EUINACTION: Willingness and Capacity for EU Policy Action in Times of Crises: Conflicts, Positions and Outcomes
Lead Research Organisation:
Leiden University
Department Name: UNLISTED
Abstract
The European Union (EU) faces pressing demands to act in major policy areas amid public
contestation of supranational governance. Our interdisciplinary project seeks to explain and facilitate
responsive and effective policy reforms by increasing knowledge about the willingness and capacity for
EU integration in specific policy areas. We study the conditions under which the EU institutions seek to
increase or decrease EU policy competencies, when their positions respond to public demands across and
within member states, and under what conditions each institution manages to assert its position in the
policy-making processes. We further investigate how the institutions’ positions and capacity to steer the
course of European integration across policy areas are reshaped by increased EU politicization and
associated shifts in institutional identities, internal disunity and switch from formal political to informal
technocratic procedures of policy-making. Public opinion surveys, party manifestos and speech data from
European and national parliaments will serve to capture citizen, party and government preferences over
the transfer of competences from the national to the EU level across policy areas. We will then examine
under what conditions and to what extent these preferences determine the positions of EU institutions,
policy proposals and adopted legislation with respect to the level of competence transfer to the EU, using
cutting-edge methods for computational text analysis. These findings will serve to develop
recommendations about innovation in policy and institutional design that can address pressing challenges
and enjoy public acceptance in member states and among their citizens.
contestation of supranational governance. Our interdisciplinary project seeks to explain and facilitate
responsive and effective policy reforms by increasing knowledge about the willingness and capacity for
EU integration in specific policy areas. We study the conditions under which the EU institutions seek to
increase or decrease EU policy competencies, when their positions respond to public demands across and
within member states, and under what conditions each institution manages to assert its position in the
policy-making processes. We further investigate how the institutions’ positions and capacity to steer the
course of European integration across policy areas are reshaped by increased EU politicization and
associated shifts in institutional identities, internal disunity and switch from formal political to informal
technocratic procedures of policy-making. Public opinion surveys, party manifestos and speech data from
European and national parliaments will serve to capture citizen, party and government preferences over
the transfer of competences from the national to the EU level across policy areas. We will then examine
under what conditions and to what extent these preferences determine the positions of EU institutions,
policy proposals and adopted legislation with respect to the level of competence transfer to the EU, using
cutting-edge methods for computational text analysis. These findings will serve to develop
recommendations about innovation in policy and institutional design that can address pressing challenges
and enjoy public acceptance in member states and among their citizens.