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Scholarly interest in EU financial regulation and economic governance has increased sharply over the last decade, but the literature on their politics remains fragmented. We present a scoping literature review which systematically locates and aggregates academic articles on their politics in ISI-ranked journals between 1999 and 2016. We identify lacunas in this literature by mapping its strands onto the EU political system. We then present a system-level research agenda that focuses on the cycles of depoliticization and politicization that strongly characterize the politics in these areas. Future research must pay careful attention to the conditions, mechanisms and, especially the venues that (dis)allow the linkage of societal politicization to EU-level politics. This approach is deeply rooted in the specifics of the politics of these policy areas, but also draws on the strengths of research in these areas to increase its relevance for broader debates on the future of the EU itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the European Commission has followed an expert-based depoliticized route to gain attention for policy issues and the credibility to deal with them. Given growing politicization, we ask whether the Commission might increasingly seek citizens’ views and whether there is patterned variation. We provide the first mapping of special Eurobarometers, the massive instrument for issue-specific public opinion. We found a steep increase and a curvilinear pattern: public opinion is rarely invited in areas of exclusive European Union competencies and exclusive national competencies. Most special Eurobarometers focus on shared competencies. Citizens are almost never asked about expenditure programmes and never on immigration. There is large variation across the Directorates General, which is only weakly related to the amount of planned legislation and the number of expert committees. Business-oriented Directorates General are much less likely to seek public opinion. These results open up promising avenues for research on agenda-setting strategies at times of politicization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]