In the past decade or so, the text of the EU Treaties has stayed the same, yet their reading has undergone significant changes. The language of anti-formalism has triumphed over formalism, obviating the need for complex political debates and democratic processes inherent to actual Treaty revisions. This method of constitutional reinterpretation was ushered in by the NextGenerationEU and seems now, in the post-Draghi-Report world, the dominant way for the Commission to address its political priorities. This article explores the invisible side of constitutional change by legal engineering. It will examine the place of Treaty respect in the old vocabulary of EU law and discuss how the NGEU drove a wedge into this established vocabulary. The NGEU experiment demonstrates how reinterpretation of core Treaty provisions may provide solutions to immediate functional needs but tends to result in ill-functioning governance models that fail to provide a stable long-term basis for integration. Further, democratic participation, which lacks an established vocabulary in the EU legal language, is easily overlooked. Yet, it is the democratic process that breathes life into constitutional change. A constitution animated by political opportunism and technocratic reinterpretation rather than broader societal evolution is not a living constitution. At best, it is a puppet constitution, at worst, it is dead.

The article examines the European Commission's use of its legal powers over mergers. It discusses and tests two views. One is that the ‘neoliberal’ Commission has ended previous industrial policies of aiding ‘national champion’ firms to grow through mergers and instead pursues a ‘merger‐constraining’ policy of vigorously using its legal powers to block mergers. The other is that the Commission follows an ‘integrationist policy’ of seeking the development of larger European firms to deepen economic integration. It examines Commission decisions under the 1989 EC Merger Regulation between 1990 and 2009. It selects three major sectors that are ‘likely’ for the ‘merger‐constraining’ view – banking, energy and telecommunications – and analyses a dataset of almost 600 Commission decisions and then individual merger cases. It finds that the Commission has approved almost all mergers, including by former ‘national champion’ firms. There have been only two prohibitions over 20 years in the three sectors and the outcome has been the creation of larger European firms through mergers. It explains how the Commission can pursue an integrationist policy through the application of competition processes and criteria. The wider implication is that the Commission can combine competition policy with achieving the ‘industrial policy’ aim of aiding the development of larger European firms.

The complexity of public policies has repeatedly been identified as a key challenge for modern democracies. Yet, we know only very little about the origins of this complexity. Controlling for functional and legal explanations, this article investigates whether complex policies have distinct institutional and political origins. The study builds on the assumption that complex policies are communicated in more complex language and uses textual data from 1771 legislative proposals issued by the European Commission since 1994 to demonstrate that the complexity of public policies is strongly tied to institutional and political costs of policy formulation. Collegial cabinets formulate more complex policies whenever they face more inclusive decision‐making processes and struggle with higher internal preference bias and heterogeneity. The implications of these findings reach far beyond the political system of the European Union and highlight that to a considerable degree, complex policies are the price of inclusive democratic decision making.

This article develops a novel approach for studying the influence of supranational institutions in international cooperation. While earlier research tends to treat member states as a collective yielding influence on supranational institutions, we unpack this collective to explore differentiated supranational influence. To this end, the article makes three contributions. First, it develops a method for measuring differentiated supranational influence that makes it possible to identify which member states give ground when a supranational institution is influential. Second, it theorizes the sources of differentiated supranational influence, arguing that states are more likely to accommodate a supranational institution when they are more dependent on the resources of this institution. Third, it illustrates the usefulness of this approach empirically through an analysis of the influence of the European Commission in European Union bargaining. The analysis suggests that our approach can measure and explain differentiated supranational influence under conditions of both heightened crisis and everyday politics.

In recent years, the debate over the need to address ecological and social concerns has grown substantially. Phenomena such as the Gilets Jaunes in France or the ecological versus social disputes in industrial sites (such as, for example, the ILVA steel plant in Taranto) have constituted a trade-off in terms of potentially conflicting policies, making the understanding of the various underlying preferences very important. Furthermore, growing environmental concerns have challenged more traditional views anchored on the predominance of social and employment concerns. The article, in line with the research questions raised in the introduction of the Symposium, intends to contribute to the above-mentioned debate addressing the following questions: did the European Union take an ‘eco-social’ path? If so, how and why? The article illustrates the growing intertwining of social and environmental policies at the EU level and tries to explain its genesis by focusing on the role of the various actors involved. The main argument is that the European Commission, and in particular the President of the Commission, developed an eco-social agenda in order to obtain further institutional (i.e. internal) and socio-political (i.e. external) legitimation.

This article analyses the ways in which the research management apparatus set up by the European Commission and national-level research foundations contributes to the publication gap of European political science vis-à-vis the United States. I identify four structural problems in the allocation of money to individuals and institutions and derive two main recommendations from them. First, reviewers should be members of a merit-oriented European Academy of Political Science rather than stem from a group of arbitrarily chosen scholars. Second, the European Consortium for Political Research should seriously consider the introduction of individual membership and competitive leadership elections.

The following transcript from an interview with the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso (conducted in July 2007), illustrates how bridge-building between the academic and policy worlds can bring profit to both sides. Barroso discusses his time as a student and teacher of political science at the University of Geneva, Georgetown University, and in his native Portugal, as well as his active membership of the European Consortium for Political Research, and how his academic experience shaped both his world view and political career.

The European Union (EU) has become increasingly visible and contested over the past decades. Several studies have shown that domestic pressure has made the EU's ‘electorally connected’ institutions more responsive. Yet, we still know little about how politicisation has affected the Union's non‐majoritarian institutions. We address this question by focusing on agenda‐setting and ask whether and how domestic politics influences the prioritisation of legislative proposals by the European Commission. We argue that the Commission, as both a policy‐seeker and a survival‐driven bureaucracy, will respond to domestic issue salience and Euroscepticism, at party, mass and electoral level, through targeted performance and through aggregate restraint. Building on new data on the prioritisation of legislative proposals under the ordinary legislative procedure (1999–2019), our analysis shows that the Commission's choice to prioritise is responsive to the salience of policy issues for Europe's citizens. By contrast, our evidence suggests that governing parties’ issue salience does not drive, and Euroscepticism does not constrain, the Commission's priority‐setting. Our findings contribute to the literature on multilevel politics, shedding new light on the strategic responses of non‐majoritarian institutions to the domestic politicisation of ‘Europe’.

National officials working in international bureaucracies regularly invoke the fear that member states strategically use such officials for influencing decision making and agenda‐setting to their advantage. This article theoretically analyses conditions under which the autonomy of national civil servants in international bureaucracies might become compromised. The ensuing predictions are then tested using a unique survey among seconded national experts (SNEs) in the European Commission (N ≈ 400). Finally, evaluating the characteristics linked to reduced autonomy among SNEs in the Commission, the article illustrates that these officials are, in practice, likely to be relatively independent from member state influence.

Although still in its early phases, the Juncker Commission has already broken new ground. Not only is Jean-Claude Juncker the first Commission President to be selected by the Spitzenkandidaten process, an extra-constitutional system that has reconfigured the European Union’s institutional balance, but he has transformed the structure and operation of the College with the aim of creating a more political, and therefore more effective, Commission, and made good – so far – on his promise ‘to do better on the bigger things and be small on the small things’. This article examines this three-fold transformation. It looks at the innovations and change associated with the Juncker Commission. It considers what motivated them and how they were achieved, sets them in historical perspective, and discusses their implications for the institutions and for the European Union more broadly.

The automotive lobby’s voluntary commitment to reducing CO2 emissions in 1998 was widely perceived as evidence of the influence of multinationals on European decision-making. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) denounced the lack of transparency. Interviewing negotiators or quoting published reports, scholars focused on the disappointing effects of this agreement. Pending the opening of the public archives, this study is based on primary industry archives, which shed light on the highly confidential negotiation phase. Exchanges within the industry and meetings with the European Commission reveal the limits of the automotive lobby’s power, which had to face internal divisions and seemed to suffer more than choose the agreement. It was the result of Directorate-General (DG) III’s maneuvering. The companies “voluntarily” accepted it as the lesser evil, as it was more advantageous than a directive. The idea of standards being co-constructed by public and private stakeholders needs to be qualified: the balance of power was unbalanced. With these soft regulations, it was above all the Commission that strengthened its position in the decision-making process, to the detriment of other stakeholders such as the European Parliament.

Proactive transparency in the form of electronic provision of documents is required by law in the EU. It has long been acknowledged in law and technology studies that digital technology can have legal consequences when implemented to perform a legal function. Consequently, the technological design of document registers has the ability to limit as well as enhance access to documents. When technology can have such regulatory powers, incorporating it into a legal function requires closer attention as to how or why it is so. This article will provide a close analysis of the European Commission’s main Register of Documents (RegDoc) to study the implications of technological design for access to documents. Transparency is approached through a procedural view, highlighting its mechanisms. The article uses a HCI based walkthrough method for the case-study artefact critique of the RegDoc. The main findings suggest that there are two specific affordances of the RegDoc that limit access, especially for users who do not have pre-existing knowledge of the documents they are searching for. These affordances are, first, the scope of the dataset and, second, searchability. Overall, designing technology for legally relevant functions should take into account the wider legal framework that the technology aims to cater for. Attention should be paid to the affordances that can make a legal difference in a technology created to perform a legally relevant task.