Journal of European Public Policy

The literature argues that successive generations have become progressively more attached to the EU, due to having experienced increasing levels of integration during their impressionable adolescent years. This generational view of EU attachment assumes that after birth cohorts have outgrown their impressionable years, they do not become more attached to the EU, regardless of period-based changes. However, newer theories of European integration emphasise period-based influences that shape EU attachment across all age cohorts, rather than solely impacting adolescents during their formative years. We use an age period cohort model with repeated cross-sectional Eurobarometer data from 1991 to 2023, showing that all EU-citizens have on average become more attached to the EU over time, rather than later-born birth cohorts being more attached to the EU based on their generational membership. Contrary to what the literature assumes, this indicates that no ‘generations of Europeans’ exist, but that EU-attachment increases for all cohorts over time. Contrary to long-standing assumptions in the literature, this indicates that efforts to increase emotional attachment to the EU can proceed faster than generational change occurs.

In the vortex of the Brexit discourse, the phrase 'taking back control' emerged as a resonant mantra, encapsulating a desire for enhanced sovereignty and self-direction. Despite its widespread usage and political importance, the phrase's practical implications remain underexplored in academic literature. This study introduces a novel analytical framework that conceptualises the notion of taking back control as an outcome of de-Europeanisation and aims to analyse its practical implications. It uses two case studies, Pathogen Resistance Treatment (PRT) or 'chlorinated chicken' and neonicotinoid pesticide bans, to investigate the intricate interplay between political aspirations and economic realities in the UK's attempt to diverge from EU standards. It reveals that the process of 'taking back control' is not a straightforward assertion of sovereignty but is mediated by complex negotiations that consider the trade-offs between regulatory autonomy, market access, and environmental and health standards. The findings underscore the persistent influence of the EU on the UK's regulatory landscape and the strategic considerations that underpin the UK's approach to de-Europeanisation. This study contributes to the broader discourse on Brexit by offering empirical insights into the practical challenges and opportunities that the UK faces as it redefines its regulatory standards in the global political economy.

The reputational perspective on agencies has sparked fruitful research. We argue that this perspective can also be applied to private actors in regulatory governance. As they are incorporated into governance because of their expertise, we hypothesise that a technical reputation dominates private actors´ regulatory talk. Furthermore, we test whether agencies have a more multi-dimensional reputational strategy than private actors. We analyse documents of private actors, national regulatory agencies (NRAs) and a European agency (ACER) in energy market regulation. We code rule drafts and agency decisions, and show that private actors not only use technical, but also legal and performative arguments. However, NRAs and ACER have a more balanced reputational strategy. They balance the reputational mix of the private actors when approving rule drafts, adding to the reputational dimensions that private actors neglect. Thus, our article shows how private actors and agencies differ in their regulatory talk within one rulemaking process.

The constitutive organisations of governance systems tend to multiply and diversify over time. In parallel, a tendency toward homophily favours the creation of clusters of homogeneous organisations. Yet, few systems drift to the point of disconnection or dislocation. Several remain sufficiently cohesive to allow adaptation and other complex properties to emerge. To maintain equilibrium between order and chaos, some organisations must create bridges between otherwise homogeneous groups. This paper argues that hybrid organisations are ideally suited for this role. By their nature, hybrids share characteristics with different types of organisations in global governance, allowing them to overcome strict homophily and create bridges across clusters. Hybrids benefit from acting as brokers and in doing so, they facilitate the exchange of material and ideational resources across the governance system. Even if it is not their intention, they contribute to holding governance systems together and counterbalance the effect of homophily. We illustrate this argument by examining the space governance system and the hybrid nature, bridging activities, and brokerage role of the European Space Agency.

Recently, scientific experts have become increasingly influential in political decision-making. Although previous research has examined the extent and conditions under which politicians use scientific evidence, we know less about how citizens perceive scientific experts. In this study, we argue that the credibility of experts depends not only on the message they deliver or the medium they use, but also on the individual characteristics of the experts. Using data collected from an original survey experiment among Swiss citizens on climate change (N = 1,854), this study analyses whether the gender and discipline of experts influence citizens' perceptions of their credibility. The results show that, contrary to our assumptions, citizens do not perceive female experts as less credible than their male colleagues. However, this effect is mainly driven by female citizens who consider female and social science experts as more credible. These findings have important implications for the role of experts in policy-making.

Sudden crises present a 'stress test' for democratic policymaking. Amidst global crises the capacity for swift decisions is becoming increasingly important but reacting to abrupt challenges also easily leads to violations of democratic norms, as recent studies on Covid-19 pandemic demonstrate. To advance our understanding of this pressing tension that thus far has been mainly approached via broad regime-level comparisons, this study examines formal and informal coordinative institutions that facilitate efficient and democratic policy response in crisis situations. Applying the core executive model, we focus on Finland's decision to apply for NATO membership that unfolded rapidly after Russia attacked Ukraine. Through detailed process tracing analysis, we show how the country's strongly entrenched doctrine of military non-alignment was overturned with broad cross-party consensus in under three months via intensive mediation involving all key actors and governing institutions. Adding important nuance to constitutionally centred studies of crisis decision-making, our analysis shows how strongly institutionalised coordination mechanisms can facilitate radical policy changes to status quo even in the context of dispersed policymaking resources and high partisan fragmentation. Our findings especially underline the complementary roles and interplay of formal rules and informal practices, showing that in crisis situations the latter acquire fundamental importance.

Policy growth is a ubiquitous feature of modern democracies that has attracted increased attention in political science and beyond. However, the literature is characterised by considerable disagreement on why policy growth occurs. Existing explanations centre on the influence of (1) public demands, (2) interest group politics, (3) electoral competition, and (4) institutional fragmentation. While all four explanations are plausible, there are no studies that assess their relative explanatory power within a single empirical analysis. This article provides such an analysis by examining the drivers of policy growth in 21 OECD countries from 1976 to 2020 in the area of environmental policy. We identify strong ties between organised interests and the government as the primary driver of policy growth. Public demands and institutional fragmentation are relevant but comparatively less important factors, while the intensity of electoral competition has no influence on policy growth. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the functioning of democracy in the long run.

Through the analysis of ECB Executive Board member speeches, we have identified three main narratives about the consequences of the environmental crisis in the monetary authority's spheres of influence: The first emphasises environmental phenomena as financial risks; the second highlights the green investment or financing gap; and the third focuses on the impacts of climate change on price stability. These narratives lead to different forms of legitimisation in terms of why and how the central bank should intervene to tackle climate change. We show that the third narrative is displacing the first as the dominant discourse around ECB climate policy. The shift in focus from the central bank's duties to maintain financial stability to its responsibilities regarding price stability under the primary mandate could lead to far-reaching green monetary policies. However, based on the concept of layered structures, we argue that this change does not signal a departure from market liberal central banking but rather a shift within the prevailing system. What we are witnessing is a new form of market liberalism adapted to climate change, or market liberalism in climate crisis mode.

This introduction argues that the East-West divide in Europe continues to be politically salient since the fall of the Berlin Wall and two decades since the accession of most East Central European (ECE) countries to the European Union. We re-evaluate the nature of the East-West divide in the EU, consider its sources, and examine the interplay between political variation and cross-border economic inequalities. The fundamental question posed here is whether such divisions are persistent, intractable, or transitional. We note that earlier scholarship on the East-West divide emphasised economic divergence as a primary explanatory factor. As relevant as the economy still is, our contribution is to argue that the divide also needs to be assessed against the broader political backdrop of democratic backsliding and new geopolitical developments. Although we find that the East-West divide is still highly salient, the articles here specify how fluid categories are and how variation has emerged-both between and within countries in the ECE region. Finally, the very perception of an East-West divide is politically consequential. If unaddressed, East-West divisions and tensions will impede future reforms of the EU's internal governance processes and limit its power on the global stage.

Although economic nationalist governments in East Central Europe (ECE) have strongly challenged FDI-dependence, FDI-led growth has remained stable across the region. The political economy literature explains this puzzle with enduring business-state elite interactions and the disciplining role of the EU. Instead, we show that the EU's regional investment aid rules, which provide central governments in relatively backward member states with considerable policy space, serve as the main policy tool for reinforcing FDI-dependence. Using a unique dataset on regional investment aid granted between 2004 and 2022 in the Visegrád countries (V4), we show that each government, regardless of its ideological background, granted the vast majority of this type of aid to foreign firms. In addition, contrary to their political rhetoric, economic nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland outperformed their non-nationalist counterparts in granting aid to foreign firms. This suggests an instrumental use of this transnationally rooted policy opportunity: as their European political isolation grew, economic nationalists increasingly resorted to the promotion of foreign firms because the continued inflow of foreign capital has a legitimising effect both at home and abroad.

In the fight against climate change, the European Union has developed a new growth strategy to transform Europe into the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. To support EU member states in their transition towards greener economies, climate change mitigation policies are being implemented at the EU-level. However, such policies can be designed in different ways, and gaining citizens’ support is crucial for the political feasibility of the European green transition. Drawing on data from an original conjoint experiment conducted in Germany (N = 5,796), this article investigates how policy design shapes public support for EU climate change mitigation. To this end, the study theoretically and empirically distinguishes four policy dimensions that address the distributive politics of the European green transition: sectoral scope, social spending, financing structure and cross-country distribution. The results confirm that all four policy dimensions significantly impact public support. Specifically, the study reveals that support is greatest for EU policy packages that target financial support at the renewable energy sector, include social investment policies, are financed by increasing taxes on the rich, and distribute resources across EU member states based on population size. Furthermore, citizens’ sensitivity to the policy design varies slightly by income position, left-right ideology and climate attitudes.

Carbon taxes are an effective tool to reduce carbon emissions but their use is hampered by a lack of public support. We develop the theoretical argument that social insurance programmes may be designed to mitigate perceptions of economic risk and unfairness, and thereby increase public acceptance of carbon taxes. Employing a novel combination of cross-sectional data, we test whether and how the coverage, replacement rates, and duration of three social insurance programmes relate to support for carbon taxes in 20 European countries. The results reveal that coverage correlates significantly with support for carbon taxes, while replacement rates and the duration of social insurance exhibit no such association individually. However, a combination of broad coverage and high replacement rates is linked to greater support for carbon taxes than broad coverage alone. The relationship between social protection and carbon tax support is furthermore equally strong among economically vulnerable and other groups.

Despite the proliferation of studies on interest group influence, there has been limited research on the conditions that facilitate their ability to impact policy agendas. This study investigates the role of supportive alignments in enhancing interest groups’ agenda-setting influence, with a specific focus on the European Union. We argue that organisations aligning closely with institutional and societal actors are better positioned to push their ‘dream’ issues on the policy agenda while keeping nightmare issues off. To assess this argument, we rely on a novel dataset comprising 301 mobilised interest groups on 56 specific issues. Our findings underscore the pivotal role of institutional alignments in gaining agenda-setting influence. Moreover, aligning with the public and other interest groups increases the chances of preference attainment. However, it does not lead to a higher likelihood of being perceived as an influential agenda-setter. Overall, our study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of interest group influence, extending insights beyond legislative politics.

Research often explores the role of scientific expertise in policymaking from an externalised perspective, mostly focusing on how policymakers use and abuse scientific expertise through political learning. However, very little is known about political learning by scientific experts. What strategies do they use to maintain and advance their access to, and influence on policymaking? Using process tracing, we illustrate how scientific experts' access to policymaking is challenged as a policy issue develops. We explore how this nudges scientific experts to engage in political learning and employ political advocacy strategies to enhance science's role in policy making, corresponding to evolving political opportunity structures. We empirically trace this using the case of EU climate policy development between 1990 and 2022. We identify three main sets of advocacy strategies used by scientific experts: Narrative and semantic (policy issue-oriented), Socialisation (Actors-oriented), and Governance (systems and structures-oriented). In doing so, this article illustrates the political actorness and agency of scientific experts and provides a supplementary understanding to the role of science in public policy and policy change, not only as a function of policymaker's instrumentalization of science, but also as a function of how scientific experts actively advocate for science's role in public policy.

Despite emigrations' adverse impacts in several EU Member States, especially in Central Eastern Europe, topics like brain drain and depopulation have received relatively little attention at EU level compared to concerns associated with free movement and immigration. This article offers an answer to why this is so. Drawing on agenda-setting theory, it argues that the institutional framework of the EU both inhibits and disincentivises attempts to turn emigration into an EU level topic. Seen through the lens of the EU policy, regulating emigration becomes a matter of cohesion policy, which makes it both difficult and unattractive to lobby. To assess the argument empirically, the article draws on elite interviews with national and EU policymakers and document analysis from 2010-2023. The analysis reveals a structural bias of the EU and offers an example of how pertinent political issues fail to become EU topics.

Scholars in several fields share a desire to better understand the inter-temporal dimensions of policy-making. While several studies analysed individuals' preferences regarding policies whose benefits unfold in the future, little is known about policy-makers' own perceptions of inter-temporal trade-offs in politics. Using an original survey of municipal politicians in Sweden, we demonstrate that factors found important in macro-level research on future-oriented policy-making also matter for politicians' micro-level perceptions. Politicians who perceive the policy-making process as consensus-oriented, characterized by corporatist concertation and by a low risk of policy reversal, and those who feel confident about (re-)election into government, are less likely to perceive a trade-off between policies that help them win elections and policies that benefit society in the long-term, and less likely to view politics as short-term biased. Trade-off perceptions are, furthermore, related to previously overlooked variations in how politicians understand the inter-temporal profile of physical and social investment policies. Our findings have significant implications for comparative public policy research, by uncovering how politicians perceive inter-temporal trade-offs and shining new light on the micro-foundations of future-oriented policy-making.

Avoiding moral hazard is a recurrent argument of those seeking to limit the development of European financial support mechanisms. Germany has been the traditional leader of this coalition of actors in the European Union (EU). However, in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, Germany supported an EU response which included grants and massive debt issuance. What was previously presented as unacceptable – because of moral hazard – became appropriate. This contribution seeks to explain why the German government ceased to emphasise the moral hazard problem in EU economic governance. We argue that the answer is not because of a challenge to the relevance of moral hazard per se, or because the Germans lost interest in the moral hazard problem, but rather because German policymakers were discursively constrained by one of the dominant meanings of moral hazard they had previously imposed – which lost its relevance in the context of a symmetric exogenous shock.

Previous research has shown how terrorist attacks attract media attention and influence public opinion and decision-makers. However, we lack a comparative assessment of the extent to which extremist ideologies matter and how they matter. Therefore, this paper compares mass media debates over extreme right and Islamist terrorist attacks. Theoretically, it innovates by linking research on discursive critical junctures and issue-specific discursive opportunity structures, emphasising the systematic differences between the two ideologies. Empirically, the study is based on an original, large-scale content analysis of mass media debates on all seven fatal attacks in Germany since 2015 (N = 9047). It combines relational quantitative content analysis with frame and network analyses. The results show how ideologies behind terrorist attack shape political reactions and the framing of the key security threat. Notably, both types of attacks provide favourable conditions for the far right, and political elites play a central role in the diffusion of far-right frames. In contrast, victims and ethnic or religious minorities have little voice in public debates. Overall, the study contributes to a better understanding of the impact of terrorist attacks on Western democracies by emphasising the impact of ideology and distorted threat perceptions in public debates.

How do actors react to the politicisation of trade policy? This special issue aims to tackle this question, considering a broad set of actors including members of parliament, political parties, regional and national governments, interest groups, and the European Commission. To set the stage for the contributions to the special issue, in this introduction, we first conceptualise politicisation as the combination of high salience and high contestation. We then present existing research on the politicisation of trade policy, highlighting the relative scarcity of work on reactions to politicisation. The introduction also offers a typology of strategies available to actors in response to politicisation, which distinguishes between dodging, free riding, confronting, and bandwagoning. These strategies differ with respect to the position taken by actors relative to contestation and by their level of activity. Finally, we summarise the main lessons learned from the special issue.

The article explores EU sectoral integration in the Eastern Neighbourhood. It shows that extant approaches to explaining EU meso-level engagement with third countries – differentiated integration and functional cooperation – fall short of capturing all dynamics at play. Drawing on the literature of ‘Europeanisation,’ it develops a novel conceptual framework for the study of EU sectoral integration entailing four avenues – rules, institutions, practices and knowledge – and two features – local ownership and cross-fertilisation. Through an in-depth empirical study of Frontex-Moldova relations, the article demonstrates that engagement in border management remains below the threshold of differentiated integration by precluding institutional inclusion but reaches beyond functional cooperation through combining integration concerning practices and knowledge. Furthermore, unlike differentiated integration, it allows for local ownership, and contrary to functional cooperation, it enables cross-fertilisation, even if these features are absent from the macro-level cooperation context. Thus, the article contributes to the refinement of the theoretical framework of European integration.

The European Union established the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) to address the socio-economic impact of Covid-19. The RRF promotes domestic ownership through increased engagement of national authorities with stakeholders. However, empirical manifestations of ownership remain unclear. This study refines the concept of 'ownership' and analyses the engagement of social actors in the formulation of National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) in Croatia, the Netherlands, and Sweden. The findings indicate that all three countries exhibit limited procedural ownership, while the extent of substantive ownership varies based on pre-existing conditions. Interestingly, higher financial allocation can hinder the ownership of social actors, although low allocations do not necessarily facilitate their involvement. Time pressures and divergent time horizons between EU and national politics further undermine domestic ownership. While the centralized preparation of NRRPs has led to the concentration of ownership primarily in the hands of governments, poor governance of NRRPs could erode legitimacy.

What explains variation in governments' policy choices to protect jobs and incomes at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in Western Europe? Departing from existing literature that emphasises path-dependency, this article proposes a dynamic model of policy-making in a major emergency. Building on the idea that governments face a trade-off between targeting and reversibility, the article develops a framework that accounts for both continuity and change in governments' policies to protect jobs and incomes during the pandemic. Introducing a four-fold typology of ideal-typical policy responses (strong reinforcement, weak reinforcement, over-provision and under-provision), it is argued that the interaction between institutional legacies and political power of the beneficiaries of a given policy determines the response that governments opt for. Case studies of three policy areas (short-time work; unemployment insurance and social assistance) across the five largest Western European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom) support the proposed theoretical framework.

Can governments make courts politically compliant without undermining public confidence in the judicial system? Many studies show a positive relationship between judicial independence and citizens' trust in courts. However, most of them have shown static cross-sectional correlations rather than actual effects of court curbing on trust. Factors such as citizens' level of education and political preferences may also play a role in moderating reactions to court curbing. We analyse how assaults on judicial independence by populist governments in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland affected judicial trust, using a difference-indifferences approach to Eurobarometer data. While we find evidence that court curbing has an adverse effect on judicial trust, this effect is much clearer among citizens who are ideologically distant from their governments. These findings coincide with experimental evidence indicating how citizens tolerate democratic backsliding, suggesting that, for many, trust in the judicial system can subsist even when courts are made politically subservient.

The present study considers whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine constitutes an opportunity for EU policy centralisation and polity-building in non-military domains, according to a social security logic. It argues that the war and growing concerns about energy security and prices have presented EU policymakers with a transboundary policy puzzle on how to ensure autonomy in energy supply, fight climate change and protect household disposable income. Then, it examines public preferences on energy and social policy options, evaluating whether the war contributed to increasing demand for supra-national capacity building and investigating the priorities (and divides) across and within EU countries in these policy areas. The findings show that social security concerns related to the war in Ukraine have been translated into greater support for policy centralisation, but they have not helped to overcome divides over conflicting policy goals, leaving policymakers with some difficult decisions.