While increased decision-making complexity and membership predispose the European Union to protracted negotiations and legislative gridlock, still some legislative proposals are adopted faster than others. What explains this variation? Drawing on models of democratic responsiveness, we argue that politicisation potential – captured by public salience, opinion division, and planned European Union authority expansion – increases legislative duration. To test our expectations, we measure public opinion using Eurobarometer surveys and classify the integration potential of legislative proposals between 2009 and 2019 using semi-supervised machine learning. Our findings indicate that European Union policymakers legislate longer on policies of higher public salience and proposals broadening the European Union authority. These results contribute to research on policymaking responsiveness and efficiency in supranational settings, demonstrating how politicisation affects legislative processes in the European Union.
Do European Union (EU) funds affect voting behavior in local elections? Following the COVID-19 crisis, the EU launched an unprecedented financial effort through the NextGeneration EU program, channeling billions of euros to support reforms and investments across different policy areas in all Member States. Using several empirical designs, including an observational, a Regression Discontinuity Design and a Difference-in-Difference strategy, this article investigates whether these investments influenced electoral outcomes in Spain’s 2023 municipal elections. Despite the scale and policy relevance of the program and the opportunity to claim credit by mayors, we find no evidence that local allocations of recovery funds increased support for incumbent parties. These null results contrast with earlier works from other European funding programs, which have often yielded electoral rewards under favorable conditions, such as high visibility, political alignment, or clear attribution. In Spain, however, the political impact of NextGeneration EU spending appears to be absent, possibly due to the low visibility of projects, the complexity of fund administration, or the lack of clear political ownership. Our findings highlight the limits of top-down economic interventions in generating local political returns and call for a closer examination of the conditions under which supranational spending shapes electoral behavior.
The European Union prioritizes geographic representation of member states when recruiting staff. Many assume a trade-off between expertise and geographic representation, where the former increases capacity and the latter increases legitimacy. However, this article provides evidence that geographic representation can enhance bureaucratic information capacity. Using the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs as a case study, I provide evidence that increasing representation of bureaucrats from a member state is associated with higher accuracy in that state’s economic forecasts. This association decreases as member state representation within the Commission increases. These findings suggest that prioritizing geographic balance in the European Union need not come at the cost of information capacity, and may in fact improve it.
This study examines how European parliamentarians frame artificial intelligence in plenary speech. It also assesses how these frames map onto partisan divisions. Analyzing 666 interventions in the European Parliament (2014–2024), it shows that frames of artificial intelligence follow traditional ideological cleavages, with right-leaning parliamentarians deploying techno-optimistic frames that foreground economic innovation while left-leaning parliamentarians frame the technology through concerns about social risks and employment impacts. Thematic context also shapes framing. When interventions address economic competitiveness, optimistic frames increase significantly across the political spectrum. The findings reveal a cross-partisan consensus in favor of regulating artificial intelligence, regardless of the frames deployed. This suggests that political contestation centers not on the principle of regulatory intervention, but on its modalities and objectives. Emerging technologies are absorbed into existing ideological frameworks while generating zones of strategic convergence when economic and normative considerations align.
This study investigates whether public opinion shapes compliance with European environmental directives. Drawing on an original dataset of subnational infringements from 2005 to 2018 across 319 subnational authorities in 20 member states, the analysis links variation in public opinion to compliance using mixed-effects logistic regression models. The results show that subnational public opinion does not exert an independent effect on the likelihood of infringement. Instead, national environmental attitudes emerge as consistently relevant for subnational compliance, with subnational authorities in member states that are less supportive of environmental protection significantly more likely to infringe European Union legislation. Subnational environmental attitudes matter where national environmental support is weak. These findings demonstrate that responsiveness in multilevel governance is conditional upon the interaction between national and subnational public opinion.
