EUINACTION: Willingness and Capacity for EU Policy Action in Times of Crises: Conflicts, Positions and Outcomes (EUINACTION)

Global financial, migration, security and pandemic crises demand coordination between national governments, which the European Union (EU) historically facilitates. Yet, the surge of Eurosceptic, nationalist and populist political parties and movements across Europe hinders discussions about EU cooperation on various issues. This raises the question of how these competing pressures affect EU policy integration. The project aims to inform responsive and effective policy reforms with findings about the willingness and capacity for European integration in specific policy areas. The consortium will seek to establish under which conditions politicians and institutions in the EU pursue an increase or a decrease of the EU’s policy competences; when these actors manage to assert their positions in the policy-making processes; and to what extent their positions respond to public demands across and within member states.

The researchers will apply state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) methods to textual data (party manifestos, speeches from the European and national parliaments, EU legislative proposals and acts) to analyse the policy goals and policy-making influence of different actors in the EU. This will enable them to explain the mechanisms that drive or obstruct policy change at the European level across policy areas.