Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe delegation of governance tasks to third parties is generally assumed to help governments to avoid blame once policies become contested. International organizations, including the European Union (EU), are considered particularly opportune in this regard. The literature lacks assessments of the blame avoidance effects of delegation, let alone of the effects of different delegation designs. To address this gap in the literature, we study public blame attributions in the media coverage of two contested EU policies during the financial crisis and the migration crisis. We show that the blame avoidance effect of delegation depends on the delegation design: When agents are independent (dependent) of government control, we observe lower (higher) shares of public blame attributions targeting the government (blame shifting effect), and when agents are external (internal) to the government apparatus, overall public blame attributions for a contested policy will be less (more) frequent (blame obfuscation effect). Our findings yield important normative implications for how to maintain governments' accountability once they have delegated governance tasks to third parties.

Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that the core institutions of the Liberal International Order (LIO) have in recent years been subject to increasingly intense contestation. There is less agreement on the sources of this contestation. This introductory paper to the special forum on "contestation in a world of liberal orders" makes two main contributions. First, the paper develops a theory of endogenous order contestation. It conceptualizes the LIO as a system of different types of suborders, which vary in the extent to which they reflect and promote liberal values and in the extent to which they are legally institutionalized. The paper explains how these different suborders generate their own types of order contestation. More liberally embedded and institutionalized suborders endogenously generate more intense and order-challenging contestation, while less liberal and less institutionalized orders are amenable to more modest and order-consistent contestation. Second, this paper identifies the specific endogenous mechanisms through which contestation shifts from order-consistent to order-challenging in especially these more liberally embedded and institutionalized suborders. It argues that not only liberal resistance to reform gives rise to order-challenging contestation, but even liberal accommodation and responsiveness can ultimately paralyze and ossify LIO institutions, which in turn lose legitimacy, frustrate would-be reformers, and drive them to order-challenging contestation. The different contributions to this special issue examine our core propositions across a range of economic, security, and social–political LIO suborders.

This paper conceptualizes the European Union (EU) as a system of differentiated integration characterized by both variation in levels of centralization (vertical differentiation) and variation in territorial extension (horizontal differentiation) across policy areas. Differentiation has been a concomitant of deepening and widening and has increased and consolidated as the EU's powers, policy scope, and membership have grown. Turning to explanation, the paper attributes the pattern of differentiated integration in the EU to the interaction of interdependence and politicization. Differentiation among the member states (internal differentiation) results from supranational integration under conditions of high interdependence and politicization. By contrast, external differentiation (the selective policy integration of non-member states) occurs in highly interdependent but weakly politicized policy areas. These constellations are illustrated in case studies of differentiation in the internal market, monetary union, and defence.