Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies最新文献

The Eurosystem is built on a compelling promise: shielded from national politics, ECB Governing Council members would be better positioned to deploy their science-based expertise. Far from embodying this ideal, scholars have documented central bankers' opportunistic engagement with the ideas underpinning monetary policy. Whilst studies have often attributed this to reputation management strategies, we show how deeply entrenched national preferences – whether hawkish or dovish – shape how central bankers frame inflationary developments and prescribe policy solutions. Based on a quantitative and qualitative study of Eurozone central bank governors' speeches from 2014 to 2023, we reveal patterns of selective engagement with economic data, strategic scepticism regarding theories and indicators and weaponised uncertainty to support or cast doubt on monetary policy action. Crucially, these rhetorical strategies are leveraged conditionally on the inflation season, leading doves and hawks to act as migrating birds, embracing the other camp's position when economic circumstances change. Casting further doubt upon the proclaimed science-based neutrality of central bankers, our study shows that central bank speeches should not be merely studied as reflections of policy learning or as instruments of reputation management but also as rhetorical tools to achieve national policy preferences.

Actors who benefit from the European Union's (EU) opportunity structures strive to expand EU policy-making. A central manner of benefitting from EU opportunity structures is the acquisition of EU funding, which then is implemented through projects and has led to research concerned with the projectification of EU public policy-making. Whilst the European Commission explicitly encourages EU funding beneficiaries to participate in the interactive set-up of EU policy-making, a bottom-up perspective on projectification in EU public policy is lacking so far. To answer the question of how the implementation of projectified policies feeds back at EU policy-making, a theoretical framework is developed that combines a projectification perspective with bottom-up Europeanisation research. The framework provides three potential modes of leveraging projectified EU policy: re-using EU project funding, promoting its availability and pro-actively shaping EU policy. Applying the framework to analyse how higher education (HE) institutions leverage EU project funding, this study finds that HE institutions do not only re-use and promote the opportunity structures that let them foster their co-operation but that they also become shapers of EU policy. The finding that EU funding beneficiaries may become EU policy shapers has important implications for EU policy-making, which increasingly relies on the bottom-up engagement of (sub)national-level actors.

Experts have over the years produced countless policy briefs, reports and documents in efforts to influence policy-makers' decisions about EU economic policy and governance. In a special category are the expert reports officially commissioned by EU institutional actors. In the past, the most influential such reports included the 1970 Werner report, the 1985 Cockfield report on completing the single market and the 1989 Delors report on monetary union, amongst others (see Gros, this issue). The latest examples are the reports by Enrico Letta (2024) on the single market and by Mario Draghi (2024) on competitiveness in the EU (see Chang, this issue; Gros, this issue; Moschella and Quaglia, this issue). These reports, much like the earlier ones, can be seen as game changers for the EU political agenda in terms of their levels of ambition and innovation.

Whether the Letta and Draghi expert reports have a direct or immediate impact on the EU political agenda remains an open question. Much depends upon such imponderables as the political will of EU leaders in the European Council, the administrative capacities of the European Commission and the evolving politics of the European Parliament (EP) and of member states in an increasingly populist extreme right context. Institutional constraints or opportunities, political serendipity and timing are additional factors. Moreover, what the reports leave out is as important for the future as what they put in.

But whatever their ultimate impact, the Letta and Draghi reports have raised the bar with regard to the ideas that will shape the conversation about the goals and parameters of the EU agenda for years to come and, in so doing, have provided a legitimating reference for all those pushing for deeper integration to address the existential challenges facing the EU. The reports have accomplished this not only as a result of the persuasive presentation of their main ideas but also through their circulation both ex ante via the initial widespread consultations in the reports' drafting phase and ex post through the widescale debates as well as contestation about their recommendations amongst EU institutional actors and member state political elites, amongst experts in think tanks and professional networks, by opinion leaders and civil society organisations and by the media. Put more simply, the reports have renewed the EU's political agenda by providing a coherent and ambitious new vision about what should and could be done to make the EU a success as a supranational polity and world economic power. And in so doing, regardless of how or even whether the specific recommendations are translated into practice, the reports have served as catalysts for focused discussions across Europe about what to do and how to do it.

This contribution begins with a brief discussion of how experts' ideas matter and then discusses why the Letta and Draghi reports substantively matter for th

Since 2007, the European Union has devoted significant time and energy to the production and dissemination of new statistics designed to monitor social and environmental trends of various types. These initiatives have often been presented as part of a broader ‘beyond GDP agenda’, which challenges the centrality of economic growth, as measured by GDP, to governance and ideology, in and beyond Europe. Drawing on interviews with staff from across EU institutions involved, this article examines the fortunes of these initiatives with regard to ongoing debates about the extent to which a ‘social Europe’ is achievable. We show that the Beyond GDP agenda faces formidable constraints. The basic structure of EU treaties and competencies and an underlying bias towards technocratic policy-making loom large in the view of those tasked with developing and implementing statistical reform, making the basic aims of the agenda difficult to achieve. Relative successes, such as the inclusion of social and environmental indicators within the European Semester policy cycle, are shown to have been equally subject to these constraints.