Europeanization beyond Europe

by: Frank Schimmelfennig

This article reviews the literature on Europeanization beyond the group of EU member, “quasi-member” and applicant states. It uses the analysis of Europeanization in applicant states as a theoretical starting point to ask if, how and under which conditions we can expect domestic effects of European integration beyond Europe. Focusing on Europeanization effects in the areas of regionalism, democracy and human rights, and the literature on the European Neighborhood Policy in particular, the article collects findings on the strategies and instruments as well as the impact and effectiveness of the EU. The general conclusion to be drawn from the theoretical and empirical literature reviewed is one of low consistency and impact.

Public perceptions of the EU as a system of governance

by: Robert Rohrschneider and Matthew Loveless

Since its inception, the European Union has stimulated many vigorous debates. This Living Review provides a state of the field perspective on the academic work that has been done to address the question of the perceptions of the European Union as a system of governance. It takes a broad scope in assessing the efforts of scholars and highlights significant theoretical and empirical contributions as well as identifying potential avenues for research. In order to understand perceptions of the EU, scholars have employed national-level frameworks of popular support, particularly partisanship and instrumental self-interest. As the number of members has increased, further research has taken a broader scope to include national identity, institutions, and attitudes regarding the normative and empirical function of both national and EU institutions. Additional works address political intermediaries such as parties, media, and elites. Finally, all of the works are fundamentally concerned with the supportive popular sentiment that underpins the EU’s legitimacy as a political institution. While there are far more works that can be practically included in this review, we have attempted to construct an overview based on the dimensions that define this research as set out by significant contributions at the core of this literature.

Europeanisation in new member and candidate states

by: Ulrich Sedelmeier

The Europeanisation of candidate countries and new members is a rather recent research area that has grown strongly since the early 2000s. Research in this area has developed primarily in the context of the EU’s eastern enlargement. A small number of theoretically informed book-length
studies of the EU’s influence on the Central and Eastern European candidate countries have provided a generalisable conceptual framework for this research area, drawing on the debate between rationalist institutionalist and constructivist institutionalist approaches in International Relations and Comparative Politics. This framework makes these studies highly compatible with analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, with which they also share one key empirical finding, namely that the impact of the EU on candidate countries is differential across countries and issue areas. At the same time, the theoretical implications of these findings appear more
clear-cut than in the case of the Europeanisation of member states: rationalist institutionalism, with its focus on the external incentives underpinning EU conditionality and the material costs incurred by domestic veto players, appears well-suited to explaining variation in the patterns of Europeanisation in candidate countries. A very recent development within this research agenda is the focus on the Europeanisation of new member states. While the study of the EU’s impact during the early years of membership was hitherto primarily a subfield of analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, it has now become an extension of studies of candidate countries by analysing the impact of accession on the dynamics of pre-accession Europeanisation and how durable and distinctive the patterns of candidate Europeanisation are in the post-accession stage.

European Parliament elections and EU governance

by: Slava Mikhaylov and Michael Marsh

The decision to establish direct elections to the European Parliament was intended by many to establish a direct link between the individual citizen and decision making at the European level. Elections were meant to help to establish a common identity among the peoples of Europe, to legitimise policy through the normal electoral processes and provide a public space within which Europeans could exert a more direct control over their collective future. Critics disagreed, arguing that direct elections to the European Parliament would further undermine the sovereignty of member states, and may not deliver on the promise that so many were making on behalf of that process. In particular, some wondered whether elections alone could mobilise European publics to take a much greater interest in European matters, with the possibility of European elections being contested simply on national matters. Evaluating these divergent views, the subject of this article is to review the literature on direct elections to the European Parliament in the context of the role these elections play in governance of the European Union. The seminal work by Reif and Schmitt serves as the starting point of our review. These authors were the first to discuss elections to the European Parliament as second-order national elections. Results of second-order elections are influenced not only by second-order factors, but also by the situation in the first-order arena at the time of the second-order election. In the 30 years and six more sets of European Parliament elections since the publication of their work, the concept has become the dominant one in any academic discussion of European elections. In this article we review that work in order to assess the continuing value of the second-order national election concept today, and to consider some of the more fruitful areas for research which might build on the advance made by Reif and Schmitt. While the concept has proven useful in studies of a range of elections beyond just those for the European Parliament, including those for regional and local assemblies as well as referendums, this review will concentrate solely on EP elections. Concluding that Reif and Schmitt’s characterisation remains broadly valid today, the article allows that while this does not mean there is necessarily a democratic deficit within the EU, there may be changes that could be made to encourage a more effective electoral process.

The aggregating function of political parties in EU decision-making

by: Christopher J. Lord

This Living Review uses concepts of aggregation to analyse what we do and do not know about the contribution of political parties to the politics and democratic performance of the European Union. It suggests that present representative structures are better at aggregating ‘choices of policies’ than ‘choices of leaders’. Much more, however, needs to be done to analyse the causal contribution of party actors to those patterns of aggregation, and to understand why European Union parties do not develop further where aggregation seems to be deficient in the EU arena.

The European Court of Justice and the judicialization of EU governance

by: Alec Stone Sweet

This Living Reviews article evaluates the most important strains of social science research on the impact of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on integration, EU-level policymaking, and national legal orders. Section 2 defines the concepts of judicialization and governance, and discusses how they are related. As the article demonstrates, the “constitutionalization of the EU,” and its effect on EU governance, is one of the most complex and dramatic examples of judicialization in world history. Section 3 discusses the institutional determinants of judicial authority in the EU in light of delegation theory. The European Court, a Trustee of the Treaty system rather than a simple Agent of the Member States, operates in an unusually broad zone of discretion, a situation the Court has exploited in its efforts to enhance the effectiveness of EU law. Section 4 focuses on the extraordinary impact of the European Court of Justice, and of the legal system it manages, on the overall course of market and political integration. Section 5 provides an overview of the process through which the ECJ’s case law – its jurisprudence – influences the decision-making of non-judicial EU organs and officials. Section 6 considers the role of the ECJ and the national courts in monitoring and enforcing Member State compliance with EU law, a task that has provoked a steady Europeanization of national law and policymaking.

The EU’s competences: The ‘vertical’ perspective on the multilevel system

by: Arthur Benz and Christina Zimmer

From the outset, European integration was about the transfer of powers from the national to the European level, which evolved as explicit bargaining among governments or as an incremental drift. This process was reframed with the competence issue entering the agenda of constitutional policy. It now concerns the shape of the European multilevel polity as a whole, in particular the way in which powers are allocated, delimited and linked between the different levels. This Living Review article summarises research on the relations between the EU and the national and sub-national levels of the member states, in particular on the evolution and division of competences in a multilevel political system. It provides an overview on normative reasonings on an appropriate allocation of competences, empirical theories explaining effective structures of powers and empirical research.

The article is structured as follows: First, normative theories of a European federation are discussed. Section 2 deals with legal and political concepts of federalism and presents approaches of the economic theory of federalism in the context of the European polity. These normative considerations conclude with a discussion of the subsidiarity principle and the constitutional allocation of competences in the European Treaties. Section 3 covers the empirical issue of how to explain the actual allocation of competences (scope and type) between levels. Integration theories are presented here in so far as they explain the transfer of competence from the national to the European level or the limits of this centralistic dynamics.

Normative and empirical theories indeed provide some general guidelines for evaluation and explanations of the evolution of competences in the EU, but they both contradict the assumption of a separation of power. The article therefore concludes that politics and policy-making in the EU have to be regarded as multilevel governance (Section 4). The main theoretical approaches and results from empirical research on European multilevel governance are summarised before we sketch suggestions for further discussion and research in the field (Section 5).

Europeanization beyond Europe

by: Frank Schimmelfennig

This article reviews the literature on Europeanization beyond the group of EU member, “quasi-member” and applicant states. It uses the analysis of Europeanization in applicant states as a theoretical starting point to ask if, how and under which conditions we can expect domestic effects of European integration beyond Europe. Focusing on Europeanization effects in the areas of regionalism, democracy and human rights, and the literature on the European Neighborhood Policy in particular, the article collects findings on the strategies and instruments as well as the impact and effectiveness of the EU. The general conclusion to be drawn from the theoretical and empirical literature reviewed is one of low consistency and impact.

EU governance and European identity

by: Viktoria Kaina and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski

This Living Review presents an overview of the research on European identity in the context of EU governance by focussing on central debates in the political science literature. It departs from the problems of disagreement between European citizens and their elites as well as the lack of a European demos. Against this background, the article discusses the functions of collective identity including the legitimation function and solution of collective dilemmas. Here, two perspectives pertaining to these functions are depicted: first, the issue of European public space and second, the integrative workings of European citizenship. Next, the article explores the conceptual and methodological problems of the research on European collective identity. In particular, it focuses on the conceptual ambiguity of the collective identity term and problems of operationalization and measurement. Following this, the article discusses the literature on identity technologies of the EU and identifies the shortcomings of identity technologies with regard to EU governance.

Europeanization and political parties

by: Robert Ladrech

This Living Review makes the case for the study of Europeanization and political parties as related but distinct from the study of political parties and European integration. It then presents the Europeanization approach to parties, noting that some of the components in this approach developed to study policy and institutional change may not lend themselves so well to the study of national parties. This argument distinguishes between direct and indirect effects of European Union influence on parties. Next, it briefly discusses the application of party Europeanization research to post-communist parties. This is followed by a discussion of proposed normative consequences of party Europeanization. Finally, suggestions for further research focuses on the need for refining the analytic framework in order to better identify the causal mechanisms specific to party Europeanization.