The subject of this study comprises how Turkey’s EU membership is seen by HDP-supporter Kurdish voters in Turkey, as a non-EU country that has on-hold negotiations but still an ostensible vision for membership. There is a dearth of literature regarding Kurdish voters’ views on the EU, and this study, employing the focus group method, aims to address this gap by providing insights into the perspectives of Kurdish voters who support the HDP on Turkey-EU relations and their attitudes toward the EU. The study employs focus group methodology to assess whether the independentist demands that began to spring in Europe are also becoming popular among Kurdish voters. The primary finding derived from the focus group study indicates that the interviewees exhibited limited interest in both the EU negotiations and the EU’s handling of the Kurdish issue, and that the EU accession process failed to evoke significant enthusiasm among the interviewees. Meanwhile, developments pertaining to the Kurdish population in Syria and Iraq have generated a significantly higher level of enthusiasm when compared to the negotiations with the European Union.

Having long shied away from proactively politicizing issues of European integration, the past crisis decade has put generally pro‐European mainstream parties under pressure to spell out more clearly which kind of Europe they support. We distinguish two such fundamental ideas of Europe: the redistributive polity, organizing transnational solidarity and the regulatory polity, strengthening national self‐reliance. Both notions are integrationist, but they come with distinct policy implications. What determines mainstream party support for either of these polity ideas? We investigate this question on data provided by the ‘EUandI’ voting advice application, which contains party positions on core issues of integration for all EU member states for the four European Parliament elections between 2009 and 2024. Mainstream party support for redistribution, we find, is generally driven by their ideological placement on the economic and cultural dimension. While progressive and left parties tend towards EU‐level redistribution, conservative and right parties are wedded to the idea of a regulatory European polity. This general dynamic, however, interacts with parties’ domestic considerations, that is, the public salience of an issue and a country's net‐payer status in the EU. We further find that the effect of mainstream parties’ ideological positioning differs across policy domains. While cultural and economic positions drive support for redistribution in fiscal and taxation policy to a nearly equal extent, support for redistribution in migration policy is driven by cultural factors alone, while in matters of security and defence right mainstream parties are more supportive of European solidarity than parties of the mainstream left. Our analysis demonstrates that mainstream parties now compete visibly over EU‐level redistribution, but that their stances on transnational solidarity differ depending on the domestic situation and the policy domain in question.

What explains the variation in public support for European integration? While the existing literature has predominantly focused on economic, cultural and political factors, the influence of geography has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by examining the impact of residing in the European Union (EU) border regions on voters' perceptions and attitudes towards the EU. Contrary to previous research, our study reveals a remarkable pattern, indicating that individuals living in border regions exhibit a higher propensity to vote for Eurosceptic parties and hold negative views on the EU. Through the utilization of both behavioural and attitudinal indicators in years ranging between 1999 and 2021 and employing statistical matching, our analysis robustly supports this finding. Moreover, we delve into the underlying mechanisms driving these negative attitudes in border regions, highlighting the significance of institutional factors. A mediation analysis reveals an interesting and previously unexplored theoretical twist: We find that residing in a border region is associated with lower trust in national political institutions, which translates into distrust in the EU. These findings suggest that it might be policymakers residing in the capital of the country rather than people on the other side of the border that make borderland inhabitants' attitudes distinctly negative.

How do mainstream political executives cue their politicised constituencies on European integration? Moving beyond static expectations that EU politicisation induces executives to either undermine, defuse or defend integration, this article theorises executives’ incentives under different configurations of public and partisan Euroscepticism in their home countries. Expectations are tested on the sentiment and complexity that executives attach to European integration in almost 9,000 public speeches delivered throughout the Euro Crisis. It is found that national leaders faced with sceptical public opinion and low levels of partisan Euroscepticism rhetorically undermine integration, whereas European Commissioners faced with similar conditions are prone to defend it. These responses intensify disproportionally with growing public Euroscepticism, but are moderated by Eurosceptic party strength in surprising ways. When such challenger parties come closer to absorbing the Eurosceptic potential in public opinion, executive communication turns more positive again but also involves less clear rhetorical signals. These findings move beyond existing uniform expectations on mainstream responses to Eurosceptic challenges and highlight the relevance of different domestic configurations of EU politicisation.

The study of European integration has traditionally focused on organisational growth: the deepening and widening of the European Union (EU). By contrast, this article analyses organisational differentiation, a process in which states refuse, or are being refused, full integration but find value in establishing in‐between grades of membership. It describes how the EU's system of graded membership has developed, and it explains the positioning of states in this system. The core countries of the EU set a standard of ‘good governance’. The closer European countries are to this standard, the closer their membership grade is to the core. Some countries fall short of this standard and are refused further integration by the core: their membership grade increases with better governance. Other countries refuse further integration because they outperform the standards of the core countries: their membership grade decreases as governance improves. These conjectures are corroborated in a panel analysis of European countries.

In a search for the ‘good European citizen’, the prevalent views of European Union (EU) policymakers, civil society bodies, and citizens are confronted. The civil society and ordinary citizens are both content with strengthening the position of civil society and not increasing the participatory demands on citizens. Ideas among EU policymakers about civil society as a means to integrate citizens and to close the gap between citizens and the EU are misplaced and incongruent with other images of the ‘good European citizen’.

In the 20 years after its introduction, the principal-agent model has seen increasing use to study political processes in virtually all policy domains in which the EU is active. Relaxing the strict assumptions that guided the original economic applications has greatly widened the scope for potential applications. This very phenomenon has also created an existential challenge to the model’s contemporary use, which is combining the reductionist aims of the model (from which it derives its strength) with the complex empirical settings to which it is increasingly applied. To facilitate this balancing exercise, we propose a two-step approach to principal-agent analysis, in which the mapping of the principal-agent proof relation is separated from the effective analysis that examines the reasons, modalities and consequences of delegation and control in the EU. In doing so, we show how the principal-agent model can continue to provide new insights at the various stages of the research process.

While Carmines and Stimson's work on issue evolutions has prompted research showing the dynamics and effects of new party alignments on abortion, religion, gender and cultural issues, this research has all centred on the United States. This article examines issue evolution in Britain. Using evidence on the timing of changes in elite positions from Comparative Manifestos Group data, and survey data on public attitudes to the European Union with a longer historical sweep than heretofore, the article finds strong evidence that the European issue has followed an issue evolution path, though with distinct dynamics contingent on the pace of elite re‐positioning. Thus, this article extends the theory of issue evolution to a parliamentary political system and demonstrates the responsiveness of the public to elite cues, while also providing additional insights from a unique case in which elites have staked out distinct positions not once, but twice.

This article discusses the extent to which it is possible to label European integration as a new critical juncture of politics in Central Europe by using four Central European countries of Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia as the focus of our investigation. The article presents the historical critical junctures of Central European efforts to liberalise and democratise politics and to create liberal democratic political institutions: the Revolution of 1848, the emergence of independent states in 1918, the Sovietisation of Central Europe between 1945–48 and democratic transition after 1989. We argue that after 2004, when the Central European countries entered the European Union (EU), the claims related to the liberal democratic nature of the EU polity triggered nationalist and illiberal opposition. Therefore, the EU membership has provided a new critical juncture impacting the consolidation or destabilisation of liberal democratic patterns of government. The article further argues that path dependence on the previous critical junctures of Central European politics plays a role in the political development of these countries’ stance on European integration. The authors show that there has been a contradiction between nationalism and liberal concept of democracy since the mid-nineteenth century and that this contradiction manifests in critical junctures based on European integration too.

Do citizens and Members of the European Parliament agree on the format and future of the EU? While the literature has emphasized the gap between pro-European elites and increasingly Eurosceptic electorates, this article relies on a novel dataset to explore the implications of measures of such (in)congruence at the EU level. We compare the preferences of elected representatives and of voters on a wide range of issues: democracy at the supranational level, the reform of EU policies, as well as institutions. The empirical analysis relies on a citizen survey and on an MEP survey conducted in the framework of the RECONNECT project. We evidence that the level of congruence varies across issues and that it is the representatives, not the citizens, who drive polarization.

This article compares the formation of national preferences and interstate bargains for the two historical decisions on British membership, the accession of the UK to the European Communities and British exit from the European Union. While both resemble in their procedure to overcome intra-party division by announcing a referendum about the outcome of interstate bargains, the closer inspection suggests a transformation from a socioeconomic toward ideological foundation of the national preference on British membership and from intergovernmental bargaining effectiveness toward two-level game (in)voluntary defection.

Debates about the European Union's democratic legitimacy put national parliaments into the spotlight. Do they enhance democratic accountability by offering visible debates and electoral choice about multilevel governance? To support such accountability, saliency of EU affairs in the plenary ought to be responsive to developments in EU governance, has to be linked to decision‐making moments and should feature a balance between government and opposition. The recent literature discusses various partisan incentives that support or undermine these criteria, but analyses integrating these arguments are rare. This article provides a novel comparative perspective by studying the patterns of public EU emphasis in more than 2.5 million plenary speeches from the German Bundestag, the British House of Commons, the Dutch Tweede Kamer and the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados over a prolonged period from 1991 to 2015. It documents that parliamentary actors are by and large responsive to EU authority and its exercise where especially intergovernmental moments of decision making spark plenary EU salience. But the salience of EU issues is mainly driven by government parties, decreases in election time and is negatively related to public Euroscepticism. The article concludes that national parliaments have only partially succeeded in enhancing EU accountability and suffer from an opposition deficit in particular.

Publishing has a variety of functions for academics. The most significant of these is linked to esteem and career success. Beyond this, however, publishing in academic journals also plays a significant knowledge production role; consequently, who is represented in journal publishing is also about who knows and is contributing to productive knowledge in different fields. In this article, we draw on the gender distribution in publishing from the journal’s inception in 1962 until 2021, for reviewing (2015–2020) and for submissions ratios since 2017 in JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. While we identify a gender gap in publishing and a persistent one in submissions, we also highlight the ways in which this gap has impacted knowledge production and reinforced disciplinary boundaries. Over time, we also find notable changes in review participation with more women being invited to review and more likely to accept invitations to review. Because these findings are consistent with the general trends in Political Science and International Relations journals, we conclude this assessment with a reflection on what strategies have paid off to decrease existing gaps and meet some of the ongoing challenges.

In times of multiple crises and a looming partial breakup of the European Union, the question of what binds Europeans together appears more relevant than ever. This article proposes transnational attachment as a novel indicator of sense of community in Europe, arguing that this hitherto neglected dimension is substantially and structurally different from alternative ones such as cross‐border trust and identification. Combining Eurobarometer 73.3 data on ties between all EU‐27 countries with further dyadic data, it is shown empirically that the European network of transnational attachment has an asymmetric core‐periphery structure centred on five extremely popular countries (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain). In line with transactionalist theory, cross‐border mobility and communication are strongly related to transnational attachment. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the network of transnational attachment is much denser among those with a higher level of education than among those with a lower level. The results suggest that offering European citizens incentives to travel to peripheral countries may help counterbalance the current asymmetric structure of transnational attachment, thereby increasing Europe's social cohesion.

How does the European Union integrate new values into the text of its treaties? A growing body of literature indicates that, in the past three decades, new norms and values have entered the EU's discourse, resulting in what is usually termed ‘normative power Europe’. Yet the research and knowledge to‐date about the EU's discursive assimilation of new values and norms is surprisingly poor. As any institutional change, such integration has the potential to undermine the coherence of the EU's identity and thus also its objective to ‘speak with one voice’. This article explores the EU's discursive management of the continuity‐versus‐change imperative by analysing the integration of new values into the text of its treaties. This issue is addressed based on a quantitative content analysis on the full texts of European founding treaties between the 1950s and 2009. Findings show that the distribution of the EU's values in the text is not uniform: while the language of market economy and democracy is pervasive, the values of peace, European identity, rights and social justice are mentioned less frequently and in restricted linguistic environments. To account for the differences in the integration of values into the EU's treaty discourse, the article develops the notion of a discursive mechanism of differentiated value integration (MDVI). This rationale echoes the logic of differentiation in policy implementation employed by the EU. It is claimed here that, applied in the European discursive arena, MDVI allows radically different readings of the same text. This helps the EU to maintain a coherent value identity while at the same time enabling change.

European Union (EU) referendums provide unique opportunities to study voters’ attitudes toward a distant level of governance. Scholars have long tried to understand whether EU referendum results reflect domestic (dis‐)satisfaction with the incumbent governments or actual attitudes toward the Union. Finding evidence supporting both domestic and European factors, the recent focus has thus turned to referendum campaigns. Recent studies emphasise the importance of the information provided to voters during these campaigns in order to analyse how domestic or European issues become salient in the minds of voters. These studies nonetheless overlook the asymmetrical political advantage in such campaigns. The broader literature on referendums and public opinion suggest that in a referendum, the ‘No’ side typically has the advantage since it can boost the public's fears by linking the proposal to unpopular issues. This article explores whether this dynamic applies to EU treaty ratification referendums. Does the anti‐EU treaty campaign have more advantage than the pro‐EU treaty campaign in these referendums? Campaign strategies in 11 EU treaty ratification referendums are analysed, providing a clear juxtaposition between pro‐treaty (‘Yes’) and anti‐treaty (‘No’) campaigns. Based on 140 interviews with campaigners in 11 referendums, a series of indicators on political setting and campaign characteristics, as well as an in‐depth case study of the 2012 Irish Fiscal Compact referendum, it is found that the anti‐treaty side indeed holds the advantage if it engages the debate. Nonetheless, the findings also show that this advantage is not unconditional. The underlying mechanism rests on the multidimensionality of the issue. The extent to which the referendum debate includes a large variety of ‘No’ campaign arguments correlates strongly with the campaigners’ perceived advantage/disadvantage, and the referendum results. When the ‘No’ side's arguments are limited (either through a single‐issue treaty or guarantees from the EU), this provides the ‘Yes’ side with a ‘cleaner’ agenda with which to work. Importantly, the detailed data demonstrate that the availability of arguments is important for the ‘Yes’ side as well. They tend to have the most advantage when they can tap into the economic costs of an anti‐EU vote. This analysis has implications for other kinds of EU referendums such as Brexit, non‐EU referendums such as independence referendums, and the future of European integration.

The literature on the relationship between European Union (EU) integration and regional power has produced two opposing theoretical models. Depending on the model, EU integration leads to either an increase or decrease in regional power. Evidence for both, however, has been largely inconclusive and mostly derived from qualitative case studies. This paper, on the other hand, offers a quantitative, large-N analysis, using data from fifty-six countries between 1960 and 2010. Its random effects model shows that EU membership considerably increases regional authority within member states over time, and its comparison with another international organization suggests that the effect is not idiosyncratic. Additionally, this paper finds support for two possible mechanisms: the establishment of the subsidiarity principle and the Commission’s requirement to create regional government structures.

Although civil societies in Central and Eastern Europe are often portrayed as similar, united by a shared communist past, they have developed along increasingly divergent trajectories over the past three decades. This article investigates the current state of civil society in the region and the role the institutional context plays in it. Drawing on historical institutionalism and the process of European integration, we classify the 14 countries under investigation into three distinct groups and analyze data from a survey of more than 350 local civil society experts. We find that, together with domestic governments, international donors and the EU are perceived as the most influential institutional actors for civil society organizations. Their respective influences, however, depend largely on a country’s stage in the EU accession process. Overall, the study provides a differentiated mapping of civil society in this region and a better understanding of how the institutional context relates to a country’s civil society.