Schmidt Publishes Journal Article on EU Governance
Vivien Schmidt, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent journal article examining the state of European Union governance.
Schmidt’s article, entitled “Rethinking EU Governance: From ‘Old’ to ‘New’ Approaches to Who Steers Integration,” was published in the Journal of Common Market Studies.
From the abstract of the article:
EU scholars have long been divided on the main drivers of European integration. The original approaches were at odds on whether EU level intergovernmental actors or supranational actors were better able to exercise coercive or institutional power to pursue their interests, with Andrew Moravcsik’s liberal intergovernmentalism serving as a baseline for one side of those debates. Newer approaches are similarly divided, but see power in terms of ideational innovation and consensus‐focused deliberation. The one thing old and new approaches have in common is that they ignore the parliamentarists, new and old. What all sides to the debates have failed to recognize is the reality of a ‘new’ EU governance of more politically charged dynamics among all three main EU actors exercising different kinds of power. This has roots not only in the national level’s increasing ‘politicsagainstpolicy’ and its bottom up effects on the EU level. It also stems from EU institutional interactions at the top, and its ‘policywithpolitics’.
Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University. Her research focuses on European political economy, institutions, democracy, and political theory. In 2018, she was appointed as a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor — France’s highest honor. She has published a dozen books, over 200 scholarly journal articles or chapters in books, and numerous policy briefs and comments, most recently on the Eurozone crisis. Her current work focuses on democratic legitimacy in Europe, with a special focus on the challenges resulting from the Eurozone crisis, and on methodological theory, in particular on the importance of ideas and discourse in political analysis (discursive institutionalism). She is a 2018 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for a US-EU comparative study of the ‘rhetoric of discontent.’