17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Katjana Gattermann
Discussant/s:
Gerald Schneider
Meeting Room I

Jan Vogler
How Do European Citizens Form Their Views of the EU Public Administration? Exploring the Role of Heuristics

Katjana Gattermann
Polity, politics or policies? Voters’ political news preferences during European Parliament election campaigns

Anastasia Ershova, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Nikoleta Yordanova
Constraining the agency to please the public: the new mode of responsiveness in the EU.

Adriana Bunea, Joe Chrisp
Participation or information? The who, what and why of the EU’s new ‘ubiquitous’ consultation regime
Constraining the agency to please the public: the new mode of responsiveness in the EU.
Anastasia Ershova, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Nikoleta Yordanova
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Institute of Political Science, Leiden University

Studies of the EU responsiveness often focus on the legislative output of the Union and its fluctuations in response to the changes in the support for the policy among various stakeholders. This paper takes a different route and analyses whether the demands of the domestic stakeholders affect the process of policy implementation. The EU decision-makers may respond to growing disillusionment with the EU by maintaining a tighter grip over policy implementation and constraining the discretionary power of the agency in charge. By constraining the extent of power delegated to the agency, the EU decision-makers minimize the prospective deviations from the policy measures agreed upon during the earlier stages of the policy-making process. The politicization of the policy area further strengthens the motivation of the principles to constrain the power of the agent to avoid the costs associated with the uncertainty of implementation within a contentious policy domain. The influence of politicization on the agency’s powers is accentuated when the supranational agent takes charge of the implementation process. The results of the paper may point towards a new mode of institutional responsiveness within the EU and flesh out how the domestic demands shape EU politics beyond the approval stage of the policymaking process. To test the expectations the paper relies on the novel dataset on the agency discretion in the EU and the data from the Eurobarometer surveys.