Authority, politicization, and alternative justifications: endogenous legitimation dynamics in global economic governance

Recent mobilization against core tenets of the liberal international order suggests that international institutions lack sufficient societal legitimacy. We argue that these contestations are part of a legitimation dynamic that is endogenous to the political authority of international institutions. We specify a mechanism in which international authority increases the likelihood for the public politicization of international institutions. This undermines legitimacy in the short run, but also allows broadening the justificatory basis of global governance: Politicization allows civil society organizations (CSOs) to transmit alternative legitimation standards to global elite discourses. We trace this sequence for four key institutions of global economic governance – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and the NAFTA – combining data on authority and protest counts with markers for CSOs and legitimation narratives in more than 120,000 articles in international elite newspapers during 1992–2012. The uncovered patterns are consistent with a perspective that understands legitimation dynamics as an endogenous feature of international authority, but they also show that alternative legitimation narratives did not lastingly resonate in the global discourse thus far. This may explain current backlashes and calls for active re-legitimation efforts on part of international institutions themselves

No longer an ivory tower: how public debates influence European Commission policies

The European Commission is often criticised for being too distant from EU citizens and for proposing policies without adequately taking on board the views of ordinary people. But how accurate is this criticism in reality? Drawing on recent research, Christian Rauh argues that the Commission is far more responsive to public opinion than is commonly recognised

The EU’s attempts to manage air transport regulation illustrate the extent to which supranational actors can send credible signals to financial markets

How can European policymakers send credible signals to financial markets? Christian Rauh traces market responses to the announcements and events during the Commission’s nine-year conflict for competences in international air transport regulation. He finds that judicial strategies and European Court of Justice proceedings sent the most credible signals for regulatory change to financial markets, adding evidence to ‘institutionalist’ views of European integration

Supranational emergency politics? What executives' public crisis communication may tell us

This contribution engages with the empirical analysis of emergency politics in the EU, arguing that executives' public communication helps to distinguish crisis management from crisis exploitation. An initial, descriptive text analysis of emergency emphasis in more than 19,000 executive speeches suggests that supranational actors, most notably the European Central Bank, do indeed use rather alarmist language over and beyond objective crisis pressures when their competences are contested. Yet, this behaviour does not appear to be a ubiquitous phenomenon, pointing to the need for more specific expectations on when and why EU executives pro-actively embark on the emergency politics script

Validating a sentiment dictionary for German political language - a workbench note

Automated sentiment scoring offers relevant empirical information for many political science applications. However, apart from English language resources, validated dictionaries are rare. This note introduces a German sentiment dictionary and assesses its performance against human intuition in parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, and media coverage. The tool published with this note is indeed able to discriminate positive and negative political language. But the validation exercises indicate that positive language is easier to detect than negative language, while the scores are numerically biased to zero. This warrants caution when interpreting sentiment scores as interval or even ratio scales in applied research

EU politicization and policy initiatives of the European Commission: the case of consumer policy

European integration is increasingly contested in public. What are the policy consequences of this EU politicization? This article argues that politicization challenges the hitherto often technocratic mode of policy preparation in the European Commission. Increased public attention and contestation render the diffuse public a more relevant stakeholder for Europe’s central agenda-setter because future competence transfers to Brussels are more likely to be scrutinized in the public realm. This incentivizes Commission actors to generate widely dispersed regulatory benefits through its policy initiatives, particularly where an initiative covers publicly salient issues. Applying this expectation to 17 European consumer policy initiatives suggests that the Commission orients its policy proposals towards wide-spread consumer interest during periods of high EU politicization and issue salience. However, the mechanism is constrained by internal turf conflicts and anticipated Council preferences. These findings highlight that politicization entails both chances and risks for further, policy-driven integration in Europe

A Bird's Eye View: Supranational EU Actors on Twitter

Given the politicization of European integration, effective public communication by the European Union (EU) has gained importance. Especially for rather detached supranational executives, social media platforms offer unique opportunities to communicate to and engage with European citizens. Yet, do supranational actors exploit this potential? This article provides a bird’s eye view by quantitatively describing almost one million tweets from 113 supranational EU accounts in the 2009-2021 period, focusing especially on the comprehensibility and publicity of supranational messages. We benchmark these characteristics against large samples of tweets from national executives, other regional organizations, and random Twitter users. We show that the volume of supranational Twitter has been increasing, that it relies strongly on the multimedia features of the platform, and outperforms communication from and engagement with other political executives on many dimensions. However, we also find a highly technocratic language in supranational messages, skewed user engagement metrics, and high levels of variation across institutional and individual actors and their messages. We discuss these findings in light of the legitimacy and public accountability challenges that supranational EU actors face and derive recommendations for future research on supranational social media messages

Jade: Learning the Problem Domain through Collaborative Modeling

Software development depends on the ability of analysts to obtain knowledge from domain experts and learn the problem domain. Traditional methods for eliciting information do not fulfill the needs of analysts. In this paper, we describe Jade, a collaborative application to assist on the development of object oriented software. Adopting Jade, analysts may shift the task of modeling to domain experts. Hence, they can focus on learning the domain as the domain experts create and test the model

Going full circle: the need for procedural perspectives on EU responsiveness

Research on policy responsiveness of the European Union has adopted the systemic model from national contexts. This focusses on the static congruence or the dynamic adaptation of aggregated policy output and similarly aggregated public opinion. Approaches in this vein provide relevant insights and uncover a surprising degree of EU responsiveness. Yet, this debate contribution argues that they only insufficiently capture indirect accountability chains and the emerging challenges of public EU politicization and mediatization. We establish the need for procedural perspectives that addresses how the different EU institutions perceive and digest public opinion and subsequently influence it through communication. To further this research agenda, we sketch the contours of a procedural model by highlighting possible variation at the input, throughput and output stages. Going full circle, we suggest, allows us to better understand the responses to public opinion and their wider implications for the societal acceptance of the unfinished supranational polity

Conflict inside the European Commission is a key factor in shaping EU legislation

Why does the European Commission at times propose legislative drafts that provoke Member State opposition, that introduce strikingly high or low standards, or that actively contradict each other? Miriam Hartlapp, Julia Metz and Christian Rauh present findings from a study of 48 legislative drafting processes. They argue that while the Commission is often thought of as a unified actor, there is substantial disagreement within the Commission over the nature of legislative proposals. They write that studying this conflict is key to understanding the policies the institution proposes for Europe