TY - JOUR A1 - Dawson, Mark T1 - Europe’s expanding coordination space JF - European Law Open N2 - Recent changes to EU fiscal policy, such as the landmark economic governance reform package passed in early 2024, have established a dense ‘coordination space’ that steers crucial social and economic choices at the EU and national levels. This coordination space, however, departs significantly from its historical predecessors. It largely operates within a hard law framework using finance rather than either rules or soft persuasion and peer review as its main tool of influence. In this coordination space, EU law is less a system of uniform rules underlain with sanctions than a negotiation framework where discretion abounds, and rules are never broken but rather ‘adjusted’. As this paper argues, the significance of the coordination space lies not only in its unique governance model and unclear boundaries but rather its increasing centrality to the governance of the EU. As the paper will explore using the rule of law example, even areas of EU law commonly conceived as necessarily insulated from political bargaining are increasingly drawn into the negotiation logic and instruments of coordination, rendering even more crucial a clear understanding of the trade-offs policy coordination implies. By unpacking 8 core features of policy coordination in the 2020s, the paper is therefore devoted to illuminating an expanding battleground within which EU law is being re-defined. Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/elo.2025.8 N1 - Open Access publication is funded by the Hertie School Library SP - 1 EP - 22 PB - Cambridge University Press (CUP) ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Dawson, Mark A1 - Bobić, Ana T1 - Unpacking Legal Accountability: The Case of the European Central Bank JF - Politics and Governance N2 - Although the term “legal accountability” increasingly appears in scholarly discourse surrounding the European Central Bank (ECB), it is under-theorised. This article explores three different dimensions of legal accountability, which are often confused. Accountability to law refers to accountability to legal rules and standards. Accountability through law refers to achieving routes of administrative and political accountability through legal institutions. Accountability of law implies the accountability of legal institutions themselves to the wider public (and other courts) for their decisions. We argue that these dimensions are deeply connected in the sense that either improvements or failures along one dimension are easily carried to the others. We demonstrate the argument by applying our concept of legal accountability to ECB activity, comparing judicial review in the context of monetary policy with the Single Supervisory Mechanism. These cases suggest a possible vicious rather than virtuous circle of legal accountability, i.e., a tendency for either unclear legal standards or lack of accountability of courts themselves to undermine accountability for ECB activity as a whole. Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.8907 VL - 13 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - van den Brink, Martijn A1 - Dawson, Mark A1 - Zglinski, Jan T1 - Alive and kicking or barely alive? The asymmetry thesis in the twenty-first century EU JF - Journal of European Public Policy N2 - This paper focuses on the legal and institutional assumptions of Fritz Scharpf's famous thesis of an asymmetry between positive and negative integration in the EU. Taking issue with a number of arguments forwarded in the lead piece for this debate section, it questions the relevance of the thesis to the governance of the contemporary EU, objecting to (i) the limited falsifiability of the asymmetry thesis as established by the distinction between structure and agency; (ii) the emphasis of the thesis on the weakening influence of negative integration and (iii) the way in which asymmetry ignores the increasing centrality of positive integration to defining the EU's legal order. As the paper concludes, while the asymmetry thesis pioneered inter-disciplinary exploration of how the EU's legal and political order inter-relates, it needs serious re-thinking in the Europe of the 2020s. Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2025.2527330 N1 - Open Access publication is funded by the Hertie School Library. SP - 1 EP - 12 PB - Informa UK Limited ER -