In recent years, data have become part and parcel of contemporary capitalism. This created tensions between the growing demand for personal data and the fundamental right to data protection. Against this background, the EU's adoption of the general data protection regulation (GDPR) poses a puzzle. Why did the EU adopt a regulation that strengthens data protection despite intensive lobbying by powerful business groups? We make two arguments to explain this outcome. First, we use process tracing to show how institutional legacies triggered and structured the policy-formulation process by strengthening the position of data protection advocates within the Commission. Second, we use discourse network analysis to show that the Snowden revelations fundamentally changed the discursive and coalitional dynamics during the decision-making stage, 'saving' the GDPR from being watered down. Our paper contributes to the literature on the political economy of data protection while also offering a comprehensive explanation of the GDPR. * Earlier versions of this article were presented at the European University Institute and at the 2019 GIG-ARTS conference in Salerno. We would like to thank all participants for their helpful feedback. We are particularly grateful to Camille Borrett, Clément Perarnaud and Martin Weinrich for their detailed comments and suggestions. In addition, we would like to thank Alexander Dix and Christopher Kuner for taking the time to answer our questions and lending us their expertise. Replication materials can be found online at https://www.timoseidl.com/publications/regulatingthe-european-data-driven-economy/

Platform companies like Uber not only disrupt existing markets but also contest existing regulatory regimes. This raises the question of how, when, and why such companies are regulated. This paper develops, tests and defends a theoretical framework that explains the politics of regulatory response to the rise of platform capitalism. Using discourse network analysis and a case study on the regulation of Uber in New York, it shows that the success or failure of regulations depends on the ability of actors to mobilize broad coalition; that narratives affect the composition of these coalitions; and that platform companies have both unique political strengths and vulnerabilities. The paper makes substantive contributions to our understanding of the politics of platform capitalism, and it makes theoretical contributions to the literatures on coalitional politics, ideational institutionalism, and business power.

In recent years, data have become part and parcel of contemporary capitalism. This created tensions between the growing demand for personal data and the fundamental right to data protection. Against this background, the EU’s adoption of the general data protection regulation (GDPR) poses a puzzle. Why did the EU adopt a regulation that strengthens data protection despite intensive lobbying by powerful business groups? We make two arguments to explain this outcome. First, we use process tracing to show how institutional legacies triggered and structured the policy-formulation process by strengthening the position of data protection advocates within the Commission. Second, we use discourse network analysis to show that the Snowden revelations fundamentally changed the discursive and coalitional dynamics during the decision-making stage, ‘saving’ the GDPR from being watered down. Our paper contributes to the literature on the political economy of data protection while also offering a comprehensive explanationof the GDPR.

For decades, the EU's trade policy has been centred around open(ing) markets. Why, then, has the EU recently embraced open strategic autonomy as the conceptual cornerstone of its renewed trade policy? In this article, we argue that this move away from neoliberalism has to be understood against the background of a changing global environment. The geopoliticization of trade in particular has changed the Commission's view about how to best serve European interests (and values) but also provided an opening for neo-mercantilist and socially oriented actors to challenge Europe's embedded neoliberal compromise. Using document analysis, interviews and discourse network analysis, we show how the Commission used open strategic autonomy as a coalition magnet to mobilize support for its new doctrine of qualified openness. Our paper contributes to understanding the ideational and coalitional politics behind the recent evolution of EU trade policy as well as broader debates around European autonomy and sovereignty.

New forms of work intermediation – the gig economy – and the growing use of advanced digital technologies – the new knowledge economy – are changing the nature of work. The digitalization of work, however, is shaped by how countries respond to it. But how countries respond to digitalization, we argue, depends on how digitalization is perceived in the first place. Using text-as-data methods on a novel corpus of translated newspaper and policy documents from eight European countries as well as qualitative evidence from interviews and secondary sources, we show that there are clear country effects in how digitalization is framed and fought over. Drawing on discursive–institutionalist and coalitional approaches, we argue that institutional differences explain these discursive differences by structuring interpretative struggles in favor of the social coalitions that support them. Actors, however, can also challenge these institutions by using the discursive agency to change these underlying support coalitions.