Research
Public Reinsurance in Multilevel Polities (EUROPE RE)
Director: Christian Freudlsperger
Duration: 2024-2029
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Starting Grant
Amount: CHF 1.8 Mio
Summary
A decade of turmoil has transformed the European Union (EU). In the ‘polycrisis’, the European polity repeatedly reached breaking point. Equally regularly, however, the EU found ways out of its predicament, future-proofing its institutions and protecting its member states. While a broad literature explicates these crisis reactions, the general direction in which they have driven the EU is not yet understood. Which kind of EU has emerged from the polycrisis? Answering this question is crucial to grasping the purpose and evolution of international authority in an era of transboundary risks and crisis. EUROPE RE provides a novel response, suggesting the EU has become a provider of ‘public reinsurance’ to its member states.
To craft a reinsurance analysis of European institutional development, EUROPE RE draws on legal and economic analyses of private reinsurance and applies them to the public realm. Private reinsurance increases and diversifies the risk pool of insurers while remaining invisible to individual policyholders. In the public sector, the territorial state acts as citizens’ primary insurer. Its insurance capacity, however, is called into question by mounting transboundary risks. To support states in resulting crises, the EU has created a series of standing capacities (e.g. ESM, SURE, Frontex, RescEU). This reinsurance allows the member states to maintain their primary responsibility for insuring citizens, to which the EU retains a merely indirect link.
EUROPE RE proposes a new framework to understand the contemporary ‘nature of the beast’ that is the EU. The project applies state-of-the-art methods to collect survey, panel, and case data on the emergence, effectiveness, and effects of public risk management in the EU and other multilevel systems. This allows EUROPE RE to provide a novel understanding of the purpose of European integration after the polycrisis, and a fresh perspective on its potential future trajectories.
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Publications
Christian Freudlsperger (2024): Europe Re: the rise of the European reinsurance polity, Journal of European Public Policy, DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2024.2314742.
Joint Implementation in the EU (IMPLEMENT.EU)
Director: Christian Freudlsperger
Duration: 2024-2028, renewable for another four-year period
Funding: German Research Council (DFG, lead agency) and Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF): Research Unit “Re-Configuring Europe”
Amount: CHF 600’000
Summary
The core interest of this project is to analyse why, how, and to which effect the EU relies on “joint implementation”, i.e., the physical involvement of supranational alongside national resources in the monitoring and enforcement of EU policies on the ground.
The “polycrisis” has repeatedly highlighted the implementation deficits in the EU multilevel system. In reaction, the EU has increasingly relied on the “joint implementation” model. A notable example is the creation of the European Border and Coast Guard (Frontex) and the European Union Asylum Agency (EUAA) to support the practical implementation of the Schengen and Dublin acquis in the member states. Other examples concern the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) or the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO).
Joint implementation formulates a novel response to the dilemma between competence and control in multilevel systems. At the same time, joint implementation is not a panacea. When dissatisfied principals seek to enhance their autonomous competence or control while being enmeshed in a compulsory system of joint implementation, the model produces inefficiencies. While control-driven actors can block joint implementation, which leads to ineffective or non-implementation, competence-driven actors can shirk their collective responsibilities and engage in uncoordinated action, leading to responsibility-shifting or obstruction.
To understand the emergence, institutionalisation, and evolution of the EU’s recourse to joint implementation, the project envisions a mixed methods design. It combines, first, the collection of supply-side quantitative data on the emergence and size of EU-level resources for joint implementation with, second, natural language processing (NLP) methods to trace the demand for EU-level implementation among political elites, and third, qualitative case studies of multilevel implementation in three domains in which pressures for vertical cooperation occurred in the past years, namely immigration, law enforcement, and labour mobility.
Download Outline (PDF, 469 KB) (as PDF file for download)
Publications
Freudlsperger, C., Maricut-Akbik, A., & Migliorati, M. (2022). Opening Pandora’s Box? Joint Sovereignty and the Rise of EU Agencies with Operational Tasks. Comparative Political Studies, 55(12), 1983–2014, DOI: 10.1177/00104140211066223
Akbik, A., Freudlsperger, C., & Migliorati, M. (2024). Differentiated participation, uniform procedures: EU agencies in direct policy implementation. West European Politics, 47(3), 645–670, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2022.2161727