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Responsive withdrawal? The politics of EU agenda-setting

  • This contribution asks whether and why the newly political environment of EU law-making impacts on the European Commission's choice (not) to announce the withdrawal of legislative proposals. We argue that the Commission uses ‘responsive withdrawal’ in response to bottom-up pressure, so as to signal self-restraint or policy-determination to different audiences. Bottom-up pressures are driven by (1) the national contestation of ‘Europe’; (2) visible controversy about optimal (crisis) governance; and (3) the domestic salience of EU legislation. Our hypotheses are tested on a new dataset of all codecision files concluded, withdrawn, rejected or ongoing between 2006 and 2018. We show that the Commission reacts to bottom-up pressure by either politicising or depoliticising the EU's legislative agenda: ‘withdrawal announcements’ are more likely when Euroscepticism is high and when legislation touches core state powers, but less likely when legislation is domestically salient. We also demonstrate the continued importance of cyclical and technical reasons. Our analysis complements extant explanations of withdrawal as the upshot of functional factors or of uncertainty, and contributes to the nascent debate about whether, why and how supranational actors respond when the systems in which they operate – and the policies they produce – come under attack.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Author(s):Christine Reh, Edoardo Bressanelli, Christl Koop
Parent Title (English):Journal of European Public Policy
Publication year:2020
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
First Page:419
Last Page:438
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2020.1712453
Release Date:2020/08/10
Tag:Agenda-setting, European Commission, legislation, politicisation, depoliticisation, withdrawals
Volume:27
Issue:3
Hertie School Research:Jacques Delors Centre
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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