The EU Through its Actors (Elites, Interest Groups, Civil Society)

Understanding the EU by focusing not on its institutions, treaties or documents but on what the actors – officials, civil society representatives and political elites – that are involved in it on a day to day contributes to explain the abovementioned structures as result of underlying social processes of cooperation, and competition between different social groups. This allows addressing questions about biases in representation, change or insulation of specific policies and can foster new research approaches to the EU. The section invites panel and paper submissions related to one or more of the following dimensions. 1) Newcomers to the EU: policy innovation in the EU and new actors. The EU tends to present itself as the appropriate level of regulation for new technologies, the latest of which is the AI Act project. This is usually related to the EU’s market power. However, the role of institutional entrepreneurs – Commission officials or MEPs – and external actors – companies, civil society coalitions, consultancies – in bringing these issues to the EU is more often neglected. Also, the representation and alliances of actors in each policy changes, with cooperative actors in some fields allied with others. 2) Innovations in the field of eurocracy. Brussels is often conceived as a relatively closed and stable policy field. However, several new socio-political dynamics are at play, from internal redistribution of power between EU services to the arrival to Brussels of representatives of far-right parties or governments. 3) New analytical and methodological approaches. Studying actors and their practices requires specific methods, such as prosopography, sequence analyses or Multiple correspondence analyses (MCA), etc. These approaches, not often used by other perspectives in the EU studies, may contribute to bring new data and understandings to the study of the EU.