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Since 2016, the EU has widely been considered to be in a state of 'polycrisis', where simultaneous, mutually reinforcing challenges threaten the Union's cohesion and legitimacy. Such polycrises may fracture Europe's political space, creating cross-cutting 'polycleavages' that polarise member states and their citizens asymmetrically, thereby constraining the EU's capacity to forge effective compromises on key policy issues. In so doing, they exacerbate the risk of the EU's falling into a multi-level 'politics trap', where negative politicisation of European issues inhibits national leaders from agreeing ambitious solutions in intergovernmental negotiations, while the ensuing deadlock in turn saps the Union's output-based legitimacy and fuels a Eurosceptic 'constraining dissensus'. In this introductory article, we develop an analytical framework elaborating the concepts of polycrises, polycleavages, and politics traps, which we then use to present and interpret the main findings of the contributions to this collection, focused on the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The most important takeaway from the contributions to this collection is that – consistent with our framework – the EU has clearly proved more resilient to the potential negative consequences of politicisation than many commentators had expected at the beginning of this long polycrisis decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced welfare states are under pressure to customize services, promptly enough to prevent a cascade of harms. With these goals, the Netherlands in 2015 decentralized social care services to municipalities, and within municipalities to neighborhood teams in continuing contact with clients. The overall results have been disappointing. But the experience of Utrecht, the Netherlands' fourth-largest city, has been strikingly different. By using hard-to-resolve cases to signal conflicts in rules, obstructive jurisdictional boundaries, and the shortcomings of private service providers, Utrecht is learning to customize and speed delivery of social care through incremental steps. This article explains how Utrecht's success addresses apparently intractable limits to the adaptability of the rule-bound welfare state, such as the problem of low-level discretion or street-level bureaucracy and the division of services into silos, in the process bridging, and perhaps effacing, the gap between the Habermasian life world and the system world of formal rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do governance reforms affect public acceptance of regulatory decisions, and if so, how? We tackled this critical but under‐studied question through a pair of linked survey experiments on public attitudes toward the reform of European Union (EU) pesticides regulation among a representative sample of the adult population in six EU member states. We tested the expectation that citizens are more likely to accept a regulatory decision that runs counter to their prior policy preferences if it is taken under a procedure they support. We first conducted a conjoint experiment to study whether the specific design of decision‐making procedures impacts public support for EU pesticide regulation. In a second linked experiment, we asked respondents whether farmers should be allowed to use glyphosate, the best known and most controversial pesticide. We then asked respondents if they would accept an authorization decision on glyphosate contrary to their prior expressed preference if it were taken under a decision‐making procedure they supported. The results demonstrate that a regulatory decision‐making procedure respondents support increases their willingness to accept a hypothetical authorization decision contrary to their prior expressed preference. Contrary to the findings of previous research, our study thus provides strong evidence that governance reforms supported by citizens can enhance acceptance of controversial regulatory decisions, even on politicized issues such as pesticides authorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How far and under what conditions may experimentalist governance be an efficient and legitimate means of responding to diversity among EU member states, in comparison to both conventional uniform regulation and differentiated integration? By comparing two major domains where the challenge of integrating national diversity has arisen prominently, electricity and banking, we find that under conditions of high interdependence and high uncertainty, diachronic experimentalism may be a necessary condition for synchronic uniformity. Uniform rules can be accepted as efficient and legitimate by member states, provided that they are regularly revised based on implementation experience through deliberative review processes in which national officials themselves participate. Our findings on EU banking regulation further suggest that experimentalist governance and differentiated integration may also be complementary, but asymmetrically so, in that the latter depends on the former to accommodate diversity within and across member states, but not vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2007.00782.x Byline: KENNETH ARMSTRONG (1), IAIN BEGG (2), JONATHAN ZEITLIN (3) Author Affiliation: (1)Queen Mary, University of London (2)London School of Economics (3)University of Wisconsin-Madison Article note: Kenneth Armstrong, School of Law, Queen Mary, College University of London, London E1 4NS, UK, email k.a.armstrong@qmul.ac.uk, Iain Begg, European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, email iain.begg@lse.ac.uk, Jonathan Zeitlin, Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1225 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA, email jzeitlin@wisc.edu