This article provides the first-ever analysis of the structure of public preferences for asylum and refugee policy, a highly politicized policy area that has attracted little scholarly attention to date. We first conceptualise the core dimensions of asylum and refugee policy and then conduct an original conjoint experiment with 12,000 respondents across eight European countries to examine how different policy designs impact on public support. Our results demonstrate that Europeans are generally committed to policies that provide protection to asylum-seekers and refugees but this commitment tends to be contingent upon policy features which allow for a means of control, namely through the implementation of limits or conditions. We find this pattern of preferences to be remarkably similar in both the old and more recent EU Member States that we surveyed. Our results imply that some aspects of the current model of the international refugee system are misaligned with the more control-based model that Europeans would prefer. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of existing research and ongoing political debates about policy reforms.
While the geopolitical rivalry between the European Union (EU) and Russia over their common neighborhood has increasingly attracted academic and public attention, relatively little is known of its actual influence on domestic institutions and policies. This special issue aims to address this deficit by investigating the joint impact of the EU and Russia on the domestic dynamics of sectoral reform in neighboring countries (NCs) -a key declared goal of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) and the Eastern Partnership (EaP) -in the areas of trade, natural resources, and migration and mobility. It examines the nature of the instruments deployed by the EU and Russia to change domestic reform processes and their impact on domestic actors in the post-Soviet space. This introductory article outlines the key research questions to which answers have been sought by experts in their respective fields and summarizes their key empirical findings in the context of broader conceptual debates. Overall, the contributions to this special issue find a strong disconnect between participation in the EU's or Russia's macro-frameworks for regional integration and domestic sectoral reforms. We show that despite the increasing external competition over the post-Soviet space, domestic actors remain the key agents to account for the pattern of change in the contested neighborhood.
This article revisits institutional constraints to political budget cycles (PBCs) in the enlarged European Union (EU). Based on a panel of 25 Member States, we show that governments frequently fiscally stimulate the economy prior to elections. We argue that the occurrence of PBCs in the enlarged EU can be well explained by a peculiar interaction of two prominently discussed institutional constraints: fiscal institutions and media strength. Fiscal rules only help to limit the extent of PBCs in countries where the media is relatively weak, whereas they fail to do so in countries that host a strong press. Suggesting that this may be due to the usage of creative accounting practices in weaker media environments, we conclude that a powerful press remains key to eradicating PBCs in the EU.
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