Steering or Solving? Organizational Responses to Attack and Failure Crises in the EU

How do different types of crises reshape the internal organization of EU institutions? While crises are widely recognized as catalysts for institutional change, existing accounts offer limited theoretical guidance on what type of organizational change different crises produce. This paper adapts the attack/failure crisis typology to explain organizational responses in the European Commission and Council of the EU, comparing the rule of law crisis (2017-2024) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022). I theorize that crisis type shapes the orientation of organizational change. Attack crises, which originate in intentional challenges to the polity's fundamental values, heighten political contestation and generate demands for enforcement, compliance monitoring, and coordination to sustain collective commitments against defection. Organizational responses should therefore exhibit steering orientation: changes concentrated on political management, negotiation coordination, and enforcement capacity. Failure crises, which originate in unintentional shocks that overwhelm existing policy capacity, foreground functional breakdown and implementation deficits. Organizational responses should exhibit operational orientation: changes concentrated on technical coordination, resource mobilization, and problem-solving infrastructure. To test this framework, I code all crisis-relevant organizational activity in both institutions, including creation of new bodies, activation of dormant structures, procedural adjustments, and responsibility reallocations, scoring each change on steering and operational dimensions. The rule of law crisis, as an internal attack on EU constitutional principles, should produce steering-oriented changes such as monitoring mechanisms and enforcement coordination. The pandemic, as a capacity-overwhelm failure, should produce operationally-oriented changes such as HERA, joint procurement bodies, and crisis management protocols. This paper contributes to institutionalist theories of crisis-driven change by specifying how crisis origins shape not only policy outputs but also the administrative architecture that produces them, extending the attack/failure framework from macro-level boundary reconfiguration to meso-level organizational design.