Category: Journal Content

Commission consultations with NGOs link European policy-makers with civil society and represent an essential feature of participatory democracy in the EU. Analysing NGOs’ lobbying strategies on environmental policy in the EU, Wiebke Marie Junk argues that public consultations “may enhance the ‘participatory’, but not necessarily the ‘democratic’, nature of ‘participatory democracy’ in the EU”. To find out more read her article “Two logics of NGO advocacy: understanding inside and outside lobbying on EU environmental policies” published in the Journal of European Public Policy.

If you are a savvy traveller in Europe, you have probably come across the European Health Insurance Card, which grants European residents free access to a number of healthcare services in any EU member state. Yet, healthcare policies continue to be mainly a national prerogative. Hans Vollaard, Hester van de Bovenkamp and Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen show, nevertheless, that the EU has become increasingly involved in the public health decisions of its member states. Read their article “The making of a European healthcare union: a federalist perspective” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn more about how a co-operative federative system is shaping the provision of healthcare in the EU.

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.