Understanding Responsiveness in European Union Politics: Opening the ‘Black Box’ between Contestation and European

The European Union (EU) is in heavy turmoil. The Eurozone crisis, the Brexit referendum in the UK, the rejection of the Ukraine Association Agreement by an advisory referendum in the Netherlands and the difficulties in devising a satisfactory concerted response to the European refugee crisis since 2015 signal a twofold crisis. Regarding input legitimacy, the incessant domestic political contestation of the EU points to a crisis of democratic representation. Regarding output legitimacy, these crises expose the many obstacles the EU faces in effective policy-making – pointing to a crisis of capacity. While it is clear that these two crises are connected, we believe that EU politics scholarship should do more to understand the specific causal mechanisms of how domestic political EU politicization and EU policy-making are connected – and how these fields in turn affect the development of European integration.

The aim of this four-day workshop is to bring together scholars connect of different sub-disciplines of political science to gain theoretical and empirical insight into the causal processes of EU responsiveness and develop a common research agenda. Understanding EU responsiveness as the connection between citizens’ EU-related preferences and the EU’s policy outcomes, the workshop specifically examines the interrelationship between citizens’ preferences and the behaviour of political parties and governments as well as the role of (national) bureaucratic actors and EU institutions.