EU Digital policy-making: a systematic literature review and paths for future research

Since a few years, the EU has been more and more active in digital policies. This phenomenon is particularly visible in the EU attempts to regulate multinational platforms activities, from taxes to online content and data protection. Accordingly, several political science studies have focused on the various aspects of EU digital policy-making, which can, at first glance, appear relatively scattered. To better structure this research field, a systematic literature review was conducted on 57 research articles about EU digital policy-making, retrieved on Google scholar and on the main journals on European integration. These articles were screened and coded using Nvivo. Three main lines of discussions emerge from this analysis. First, the focus on Artificial intelligence as a ‘pure’ digitalised object, as well as on the digital market, masks other transformations taking place in more traditional policy sectors affected by the digital transition. As such, it is not yet clear how to interpret political transformations occurring simultaneously in a nascent autonomous subsystem (the ‘digital’ sector) and within well-established policy sectors. Then, a part of the literature revolves around the idea of ‘digital sovereignty’. The emergence of this concept expresses the difficulties of EU institutions to exert control over the digital space, yet it remains to be seen to what extent this notion can be analytically developed to provide a multi-faced tool of analysis of EU power in a digital age. Finally, the literature focuses mainly on the power of private actors and of the European Commission. However, only few studies refer to the activities of standardisation bodies. As underlined by works inspired by the Science and technologies literature, we believe that a true understanding of power in EU digital policy-making must include a focus on technical bodies and infrastructures, where political decisions are translated into digital devices (hardware, software, and coding).