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Four implications of the Covid-19 pandemic for the EU’s asylum and migration policy
No full textThe outbreak of Covid-19 has disrupted all strands of EU policy-making. Discussions about the EU’s immediate response to the pandemic focus predominantly on the bloc’s economic recovery. However, mitigating its fallout in other branches of EU policy is equally necessary. The Union’s area of free movements is among the policies most tangibly affected by the pandemic. While national border closures and regional lockdowns impaired EU citizens’ ability to travel, they also had substantial consequences for migrants and asylum seekers
A Decade of EU Law in the Courts of Scotland and Ireland: National Legal Systems Compared
No full textThis article is the first to undertake a comparative statistical study examining the application and trends in European Union ('EU') law before the Scottish and Irish courts over a ten year period from 2009 – 2018. The paper poses the question, how does European integration impact on the domestic legal systems of EU Member States due to the increasing volume, and significance, of cases where EU law is raised and applied within domestic legal systems? It highlights similarities and differences between the two jurisdictions and the fields of law where EU law has been most prominent. The research, focussing on civil law matters, is of particular relevance in light of Brexit. It highlights the potential difficulties implicit in attempting to unpick over 40 years of assimilation of EU law and principles into Scots law and lays the groundwork for a further comparative study after another 10 years on the extent of the impact of Brexit in Scotland and Ireland
Juncker's Curse? Identity, Interest, and Public Support for the Integration of Core State Powers†
No full textAbstract
In this study we analysed the patterns and covariates of public support for the European integration of core state powers based on an original new survey. We found considerable variation across integration instruments, member states and policy issues. Horizontal transfers are supported more than vertical capacity building; member states from the EU's South‐East are more supportive than states from the North‐West; and support increases from debt relief to unemployment assistance, sharing the burdens of refugees, and military defence to disaster aid. Identity is a strong and fairly consistent predictor for individual variations in support. The association with respondents’ interest is less consistent, but can be quite strong with respect to specific policy issues such as debt and unemployment. Overall, support for the integration of core state powers is higher and more variable than expected. This suggests there is considerable room for political agency rather than a general constraining dissensus
Fast Data for Faster Decision-making: The Utility of High-frequency Economic Indicators
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic is posing unique challenges to policymakers across the globe, necessitating efficient action in short timeframes. During such crises, having the right data at the right time is crucial to making informed policy decisions. Traditional economic indicators can be inadequate owing to issues of timeliness, granularity, and difficulty in collection. There is a need therefore for higher-frequency and more granular data to track economic activities. These “alternative” or “proxy” high-frequency indicators could help assess the economic impact triggered by COVID-19, shape new economic policies, and understand the road to recovery. This brief argues for the creation of a publicly accessible, multi-sectoral dashboard based on sectoral, high-frequency indicators
B. National courts Making sense of the “incomprehensible”: The PSPP Judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court
No full textProcedural vs substantive accountability in EMU governance: between payoffs and trade-offs
No full texthis article introduces a new normative framework for analysing accountability in the European Union’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The framework is anchored in four normative ‘goods’ that accountability is supposed to ensure: openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness. All of these can be achieved in a procedural or substantive way, depending on whether actors are held accountable for the quality of their decision-making processes or for the actual merit of their decisions. Transposed to EMU, this conceptualisation shows both the payoffs and trade-offs of prioritising procedural accountability. Using different examples across EMU governance, the article illustrates how current mechanisms of political, legal, and administrative accountability predominantly evaluate the procedures followed by EU institutions when performing their tasks. While such an approach can bring clarity, predictability, and autonomy for the actors involved, it distracts attention from the substantive assessment of EMU decisions. The article contributes to the EMU accountability literature by going beyond principal-agent expectations of democratic control rooted in the nation-state or legal debates about principles for accountable behaviour found in EU Treaties. The EMU, and the EU more broadly, need a different perspective on accountability focused on generally-applicable standards for holding power to account
The Future of the European Budget. What does the Commission's White Paper mean for EU Finances?
No full textIn its recent White Paper, the European Commission describes scenarios for the future of European integration and imagines what the EU could look like by 2025. As a contribution to the ongoing debate, this paper outlines what the different scenarios might mean for the EU budget
Country Size and State Performance: How Size Affects Politics, Administration and Governance
No full textThis dissertation addresses the question how the size of a country affects the performance of ist political and administrative system. It advances the literature on small states by explicitly theorizing large states and empirically comparing countries of different sizes. Country size, operationalized as population size, is expected to be related to three clusters of country characteristics: First, a perception of vulnerability in small states vs. a lack of awareness for external threats in large states; second, social homogeneity and proximity in small states vs. heterogeneity and distance in large states; third, institutional centralization and concentration of power in small states vs. specialization and de-centralization in large states. The effect of country size and these three characteristic features on different aspects of procedural state performance is analyzed in three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 develops the argument that small country size favors the stability of political regimes, namely authoritarian monarchies. It iterates between theoretical reflections and the empirical analysis of different data: statistical data on population size and monarchic regime durability between 1946 and 2008; two most similar comparative cases of monarchic regimes, Egypt and Jordan; and supposedly deviant cases. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of population size on the effectiveness of national bureaucracies and expects a trade-off between economies and diseconomies of scale. It estimates multivariate OLS regression models and within-between random effects models for more than 150 countries. The analysis supports the hypothesized inverse U-shaped relation and finds that administrative effectiveness is highest, ceteris paribus, at medium levels of population size. Chapter 4 consists of a comparative case study of Germany and Luxembourg and investigates whether country size affected how the two states prepared for and reacted to the 2015 migration crisis. The analysis builds on newspaper articles and 20 expert interviews. It shows that Luxembourg’s small size favored identities and structures that allowed early crisis recognition and preparation as well as swift communication and coordination, whereas Germany’s large size led to attention biases that inhibited a quick reaction. In sum, the findings show that country size affects several aspects of state performance, which has important normative and practical implications
The Quality of Government and Public Administration
No full textIn 1999, Evans and Rauch showed a strong association between government effectiveness (quality of government)—particularly the presence of a Weberian-like bureaucracy, selected and promoted on merit alone and largely autonomous from private interests—and economic growth. In 1997 and the aftermath of the Washington Consensus controversial reforms the World Bank promoted this finding in its influential World Development Report 1997 as part of its broader paradigm on “institutional quality.” Twenty years of investment in state capacity followed, by means of foreign assistance supporting the quality of public administration as a prerequisite to development. However, most reviews found the results well under expectations. This is hardly surprising, seeing that Max Weber, credited as the first promoter of the importance of bureaucracy as both the end result and the tool of government rationalization in modern times, never took for granted the autonomy of the state apparatus from private interest. He clearly stated that the power using the apparatus is the one steering the bureaucracy itself. In fact, a review of empirical evidence shows that the quality of public administration is endogenous to the quality of government more broadly and therefore can hardly be a solution in problematic contexts. The autonomy of the state from private interest is one of the most difficult objectives to accomplish in the evolution of a state, and few states have managed in contemporary times to match the achievements of Denmark or Switzerland in the 19th century. Two countries, Estonia and Georgia, are exceptional in this regard, but their success argues for the primacy of politics rather than of administration