How the impossible became possible: evolving frames and narratives on responsibility and responsiveness from the Eurocrisis to NextGenerationEU

Crespy, Amandine; Massart, Tom; Schmidt, Vivien

doi:10.1080/13501763.2023.2282164

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 40 publications

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“…Over the next couple of months, however, the creditor-debtor cleavage was progressively diluted by a discourse on 'solidarity' which increasingly resonated amongst European governing elites and publics alike (Crespy et al 2023). Moreover, by mid-May the discourse shifted dramatically to one of solidarity, as France and Germany came out publicly recommending a major grant-based recovery fund which broke the 'no-bailout' rule of the Treaties.…”

Section: Fiscal Policiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power and legitimacy during emergency politics: a democratic audit of responses to the Covid-19 crisis

Schmidt

2024

Preprint

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EU and member-state responses to the Covid-19 pandemic involved emergency politics in a number of domains, including a) lockdowns, border closures and movement restrictions; b) steps towards Health Union; and c) the suspension of the fiscal rules and creation of the Next Generation EU and the Resilience and Recovery Fund. These raised major theoretical questions about legitimacy and the exercise of executive power during emergencies. This paper answers such questions by first considering democratic legitimacy in ordinary times in terms of the quality of governing activities related to output performance, input politics, and throughput procedures, as operationalized in terms of the ‘democratic audit.’ It next discusses the processes and problems of democratic legitimation in the EU with regard to leaders’ discourses of policy coordination and political communication. It then explores the complications for legitimacy and legitimation from emergency politics, and refines the democratic audit to apply to emergency politics. It follows by exploring how the exercise of executive power—coercive, institutional, and ideational/discursive—affects legitimacy and legitimation in emergency politics. Finally, the paper uses these theoretical criteria in a democratic audit of the empirical cases of bordering, health, and fiscal policy through process tracing and discourse analysis. It finds that governing authorities for the most part successfully discursively legitimated their actions on the grounds that positive output performance made up for reductions in political input and procedural throughput.

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Section: Fiscal Policiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power and legitimacy during emergency politics: a democratic audit of responses to the Covid-19 crisis

Schmidt

2024

Preprint

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Who is to blame? Stories of European Union migration governance in Italian, Maltese, and Spanish newspapers

Abisso,

Terlizzi,

Cusumano

2024

European Policy Analysis

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While scholars have investigated how media frame human mobility and securitize irregular border crossings, little research has been dedicated to how European Union (EU) actors are portrayed in media coverage of migration across the Mediterranean. By integrating framing into narrative analysis through the Narrative Policy Framework, our article fills this gap. Specifically, we provide a content analysis of Italian, Maltese, and Spanish newspapers and identify the key narratives underlying the portrayal of specific EU actors. We show that, overall, lack of EU solidarity is the prevalent issue in Italian, Maltese, and Spanish newspapers alike, followed by the alleged inefficiency of EU actors. Accordingly, the EU and its key actors are regularly narrated as either villains, responsible for the crisis and deserting member states in need of solidarity, or as weaklings unable to take effective action. These narratives appear remarkably consistent across countries, over time, and newspapers with different ideological orientation.

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The governance of the recovery and resilience facility. The incremental innovation of standard conditionality regime

Fernández‐Pasarín,

Lanaia

2024

European Policy Analysis

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How can we explain the system of governance underlying the conditionality regime of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF)? Two contrasting instruments were adopted by the European Union to deal with the economic impact of the COVID‐19 crisis. The initial adaptation of the intergovernmental European stability mechanism was followed by the RRF, an instrument adopted as an add‐on to the EU budget and combining both supranational delegation and intergovernmental filters. Using the lenses of historical institutionalism, and a coalition‐based explanatory framework, this article examines the impact of past institutionalization patterns on the shift towards the RRF combined model. It argues that space for supranational delegation occurred as the result of the incremental innovation of the standard Community regime at work in EU budget‐related policies.

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How the impossible became possible: evolving frames and narratives on responsibility and responsiveness from the Eurocrisis to NextGenerationEU

Cited by 8 publications

References 40 publications

Power and legitimacy during emergency politics: a democratic audit of responses to the Covid-19 crisis

Power and legitimacy during emergency politics: a democratic audit of responses to the Covid-19 crisis

Who is to blame? Stories of European Union migration governance in Italian, Maltese, and Spanish newspapers

The governance of the recovery and resilience facility. The incremental innovation of standard conditionality regime

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