National policymaking between influences of the European Union and the economy

The year 2022 starts with many hopes. Among many others, this includes hopes for effective ways to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, hopes for mitigating climate change, and hopes for equality among human beings. Faced with these objectives, national policy-making processes are often influenced by two important relations—those with the supranational level of the European Union and those with powerful economic actors. This EPA issue includes six original articles that deal with the influence of the EU and the economy on domestic policy-making and provide insights into the challenges and opportunities that these interdependencies bring with them.

Following the financial crisis of 2008, the EU member states transferred important competences in the area of financial oversight and regulation of the financial market to the supranational level. This led to the establishment of the Banking Union in 2014 (Guidi, 2019). Swinkels and van Esch (2022) use the framework developed by Rinscheid et al. (2019) to show how a belief shift of key policy actors serve as an explanation the institutional change presented by the Banking Union. Equally concerned with a powerful economy with many interdependencies, namely, that of the Swiss energy sector (Dermont & Kammermann, 2020), Fischer et al. (2022) analyze the Europeanization of informal networks at the domestic level. The authors disentangle the complex web of relationships between domestic and European actors in multilevel governance and argue that informal and bottom-up processes play a key role in public policy-making even in nonmember states.

Less focused on political economy but even more so with the challenges of climate change, the article by Liefferink and Leppänen (2022) applies the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) (Herweg et al., 2017) to the stages of agenda-setting and policy formulation of the Just Transition Fund (JTF). The authors put forward the claim that the institutional context substantially shaped the influence of policy entrepreneurs and outlined the relevance of supranational institutions to EU climate policy. This is in line with other contributions that highlight policy entrepreneurship at the supranational level published in this and related journals (Arenal et al., 2021). The relevance of the EU in tackling societal challenges is further built on by Meister Broekema et al. (2021). Reviewing and investigating the strategies of co-creation inherent in the Horizon 2020 call for “co-creation for growth and inclusion,” their contribution presents a critical assessment of the capability of this call to stimulate innovation and conclude that the program's policy design is too rigid to do so. Moving away from the focus on Europeanization, but researching the motives to engage in public-private partnerships (PPP), Ilgenstein (2021) equally draws from insights of the MSF to reveal that the involvement of actors in PPPs is policy-driven rather than dependent on financial incentives. Thereby, the article contributes to the explanation of successful PPPs in a country with so far few existing PPPs, Switzerland, and to the enhancement of the explanatory power of the MSF in public administration.

Last but not least, Benczes (2021) investigates an equally pressing challenge of our time, that of populism, to ask what effects incumbent populists have on the economy. Although concerned with the empirical cases of Latin American countries, the contribution resulting from funding by the Horizon 2020’s research and innovation program provides important lessons for European countries with populist tendencies: The author stresses that populist governments hold up a stable macroeconomy and respect its constraints but influence the domestic economy above all through redistributive measures designed to pit people against the elite.