Month: April 2019

In an attempt to shake off the secrecy surrounding the EU’s trade negotiations, the European Commission is obliged, since 2009, to immediately and fully inform members of the European Parliament of its deliberations with third parties. Some may say unsurprisingly, the transparency-enhancing role of the European Parliament has come in hand with an informalisation of communication between Commission and Parliament: As transparency threatens confidentiality and quick decision-making, Commission officials turned to an informalisation of communication to preserve the efficiency of their trade negotiations, yet arguably eroded the transparency gains achieved through the 2009 reform. In her article “Opening up by closing off: How increased transparency triggers informalisation in EU decision-making” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Evelyn Coremans challenges the common perception that informalisation conflicts with the goals of transparency reforms. Focusing on the case of the EU-US negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), Evelyn develops a causal mechanism linking the increased transparency of TTIP negotiations to the informalisation of interactions between the Commission and the European Parliament. Evidence from her case study supports Evelyn’s expectation that the Commission’s informalisation of communication improved the quantity and quality of information exchange with members of the European Parliament, much in line with the goals of the transparency reform. Evelyn concludes that the “informalisation of Parliament-Commission communication for TTIP is an improvement to a system where secrecy and confidentiality between Council and Commission reigned supreme only a few years before.”

As new policy initiatives shuttle through the EU’s institutions, we expect policy-makers to chisel away at the language contained in these proposals to make sure that policies’ anticipated effects match policy-makers’ preferences before they are formally adopted. Yet, even once a policy successfully exits the legislative arena, its actual impact may be subject to change. In their article “Many faces of dismantling: hiding policy change in non-legislative acts in EU environmental policy” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Jan Pollex and Andrea Lenschow argue that the EU’s regulatory legislation typically provides the European Commission with opportunities to shape the actual effects of policies after their adoption by designing specific implementation measures. In light of the Commission’s prioritisation of fostering economic growth in response to the economic crisis, Jan and Andrea provide case studies of the EU’s ecolabel and ecodesign policies and show that the Commission had used its powers of specifying implementing measures to ease the regulatory pressure in the EU’s environmental policy. Jan and Andrea’s analysis highlights that in order to evaluate the EU’s environmental policy it is necessary to pay close attention to the actual implementation of policy, as “we might see policy dismantling in disguise, effectively softening environmental regulatory pressure on producers within rather stable regulatory structures.”

Strike a conversation with a stranger about the EU these days and you are (rather) unlikely to end up chatting about the EU’s Cohesion Policy. But why not actually? After all, development projects funded in the context of the Cohesion Policy account for roughly a third of the EU’s annual budget and the policy is the bloc’s key tool to address social and economic disparities both across and within its Member States. In their article “The EU as a savior and a saint? Corruption and public support for redistribution” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Monika Bauhr and Nicholas Charron address the gap in our knowledge on European citizens’ support for the EU’s cross-border redistribution of resources. Drawing on original survey data tailored to capture public opinion on the EU’s Cohesion Policy in 15 Member States, Monika and Nicholas conclude that citizens generally express some sense of support for redistribution within the EU. However, their analysis shows that this support is shaped by citizens’ perceptions of domestic corruption. Monika and Nicholas find that those who perceive domestic institutions as performing poorly “are more likely to perceive the EU as both a potential ‘savior and saint’, that will ultimately ensure better public service delivery and governance systems less plagued by corruption and mismanagement of public funds.”