can be expected. Results from a fuzzy-set analysis of compliance across EU member states suggest that “member states tend to comply with civil liberties when they are both able and willing to do so.”

Most parliaments across European democracies are still a few steps – and in some cases, spirited leaps – away from achieving gender-balanced representation. Existing research has shown that women tend to take a more liberal stance on mainstream political issues. Since most seats in parliament remain occupied by men, women’s preferences across a broad spectrum of policy fields may not be adequately represented in policy-making processes. In their article “Do parliaments underrepresent women’s policy preferences? Exploring gender equality in policy congruence in 21 European democracies” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Sarah C. Dingler, Corinna Kroeber and Jessica Fortin-Rittberger shed light on whether the gender gap in parliaments results in an underrepresentation of women’s policy preferences. Their results are somewhat surprising: Evidence from 21 European countries suggests that congruence of policy preferences actually tends to be highest between MPs and women. Interestingly, preference congruence is also not highest where the representation of women in parliament is most pronounced. Sarah, Corinna and Jessica show that the key to explain this puzzling finding is women’s turnout at the ballot box: “In countries where women vote at higher rates than men, elected legislatures mirror women’s policy preferences more closely.”

‘Referendum’ is unlikely to be a particularly popular term around the Rue de la Loi in central Brussels. While most observers of EU politics may currently associate talk of referendums with the ‘Brexit’ decision, member state electorates had challenged the trajectory of European integration long before the British vote in June 2016. In his article “Referendum challenges to the EU’s policy legitimacy – and how the EU responds” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Richard Rose documents a paradigm shift in the application of direct democracy since the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty: away from national referendums approving EU membership towards the rejection of EU policies. Still, Richard argues a thumbs-down in a national referendum may not necessarily mean the end of supranational policies. The EU has successfully employed several strategies to respond to these challenges, ranging from legal coercion to differentiated integration. Such strategies, however, do not guarantee effectiveness. Richard warns that where EU policies fail to deliver tangible benefits, attempts to circumvent popular verdicts create “a conflict between democratically expressed demands of national electorates and the absolute value of the EU’s legal legitimacy.”

In the debate revolving around the EU’s democratic deficit, much has been said about the EU’s electoral accountability, yet we know far less about its administrative legitimacy. The army of civil servants in Brussels may hail from all corners of the EU, but does the diversity of the EU’s administrative workforce provide their home communities with a voice in EU matters? In their article “Administrative legitimacy and the democratic deficit of the European Union” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Zuzana Murdoch, Sara Connolly and Hussein Kassim tap into this gap in our knowledge of the EU’s input legitimacy. Drawing on surveys among EU civil servants and Eurobarometer data, Zuzana, Sara and Hussein analyse whether the policy preferences of administrative staff in EU institutions reflect the preferences of their member states’ populations. Their results suggest that administrative staff in EU institutions in fact represent their constituencies better than their national colleagues in their country of origin. Challenging commonly held notions that the European Commission is aloof and isolated from public opinion, the article also has implications for our understanding of representative bureaucracy, suggesting “that it is not sufficient for a public bureaucracy to look like the wider community, but that within its workforce there must be staff members who think like them.”

The EU’s ventures into social policy-making have been few and far between, as member states remain reluctant to cede their competencies on taxation, spending and social insurance to the supranational level. Nonetheless, albeit a lack of capacity for social policy-making, positive integration via supranational social regulation can still have a crucial impact on welfare state regimes across the EU. In his article “Liberalizing markets, liberalizing welfare? Economic reform and social regulation in the EU’s electricity regime” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Hanan Haber analyses how and why social provisions were added to the EU’s electricity sector reform, highlighting their impact on national welfare states. Hanan’s research shows that the EU’s response to consumer dissatisfaction amid power blackouts and rising prices emphasised the protection of vulnerable consumers and the concept of energy poverty, which reflected regulations common in the liberal welfare regime of the United Kingdom. By adopting supranational social regulations concerned with an issue by and large exclusive to liberal welfare states, the EU introduced liberal welfare problems and solutions to other types of welfare regimes, effectively “promoting a liberal model of welfare through social regulation, pushing member states towards this type of welfare.”

Amid the communitarization of migration policy, the driving forces shaping EU migration governance have been the subject of a vivid scholarly debate. If anything, the fallout from the EU’s migration crisis is likely to fan the latter’s flames. Zooming in on the actors and mechanisms behind migration policy change in the EU, Saskia Bonjour, Ariadna Ripoll Servent and Eiko Thielemann identify three areas that deserve the attention of future research. In their article “Beyond venue shopping and liberal constraint: a new research agenda for EU migration policies and politics” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Saskia, Ariadna and Eiko call on future research to open up the black box of preference formation in member states and EU institutions, to analyse when, how and why we observe variation in actors’ influence in migration policy-making processes, and to embrace greater transparency in conceptualizing and measuring the extent and the content of policy change. They argue that scholars’ focus on these three axes may allow the community “to engage in a more productive debate and collectively work toward gaining greater insights into the multiple puzzles of EU migration governance.”

The euro crisis and an unprecedented influx of asylum seekers and migrants highlight a shift in the dimensionality of political conflict across EU member states. While the recent crises have not manifested themselves in dramatic programmatic adaptations of extant parties, we can witness a rise and strengthening of new parties, especially on the far-right end of the political spectrum. In their article “Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the transnational cleavage” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks argue that recent European crises can be conceived of as critical junctures, revealing pressures that have built over the past two decades. As traditional cleavages along class, territory and religion gradually forfeit their shaping power on political conflict, Liesbet and Gary identify a new, transnational cleavage, “which has as its core a political reaction against European integration and immigration.” Their analysis shows that as extant parties appear to labour in vein to come to terms with a new social division, change in national political party systems “has come not because mainstream parties have shifted in response to voter preferences, but because voters have turned to parties with distinctive profiles on the new cleavage.”

As unemployment soared in the wake of the euro crisis, some observers feared that the economic hardship experienced across many societies and dissatisfaction with their governments’ responses to the crisis may prove too much for the resilience of some European democracies. Would the effects of the euro crisis undermine Europeans’ confidence in the principles of democracy? Would it pave the way for a resurgence of authoritarian-styled politics, particularly in places where the crisis hit hardest? In his article “The implications of the euro crisis for democracy” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Hanspeter Kriesi draws on data from the sixth round of the European Social Survey and takes stock of Europeans’ evaluations of democracy. Hanspeter’s analysis uncovers that in the aftermath of the crisis dissatisfaction with both domestic and European politics escalated in Southern Europe, whereas Northern Europeans remained relatively content with their national politics. Somewhat counterintuitively, we should not expect those losing confidence in their governments’ capacity to effectively deal with the crisis to show democracy the cold shoulder. In fact, Hanspeter’s analysis suggests that dissatisfaction with governments’ performance strengthened citizens’ belief in democratic principles. Instead of undermining European democracies, “[b]y creating ‘critical citizens’, the economic crisis contributes to the strengthening of democratic principles.”

Recent years have been marked by anything but smooth sailing for the EU and its member states, with the fallout from the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the union yet to fully emerge and credible challenges arising from the euro and Schengen crises that have rocked the foundations of European integration. With regard to the latter two, the products of these crises could not be any more different, as the euro crises has ushered in new supranational institutions and strengthened existing ones, whereas the Schengen crisis laid bare the EU and member states’ inaptitude to update – or at the very minimum save – their common migration and asylum policies. In their article “From the euro to the Schengen crises: European integration theories, politicization, and identity politics” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse unpick this puzzle and demonstrate that existing theories of European integration can only partially explain variation in European responses to these crises. Contending that debates surrounding the two crises have been framed in fundamentally different terms, solidarity within the European community in the context of the euro crisis contrasted by an ‘Us against them’ notion on migration and asylum policies, Tanja and Thomas also zero in on the role of politicization. Here, they highlight the importance of the crises’ sequence, with efforts to depoliticize the euro crisis coming back to haunt the EU when dealing with an unprecedented influx of migrants and refugees, suggesting that “[d]epoliticization through supranational delegation has ultimately led to more, not less politicization”.