Journal of Common Market Studies

Publisher:: Wiley
Publication date:: 2024-07-08

ISBN:: 1468-5965

Issue Number

No. 62-1, January 2024

Latest documents

Working with the EU: How Discourses Shape the Application of EU State Aid Rules
State aid rules are an important part of the European Union's (EU) competition policy that aims to ensure a fair competition in the common market. These rules directly affect national and sub‐national governments of member states, which are sometimes confronted with different and opposing claims about what to do. The question is how implementing civil servants interpret and resolve these claims in practice. In this article, discourse analysis is applied to identify how civil servants apply and interpret state aid rules based on empirical research in the Netherlands. The main finding is that, even within the existing regulatory framework of one member state, the application of state aid rules is understood differently based on the discourses we identified. We describe the content, dissemination amongst civil servants and the relationship of these discourses with compliance. The article shows that discourses matter and help to understand how state aid rules are applied.
Awakening the Europhile Giant: EU Issue Voting in Western and Central‐Eastern Europe
Many works have analysed EU issue voting, showing that European integration affects electoral preferences. This article posits that EU issues have increasingly influenced party preferences, boosting their effects and, in particular, on Europhile parties. Several punctuation points – authority transfer towards the EU, party politicisation efforts and a multiple set of crises – have occurred, with EU issues cumulating effects on voting preferences. Europhile parties may have strategically responded on this issue dimension, seizing on more favourable public orientations and, thus, prompting an electoral mobilisation of their constituents. By exploring the EU issue voting patterns in 25 Western and Central‐Eastern European countries between 2014 and 2019, the article presents two core findings, corroborating its expectations. It demonstrates that EU issues have increasingly affected electoral preferences, as well as enhancing their effects amongst the Europhile party voters.
Issue Information
No abstract is available for this article.
From Market Liberalism to Public Intervention: Digital Sovereignty and Changing European Union Digital Single Market Governance
Against the backdrop of the ever‐increasing importance of digital services, the European Union (EU) is promoting deepening of its digital single market (DSM). Whilst the single market has often been portrayed as the Trojan horse of neoliberalism, recent rhetoric on digital sovereignty indicates a desire for more control over the digital sphere. A historical case study of key elements of the DSM, namely digital services regulation and data protection, shows that EU governance has become less market‐liberal and more public‐interventionist. In response to challenges associated with the digital economy, policy goals have been broadened to include further objectives in addition to competitiveness. Stakeholders and public authorities rather than business actors have become more important in governance processes, and more market‐correcting instruments have been introduced. These reforms have been made by adding more interventionist elements and also by redirecting the role of the European Commission to overseeing very large online platforms.
Comparative Green Advantage: Growth Regimes and Public Investment in Renewable Energy R&D
Many consider research and development (R&D) a crucial pillar of decarbonization, yet few have investigated what actually drives investment. What drives public investment in renewable energy R&D in wealthy democracies? Using OECD data, this research note tests a number of hypotheses from the literature and finds that public investment in renewable energy R&D is most closely associated with growth regimes and their related characteristics. Furthermore, the ‘most invested’ are dynamic services export‐led growth regimes who are deindustrializing and moving towards knowledge‐based sectors like information and communications technology and finance. In short, economies investing the most in renewable energy R&D have the least structurally carbon‐intensive growth regime. As international economic integration locks many countries into specific path‐dependent roles, these findings suggest that there is a comparative advantage to the green transition. It concludes with a discussion of the asymmetric green capacities between core and periphery countries in the European Union.
Two and a Half Tales of Europe: How the European Commission Narrates Peoplehood in Migration and Citizenship Policy
Since 2019, the European Commission has had a vice president for ‘promoting our European way of life’, but whether a European ‘we’ exists at all is disputed. This article investigates whether and how the Commission has constructed this ‘we’ through narratives of peoplehood. Analysing official communications in migration and citizenship policy between 2007 and 2020, it traces three narrative elements: characters, plot and main theme. The article argues, first, that the Commission's narrative of ‘realizing European citizenship’ creates a sense of peoplehood more than its narrative of ‘achieving a comprehensive migration policy’ and, second, that it has largely repeated its citizenship narrative while adapting its migration narrative. The findings suggest that the Commission is a rather subtle narrator of peoplehood and call into question whether it has a clear idea of the ‘we’ whose ‘way of life’ it seeks to promote.
(De‐)politicization Discourse Strategies: The Case of Trade
Examining (de‐)politicization as an actor‐driven phenomenon, this study asks: How and to what extent do actors in the public sphere attempt to (de‐)politicize European Union (EU) policies? (De‐)politicization is understood not only as a process but also as the deliberate framing of debates over EU issues at a domestic level. This paper conceptualizes (de‐)politicization acts in the public sphere and shows how these can be detected empirically through a claim‐level (de‐)politicization index. This approach is applied to a database of evaluations (claims) on EU trade, by EU actors, national executive actors and societal actors, surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement, in the media of six Member States (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, and Denmark). Whilst all kinds of actors may engage in (de‐)politicization, the analysis of the index allows us to determine if a certain category of actors does so to a greater or lesser extent compared with others.
Opting for Opt‐outs? National Identities and Support for a Differentiated EU
An extensive literature investigates individual support for European integration. However, support for differentiated integration has only recently become an important topic of study for public opinion scholars. Previous literature on this issue has not probed how differentiated integration is shaped by exclusively national identities and whether the effect varies by how differentiation has been framed. Using survey data from 2020 to 2021, I show that exclusively national citizens are most likely to support differentiated integration that allows for greater national autonomy and may oppose differentiation whose primary goal is to facilitate further integration. However, I find no clear link between elite framing of differentiated integration and popular support for it. This raises important questions both about what kind of differentiated integration will enjoy public legitimacy and how cues shape support for European Union (EU) differentiation.
Fundamental Change Beneath the Surface: The Supranationalisation of Rule of Law Protection in the European Union
Whereas most studies on the European Union's (EU) responses to the rule of law crisis stress the underenforcement of EU law, this article offers a different perspective. Focusing on the long‐term dynamics concerning rule of law protection, we detect a gradual trend towards supranationalism. The Rule of Law Conditionality mechanism adopted in 2020 is the first instance of ‘effective supranationalism’, that is, a rule of law tool that combines supranational decision‐making procedures with binding and enforceable consequences. To explain this development in an area that has been marked by considerable resistance to efforts to strengthen supranational oversight, we draw on the agent‐centric historical institutionalist approach. Our qualitative study shows that supranationalisation has become possible through two interrelated factors: the joint strategies of community bodies, which have promoted competence transfer to the EU level, and the increasing marginalisation of sovereigntist positions within the Council, given the escalating conflicts with Hungary and Poland.
The Revolving Door and Access to the European Commission: Does the Logic of Influence Prevail?
This article analyses to what extent and under which conditions revolving door practices relate to access to the European Commission (EC). The revolving door hypothesis is analysed by combining two data sources: a dataset with publicly available records about the meetings between interest organizations and senior EC officials and evidence collected through the Comparative Interest Group‐survey (CIG‐survey). It is especially in professionalized organizations, where staff and organizational leadership dominate, that we observe a significant positive relationship between revolving door practices and access. In contrast, the extent to which the membership decides on political positioning and advocacy strategies has no impact on the relationship between revolving door and access. These results show that the revolving door is primarily connected with a logic of influence, implying that revolvers are especially advantageous for professionalized organizations.