In this session, PhD researchers, Giulio D’Arrigo and John Michaelis will present their ongoing doctoral research.
‘Building the Economic Governance of the European Union: The Institutionalisation of EU Economic Policy Coordination’
Speaker: Giulio d'Arrigo
Since its inception, the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the European Union (EU) has been structured around two central pillars: monetary policy and fiscal regulation. By contrast, the coordination of national structural policies has typically been seen as marginal and weakly effective. While this characterisation was indeed true in the early years of EMU, socio-economic policy coordination has gradually expanded in scope and become increasingly institutionalised, culminating in the current Recovery and Resilience Facility.
This development challenges postfunctionalist expectations that public politicisation constrains further European integration. At the same time, the balance of power within this domain has progressively shifted from the Council towards the European Commission, enabling it to build a steering capacity over domestic structural reforms. Through a process-tracing design analysing the development of its institutional architectures since the beginning of EMU (Broad Economic Policy Guidelines, Open Method of Coordination, European Semester, Recovery and Resilience Facility), my research seeks to uncover the mechanisms driving the gradual expansion and institutional thickening of socio-economic coordination in the EU. It does so following an abductive approach, primarily examining the behaviour of actors within the Commission and the Council, as well as the dynamics of positive and negative feedback within this institutional setting. Evidence will rely on elite interviews and document analysis.
‘Watching the Enemy: How Partisan Outgroups Drive Engagement with Policy Issues’
Speaker: John Michaelis
Which issues become politically salient? Research shows that individuals prioritize issues they consider urgent or personally relevant, yet they also engage with issues they themselves rank as low priority. This paper argues that associated political actors, not just policy content, shape this pattern: attaching a policy proposal to a disliked partisan outgroup may elevate peripheral issues into objects of contestation. Drawing on research showing that affective polarization is increasingly group-based rather than policy-driven, I propose two mechanisms through which outgroup cues generate engagement: threat-based vigilance, manifesting as information-seeking, and identity-based demarcation, manifesting as amplification. I test this using a conjoint survey experiment in Germany, where participants make pairwise choices between policy proposals randomly assigned to one of four parties. Willingness to share or click on a policy post serves as the outcome measure. Pre-treatment issue rankings identify low-priority domains for each respondent, enabling a direct test of whether outgroup cues elevate peripheral issues. The design provides causal identification of an effect that existing observational research can only correlate, explores potential mechanisms, and extends the largely U.S.-based literature on outgroup engagement to a multiparty context where negative partisanship operates under different structural conditions.
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