Jean monnet research Network on EU-UN relations (EUN-NET)
Promoteur: Tom Delreux
Le ‘Jean Monnet Research Network on EU-UN Relations’ (EUN-NET) rassemble des académiques provenant de huit institutions européennes et américaines, dont ISPOLE. Il vise à stimuler l’intérêt académique quant aux interactions entre l’UE et l’ONU et à créer une plateforme multidisciplinaire pour des analyses et débats sur ce sujet. [http://eunnet.eu]
English Version
The EUN-NET Network brings together established academics from different disciplines (law, economics, political science and international relations) that have a proven record of research and teaching excellence in the field of EU-UN relations. The rationale of this multidisciplinary partnership is to encourage exchange of academic best-practice and creating a thematic trans-national research group.
The EUN-NET Network’s dual objective comprises the stimulation of academic interest in EU-UN interactions and the forging of a broader common public space for informed analysis and debate on current EU-UN issues. The former will be achieved by a variety of teaching methodologies and the set up of a research network that will outlive the duration of the program. The latter will entail an enhanced cooperation between academic and civil society stakeholders through several public events to disseminate knowledge and enhance the understanding of this complex relationship.
Welfare Policies and media Coverage: analysing Linkages between Citizens and Politics in Comparative Perspective
Promotrices: Virginie Van Ingelgom, Claire Dupuy
Chercheur: Damien Pennetreau
Starting from the difficulties faced by the European integration project, this research investigates one of the underlying mechanisms of EU’s current legitimacy crisis: welfare retrenchment. Historically, policies have been used by political elites as a tool of legitimation. States have relied on the promotion of social policies and subsequent development of welfare states to establish their legitimacy. Thus, it makes sense to investigate the overlooked policy feedback effect. The core argument of the policy feedback theory is that policies’ outcomes reshape the subsequent policy process. In the meantime scholars underline that citizens’ relationship with politics is changing. The literature related to democratic linkages illustrates that citizens engage in politics differently than in the past. It also tries to understand what the new patterns of citizens’ involvement are. It then is appropriate to assess the policy feedback effect in the light of citizens’ democratic linkages. Still, the role of the media has to be taken into account. These latter highlight policies’ success or failures. In doing so, they provide the necessary information to evaluate the action of the incumbent governments. They also provide lenses that may influence citizens’ judgement. This explains the relevance of integrating media in the analysis. This research answers to the following academic question: how do welfare retrenchments in labour and health policies and the media coverage in that regard influence citizens’ relationship with their political system? Relying on mixed-methods the cases (Belgium, France, and the UK) are analysed in longitudinal perspective. The used qualitative data are taken from existing research and reappraised while the quantitative data are produced through media content analysis and interpreted.
The impact of parliamentary activities on the reselection and reelection of members of European Parliament
Promoteur : Lieven De Winter
Chercheur : Mihail Chiru
Financement : “MOVE-IN Louvain” Incoming Post-doctoral Fellowship, co-funded by the Marie Curie
Actions of the European Commission. The absence of an electoral connection in the European Union (EU) elections, i.e. the fact that voters do not reward or punish Members of European Parliament (MEPs) for their legislative behavior is the standard view among EU election scholars. For most of the period since 1979 this view seemed too obvious to be tested empirically, but recent institutional reforms and societal developments suggest the need to reconsider the conventional wisdom. Thus, the project will investigate to what extent and how do individual parliamentary activities matter for the re-selection and re-election of MEPs. Special attention will be given to distinguishing between the electoral consequences of policy influence and of constituency service, while also adopting a longitudinal perspective to trace any changes related to electoral reform. An original dataset will be built that will include the MEPs’ roll-call dissent levels, number of reports, opinions and parliamentary questions submitted between 1999 and 2014 and information regarding their participation in subsequent EP elections. The project would improve our understanding of patterns of EP legislative policy making over time by looking at how parties manage their most knowledgeable and resourceful cadres. By adopting a longitudinal perspective this analysis would offer an assessment of the legislative professionalization potential of the European Parliament and of how the various electoral arrangements and actual elections affect the pool of experienced and policy-influent legislators. Moreover, the project can answer several theoretical puzzles with respect to EP elections and recruitment: the supposed trade-off parties face between nominating national legislators who can win votes and nominating incumbents who can achieve policy goals; the apparent irrelevance of voting loyalty for re-election, although several scholars have emphasized that national parties, the main principals of the MEPs, are very interested in loyalty.
The EU in contemporary global environmental governance
Promoteur : Tom Delreux
Chercheuse : Frauke Ohler
Financement : FNRS aspirance
This project studies the role of the European Union (EU) in contemporary global environmental politics through an innovative combination of an outside-in mapping with an inside-out explanation of that role. Three dimensions of the EU’s role are examined : its environmental ambition, leadership and diplomacy. The project is innovative because of a twofold reason. First, counterbalancing the literature’s dominant focus on climate change, it focuses on the EU’s role in three less politicized, yet important, international environmental treaty regimes. Those regimes are the regime of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the regime of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, and the chemicals regime. Second, the project evaluates the EU’s role via an original outside-in mapping, based on non-EU centric evaluations by observers of the EU’s role. Variation in the role of the EU in the three environmental treaty regimes in the period 2010-2018, both over time and between the treaty regimes, are then explained through structured, focused comparisons based on an inside-out approach. Original empirical data are collected through several techniques. First, interviews and online surveys will be conducted with non-EU observers who have witnessed the EU’s role in the environmental treaty regimes : officials working at the secretariats of the international treaty regimes and Earth Negotiation Bulletin reporters. Second, data to explain variation in the EU’s role is gathered through semi-structured interviews with closely involved EU policy-makers, and through the analysis of official documents (from the EU and the secretariats) and specialized press reports on internal EU decision-making. The project will thereby contribute to a more fine-tuned understanding of the EU as international actor and to improved knowledge about the process and outcomes of international environmental cooperation.
Analysing the legitimacy of the EU in the context of multilevel governance
Promotrice : Virginie Van Ingelgom
Chercheuse : Soetkin Verhaegen
Financement : Chargée de recherche FNRS
To make governance operate effectively requires citizens to perceive it as legitimate. Perceived legitimacy, is “the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appro-priate ones for the society” (Lipset 1983: 64). Questions about legitimacy arise for all governance levels citizens are subject to: national, subnational and supranational levels. Hence, a growing literature studies perceived legitimacy, mostly of the national or EU level. However, theories on multilevel governance stress complex relationships between gover-nance levels. This is in contrast to the currently dominant practice of studying these governance levels in isolation, or as a simple trade-off between two levels. The absence of a deep understanding of the relationship between citizens’ attitudes about the various governance levels they are subject to is problematic, as the multilevel setting has a profound impact on legitimation dynamics (Scharpf 2007). For these reasons, the proposed project integrates the literatures on perceived legitimacy and multilevel governance to answer its guiding research question ‘to what extent and how do perceptions of legitimacy of European, national and sub-national governance levels interact?’. The project places the EU, national and the most relevant subnational level in EU member states at the centre, as questions about legitimacy are most apparent for these levels. A mixed-me-thods approach combining focus groups in Belgium and the Netherlands, the collection of original survey data in Belgium (in cooperation with the EOS project) and the analysis of quantitative survey data on all EU member states will be used to answer this question. It will be explored what citizens regard as relevant traits of legitimate governance and how this varies across governance levels, the linkages between perceptions of legitimacy of these levels will be shown and variation in citizens’ perceptions of legitimacy of each level, and their linkages will be explained.