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This study analyses how preference heterogeneity across EU member states affects the adoption of soft-law acts over time. On the one hand, high diversity in policy preferences is expected to increase the proportion of soft-law instruments because governments are less likely to agree to binding measures. Conversely, preference heterogeneity could also decrease soft law due to the perceived threat of compliance problems. We test these competing arguments using a dataset on all EU soft-law and hard-law instruments adopted between 1967 and 2019. The results show that preference heterogeneity increases the share of soft EU instruments. However, more past heterogeneity prompts EU legislators to decrease the proportion of softer measures in areas that experience high levels of past non-compliance.

11 juli 2022, Contains fulltext : 284702.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)

EU agencies have become important regulatory venues. Initially established to provide expert advice, many have gained far-reaching decision-making and enforcement powers. This has attracted considerable attention from stakeholders, but the extent of their influence on EU agency conduct has remained a black box. We employ a novel dataset of 203 consultations (2007–2017) containing 26,468 attempts of stakeholders to change proposed regulatory rules by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, as well as the agency’s response. This dataset allows for an original approach to measuring influence by linking influence attempts to rule changes. We found that business interests are far more influential than diffuse public interests. This has important implications for the legitimacy of EU agency stakeholder policies, as they are meant to make EU agencies more broadly accessible. National regulators are also influential in EU agency consultations, pointing to the unacknowledged importance of stakeholder consultations for EU-national regulator interactions.

The European Commission needs to craft a reputation of being legitimate. For this, it articulates to represent the interests of stakeholders such as citizens and businesses. This can be referred to as ‘legitimacy claims’: mentions of stakeholders with the goal of signaling that these form a source of legitimacy. In times of increasing politicization, a key question is whether and how the Commission adjusts its communication strategy. With this thesis, I test whether politicization has an effect on the number of legitimacy claims towards citizens and businesses. Using a quantitative text analysis of Commission press releases between 1997 and 2009, I gathered monthly data on legitimacy claims. I built two time series models (ARIMAX) and included politicization and the orientation of Commissioners as independent variables. Results show that the Commission did not adjust its communication strategy towards citizens and businesses in light of politicization. The share of press releases in a month that quoted Commissioners holding citizen-oriented portfolios did not significantly affect the number of legitimacy claims directed at citizens. These findings suggest that, despite the growing body of literature emphasizing the effects of politicization, legitimacy claim dynamics may be relatively stable over time.

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.

Does domestic contestation of European Union legitimacy affect the behaviour of the European Commission as an economic and fiscal supervisor? We draw on theories of bureaucratic responsiveness and employ multilevel and topic modelling to examine the extent to which the politicisation of European integration affects the outputs of the European Semester: the Country-Specific Recommendations. We develop two competing sets of hypotheses and test these on an original large-N data set on Commission behaviour with observations covering the period 2011–2017. We detect a twofold effect on the Commission's recommendations: member states that experience greater politicisation receive recommendations that are larger in scope but whose substance is less oriented towards social investment. We argue that this effect is best explained as an outcome of the Commission's institutional risk management strategy of regulatory ‘entrenchment’. The supranational agent issues additional recommendations while simultaneously entrenching on a stronger mandate substantively, which allows it to maintain its regulatory reputation and signal regulatory resolve to observing audiences.