Unpolitics in the EU: Comparing the impact of populist governments across policy areas I

Abstract

Until recently, we knew very little about the role of populist governments in EU policy-making. The "crucial case" of refugee distribution in the EU has demonstrated that their behaviour is ruled by "unpolitics": they reject formal and informal rules of decision-making if these are not conducive to their preferred outcome; they reject traditional means of ensuring compromises such as package-deals and side-payments; and they reject the final solution and exploit the ensuing deadlock to prove that the EU is weak and dysfunctional. However, to what extent is "unpolitics" a phenomenon unique to migration—an area prone to (nativist) populist capture? This is one of two panels aiming to compare the behaviour of populist governments in different policy areas to better understand under which conditions "unpolitics" are more likely to be used in EU policy-making. The two panels aim to better understand how unpolitics is used by populist governments as a specific behaviour to mobilise domestic constituencies. We want to compare whether issues that can be defined as "low risk" and "high gain" —namely, issues that can be politicised but where the harm provided by a non-decision is neither immediate nor blatant – are more prone to unpolitics and whether specific venues make it easier for populist governments to adopt this behaviour. Hence these two panels examine a range of policy areas (EMU, rule of law, gender, development and foreign policy) to better understand how the presence of populist governments has affected the framing and settlement of policy problems in a multi-level setting.

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