Throughout 2018, we ask JEPP authors and members from JEPP’s editorial board to share with us their stories as to how the research published in JEPP over the past 25 years influenced their own thinking and research about Europe, the EU, and public policy. This is what they are saying.
Daniel Naurin, University of Oslo, Norway
Over the years, I have found highly inspiring articles in JEPP within most of my fields of interest, including interest group politics, EU legislative politics, deliberation and intergovernmental negotiations. In the last years, a particularly motivating special issue has been “Perpetual momentum? Reconsidering the power of the European Court of Justice”, edited by R. Daniel Kelemen and Susanne K. Schmidt in 2012. The special issue was published at a time when European judicial politics was at cross-roads. Established truths based largely on intelligent speculation was increasingly being questioned by systematic empirical research, raising heated debates about the judicialization of European politics, and the possibility of democratic control over unelected judges. These scholars, however, managed to keep their cool, and provide a nuanced set of articles demonstrating both the opportunities and limitations of judicial discretion set by the EU political system. Furthermore, they pointed at several puzzles and gaps in the literature that I have grappled with in my research ever since, including in particular the sources of judicial preferences, the political appointments of judges, and the politics of organization within the ECJ.
Dimiter Toshkov, Leiden University, Netherlands
JEPP published this article in 2004, just as the first wave of post-communist countries was officially entering the European Union. Amidst all the fanfare celebrating the success of the ‘big-bang’ enlargement of the EU to the East, Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier presented an insightful and clear-headed analysis of the power of the EU to export its rules outside its borders. The article outlined a comprehensive theoretical framework of rule transfer and offered a perceptive interpretation of the Eastern enlargement process in light of this framework. But the major feat of Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier was probably to demystify the sources and mechanisms of EU influence, and in the process, hint to its limits. This opened a new research agenda that continues to this day to explore the varying success of the EU in exporting its rules and institutions to candidates for membership, to the countries in the EU’s neighbourhood, and beyond.