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AbstractRecent research indicates that bottom‐up EU politicization shapes top‐down EU policy enforcement, yet leaves open questions on the pervasiveness of these effects in policy areas that are depoliticized by design. This contribution asks how societal EU politicization shaped the enforcement of the Stability and Growth Pact up until its COVID‐19‐induced suspension. It employs causal process‐tracing to analyse fiscal rule enforcement under varying levels and constellations of EU politicization. Results indicate that enforcement by the European Commission is shaped both by mandate and exogenous pressures created by politicization and the reputational concerns they induce. Moreover, politicization has gradually pushed the Commission towards increasingly flexible enforcement of EU fiscal rules. These conclusions are relevant because they show that politicization permeates even the most depoliticized areas of EU policy. Additionally, they suggest that the SGP's COVID‐19‐induced suspension can be understood as a continuation of existing enforcement strategies.

Abstract
Organizational reputation theory suggests reputational threats can induce public organizations to change their behavior. However, it offers few insights into how organizations in contexts of high audience heterogeneity prioritize between conflicting threats, or how they ensure reputation-seeking signals reach their intended audiences. This article seeks to close these knowledge gaps. It expects organizational threat prioritization to be shaped by the centrality of the threat to the organization's distinct reputation, and by differences in audiences' capacity to put pressure on the organization through mobilization. Moreover, it argues that public organizations strategically vary the observability and costliness of outgoing reputation-seeking signals in response to shifts in the balance of reputational threats they face. It finds support for these expectations in the context of the European Commission, a supranational organization operating in a context of high audience heterogeneity and severe reputational threats. The empirical analysis is based on the Bayesian longitudinal modeling and simulation of Commission decision-making and applies a novel dataset on fiscal rule enforcement in the European Union (EU). The findings have important implications for organizational reputation theory and call for a renewed focus on the mechanisms underlying audience-induced organizational behavior.

Recent research shows that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and intersex (LGBTI) rights have become a core value of the European Union. Concurrently, hostility towards LGBTI rights is increasing across the European Union, including through anti-gender mobilisations, which reject 'gender ideology'. This study employs sequential discourse analyses to discover: (1) the regional specificities in anti-gender discourse; and (2) whether the European Commission is discursively responsive to these differences. We find that the European Commission adapts its LGBTI discourse to actual and expected regional specificities, both in the issues discussed and in the frames employed. These conclusions are relevant because they show that European Union discourse on LGBTI rights is not homogeneous and may be strategically adapted to regional contexts, which has implications for the purported universal protection of LGBTI rights in the European Union. Additionally, these findings shed light on the important but neglected role that social mobilisations play in sensitising European Union actors to regional variation in political attitudes and values.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are a primary tool for conserving marine biodiversity. The literature presents a scattered picture regarding the extent to which co-management can be considered valuable. In this study we examine, what conditions are for co-management to make a contribution to conserving marine ecosystems (e.g., stopping coral bleaching and safeguarding fish populations). By combining data on MPA management practices with a novel source of global biodata collected by citizens (ReefCheck), we demonstrate that if co-management is part of a formal governmental strategy, coral reefs show up to 86% fewer bleached colonies and up to 12.2 times larger fish populations than co-managed MPAs lacking formalized governmental support.

Does domestic contestation of European Union legitimacy affect the behaviour of the European Commission as an economic and fiscal supervisor? We draw on theories of bureaucratic responsiveness and employ multilevel and topic modelling to examine the extent to which the politicisation of European integration affects the outputs of the European Semester: the Country-Specific Recommendations. We develop two competing sets of hypotheses and test these on an original large-N data set on Commission behaviour with observations covering the period 2011–2017. We detect a twofold effect on the Commission's recommendations: member states that experience greater politicisation receive recommendations that are larger in scope but whose substance is less oriented towards social investment. We argue that this effect is best explained as an outcome of the Commission's institutional risk management strategy of regulatory 'entrenchment'. The supranational agent issues additional recommendations while simultaneously entrenching on a stronger mandate substantively, which allows it to maintain its regulatory reputation and signal regulatory resolve to observing audiences.

Does domestic contestation of European Union legitimacy affect the behaviour of the European Commission as an economic and fiscal supervisor? We draw on theories of bureaucratic responsiveness and employ multilevel and topic modelling to examine the extent to which the politicisation of European integration affects the outputs of the European Semester: the Country-Specific Recommendations. We develop two competing sets of hypotheses and test these on an original large-N data set on Commission behaviour with observations covering the period 2011–2017. We detect a twofold effect on the Commission's recommendations: member states that experience greater politicisation receive recommendations that are larger in scope but whose substance is less oriented towards social investment. We argue that this effect is best explained as an outcome of the Commission's institutional risk management strategy of regulatory 'entrenchment'. The supranational agent issues additional recommendations while simultaneously entrenching on a stronger mandate substantively, which allows it to maintain its regulatory reputation and signal regulatory resolve to observing audiences.

To mitigate the enormous and asymmetric economic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU has adopted an unprecedented €750 billion fiscal transfer programme, financed by joint member state liabilities. The highly contested decision pitted 'frugal' northern member states against 'profligate' southern member states. However, do citizens from northern countries view EU transfers as unfavourably as their governmental positions suggest? This article focuses on the crucial case of the Netherlands, whose government has become the assertive leader of the 'frugal' coalition. We test COVID-19 specific explanations based on a large-scale survey conducted at the height of the pandemic. Our analysis suggests that citizens who experience the non-material health and social effects of the pandemic more directly are more supportive of fiscal transfers than those to whom the pandemic is more abstract, whereas those who experience negative financial effects and those who believe that COVID-19 is a conspiracy are less supportive.

Political innovations aim to strengthen democracy but few connect well to the institutionalized democratic context. This paper explores how political innovations can be successfully embedded in existing democratic systems. It builds upon both the literature on political innovation and on new democratic arrangements and studies a practice of aleatoric democracy – using the lottery instead of elections to select representatives – in the Dutch City of Utrecht. The case study shows how the idealist logic of improving democracy and the realist logic of realizing specific political goals intertwine to get the political innovation accepted by the institutionalized democratic system.