Project Details
Projekt
Reconfiguring EU through Spending (ReSpend)
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Miriam Hartlapp
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 532657320
After decades of liberalization and retreat of the state, current crisis responses show a great role of the expenditure state. At the national level, COVID-19 has been fought with massive market intervention, procurement of medical equipment, and large-scale short-term working schemes. The EU has also increased its financial powers with the Recovery Fund and Next Generation EU. These new funds, with other EU off-budget funds and the regular budget, make up the EU's financial resources. Understanding if and how these resources are used is relevant as (re)distribution has increased and is here to stay. With this aim, this project focuses on the process that lies between negotiating resources in Brussels and their decentralized implementation in member states. How does the EU spend its money? This research centers on rules and goals, the institutions and practices governing EU spending, and the effects of spending on policies and the EU political system. The three aims of the project are to capture and assess how EU money is spent, explain spending processes and outcomes with competence-control (cc) arrangements, and theorise the effects of spending on the EU political system. Empirically, the project offers an analysis of social and industrial policies historically, which is fundamental to addressing current economic and social challenges. Methodologically, it builds the first database on spending policy with indicators on the gap between allocation and disbursement (volume and targets) and institutional features of spending governance. It combines a quantitative analysis of spending patterns with an in-depth analysis of 16 cases, systematically selected to vary between social and industrial policy, over time, and in institutional features of spending governance. The results are expected to provide a comparative empirical and theoretical account of EU spending as a distinct phase between intergovernmental budget negotiations and decentralized implementation that highlights the role of control and its effect on the reconfiguration of the EU. The project is part of and contributes to the DFG Research Unit ‘Reconfiguring Europe: Between competence and control’ in two respects. First, it offers new data on a largely unstudied aspect of EU resources to understand the reconfiguration of the EU system when moving beyond the regulatory state (Majone 1993) towards an expenditure state (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2014). Second, the project offers insights into the role of the Commission in spending. Together with other implementation projects this allows the RU to bundle and theorize insights on the supranational level as governor controlled by member states.
DFG Programme
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