Suchergebnisse

National identification strength is a key Euroscepticism driver. We examine how politicians' framing of immigration policies increases the salience of different national identity representations and its relationship with support for the European Union (EU) in a two-waves between-subject survey-experiment using French and German samples. As predicted, exposure to assimilation frames (directly for the French sample or via frame perception for both samples) increased the salience of ethnocultural national identity representations. Additionally, as hypothesised, higher ethnocultural representations salience following assimilation frames exposure was related to higher Euroscepticism. However, feeling emotionally attached to the EU reduced this negative impact of ethnocultural national identity representations on EU attitudes. We discuss the role of ethnocultural nationalism in Euroscepticism and the importance of fostering stronger emotional ties to the EU.

The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is the start of a new relationship between the UK and the European Union (EU). As the consequences of Brexit unfold, there will be pressure to change the TCA, either in a "softer" or "harder" direction. To determine the potential medium-term direction of the EU–UK relationship, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment with a sample of British voters, where we asked them to choose between different hypothetical package deals. When faced with such choices, British citizens overall mostly support a softer relationship in which the UK applies EU regulatory standards in return for greater access to the single market. However, Leave voters most often support a much harder trade-off of full regulatory sovereignty but continued restrictions on UK exports.

What characterizes European Union soft law and what are its implications for the EU multilevel system? What is the proportion of hard and soft law in EU policy? Which types of soft law act are adopted in different policy sectors? This article introduces the conceptual and analytical framework that encompasses the EfSoLaw dataset and explains its methodology, advantages, and limitations. This dataset unites information on thousands of EU hard and soft law acts from seven different policy sectors, drawn from over fifteen years (2004–2019) and from various sources (EUR-Lex, DGs, agencies). We present implementation options of the dataset making it exploitable for other scholars and we propose hypotheses to explain the variation in the adoption of soft law in different policy sectors.

Supranational bureaucracies are often promoted as a solution to collective action problems. In the European Union context, investing the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy with new agenda-setting powers was expected to improve the coherence, continuity and efficiency of foreign policy-making. Relying on novel fine-grained and comprehensive data about the content and duration of working party meetings, the study maps and analyses the allocation of political attention to different foreign policy issues between 2001 and 2014. The results show that the empowerment of the High Representative by the Lisbon Treaty had little immediate effect on the Council's foreign policy agenda. However, the study also indicates that this result might be due to a lack of capability and ambition rather than weak institutional prerogatives.

The United Kingdom's 2016 'Brexit' referendum vote to leave the European Union (EU) raised concerns that other countries would follow suit. This article examines how arguments about EU membership related to economic, cultural, political, and security and peace issues could influence how citizens would vote in EU membership referendums. Our two-wave survey experiment on a random sample of the German population and difference-in-differences analysis revealed that only fears of being outvoted in EU decision-making swayed German voters' attitudes about EU membership, particularly voters with weaker EU support, little EU knowledge and low levels of political engagement. We therefore conclude that concerns about sovereignty loss can be drivers of Euroscepticism even in a country that has vast influence over EU decisions.

What role does the rotating Council Presidency maintain a decade after Lisbon? This article argues that, regardless of institutional changes, the rotating Presidency still shapes the Council agenda to a large extent. Based on an original hand-coded dataset of rotating Presidency programmes between 1997 and 2017, I show that some policies are 'stickier' on the Council agenda, while the others exhibit significant changes in salience over time. Since the magnitude of these shifts varies from Presidency to Presidency, the analysis focuses on domestic political factors and the country positioning vis-à-vis the European Union to determine their relationship with agenda volatility. By means of a panel model, the examination demonstrates that the government issue salience can best explain the levels of issue salience in the Presidency programmes.

Research shows that affective style (i.e. our individual ways of responding to emotions) matters for social behaviour. This article explores how affective style, as a new key predictor, explains attitudes towards the European Union, encompassing the feeling of internal efficacy towards the EU and trust in the EU. The study relies on survey data from Denmark (2014). The article concludes that the affective styles of tolerating, concealing and adjusting all significantly predict EU attitudes, albeit in different ways. Adjusting is positively associated with EU attitudes, while tolerating and concealing are negatively related to EU attitudes. Mediation analysis shows that most of personality's effect is not mediated by affective style. Hence, most of the effect of affective style is not merely a transmission of prior personality effect.

Positive assessments of what entry to the European Union (EU) meant for Poland and for Poles increased after the 2003 vote to join and dramatically so after accession. Analysis of panel data from 2003 and 2008 shows the increase in positive assessments is related to the size of EU transfers and to increases in personal income, particularly for assessments of personal benefits. The attitude changes are also related to variables associated with individuals mostly likely to benefit from greater access to the larger Europe. The positive EU attitudes on both dimensions are related to votes for the pro-EU party that came into office in the 2007 election. In this way, the benefits from entry 'bought' more favorable attitudes and a more favorable government for the EU.

The analysis of interest group influence is crucial in order to explain policy outcomes and to assess the democratic legitimacy of the European Union. However, owing to methodological difficulties in operationalizing influence, only few have studied it. This article therefore proposes a new approach to the measurement of influence, drawing on quantitative text analysis. By comparing interest groups' policy positions with the final policy output, one can draw conclusions about the winners and losers of the decision-making process. In order to examine the applicability of text analysis, a case study is presented comparing hand-coding, WORDSCORES and Wordfish. The results correlate highly and text analysis proves to be a powerful tool to measure interest groups' policy positions, paving the way for the large-scale analysis of interest group influence.

This article analyses the effect of conflict in the Council of the European Union (EU) on delays in the transposition of EU directives. Based on enforcement and management theories, we predict that conflict in the Council speeds up the transposition process. In addition, we control for the instigation of infringement procedures by the Commission and expect a weaker effect of conflict in cases where the Commission disagrees with a directive and if directives grant more discretion to member states. These hypotheses are tested using two indicators of conflict: heterogeneity and polarization. Cox regression analysis is applied with time-dependent effects and with a shared frailty to control for the multilevel structure of the data. The analyses show that, over time, conflict has an increasing negative effect on delays.

This article examines whether data on the voting patterns in the Council of Ministers lend support to the hypotheses that can be derived from some recent rational choice models of decision-making in the European Union. The findings show major discrepancies between the predictions of these spatial models and the empirical observations. Unanimous decision-making is much more frequent than one would expect from these influential contributions. Our empirical evaluation of the roll call patterns between 1994 and 1998 reveals furthermore that the probability of voting against the Council majority varies greatly between the Council members. Large countries are significantly more inclined to vote `no' than are their smaller counterparts. The multidimensional scaling analysis of voting coalitions indicates a north-south division in the Council.

Quantitative text analysis constitutes a promising new method that allows for measuring the policy positions and the lobbying success of interest groups by analyzing their submissions to legislative consultations ( Klüver, 2009 ). The use of quantitative text analysis allowed me to present a novel and unique research design which was the largest in scope at the time and resulted in important new insights regarding the determinants of lobbying success ( Klüver, 2009 , 2011 , 2013 ). In their recent article, Bunea and Ibenskas (2015) however question the usefulness of quantitative text analysis for studying interest groups and discuss several issues which in their view constitute important disadvantages of the technique. In this article I carefully discuss each of their arguments and show that none of their objections actually prevents scholars from successfully using quantitative text analysis to study interest groups in the European Union and beyond.

A common argument against flexible integration as a solution to increased preference heterogeneity is that a likely consequence for those member states opting out of the enhanced cooperation is a loss of status and influence generally in the European Union (EU). It has been argued, for example, that the decisions by Denmark, Sweden and the UK not to join the Euro is considered to be free-riding, which leads to a bad reputation and exclusion from informal networks. We test this proposed free-rider effect by comparing the network capital of Euro-outsiders with insiders in the Council of the EU, using survey data of more than 600 member state representatives. The findings speak strongly against the free-rider hypothesis, as the Euro-outsiders are highly ranked in terms of network capital.