Project Details
Projekt
Competence, control, and joint procurement in the EU
Applicant
Professor Dr. Philipp Genschel
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 532657320
Recent crisis events from Covid-19 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine have triggered demands to centralize public procurement in the EU in order to ease supply bottlenecks in strategic resources - vaccines, energy, ammunition, computer chips. This project analyses the creation, configuration, and use of EU instruments of joint procurement across sectors and over time. 1) Empirically, the project traces the emergence (and phasing out) of EU instruments of joint procurement since 1957. It maps the institutional features of these instruments and records the intensity of their use for resource mobilization. 2) Theoretically, the project accounts for variance in the creation, configuration, and use of procurement instruments in a competence-control perspective. It investigates the sources of demand for EU competence for joint procurement, as well as the demand for national control of EU procurement policy. It theorizes the tradeoffs between both demands and explains the ways in which they shape EU decision making on joint procurement. 3) Analytically, the project engages in a mixed-methods design combining observational and experimental, and quantitative and qualitative approaches. The project is organized into three work packages: 1) Work package 1 develops the competence-control framework (see Jachtenfuchs’ overall description of the Research Unit). The basic tenet is that competence for joint procurement and national control of joint procurement are inversely related: one tends to undermine the other. The work package develops hypotheses about the determinants of political demands for competence and control as well as for the consequences of competence-control tradeoffs for the creation, configuration, and use of EU procurement instruments. 2) Work package 2 analyzes joint procurement quantitatively. Most importantly, it creates a comprehensive dataset of the creation, configuration, and use of EU instruments of joint procurement which allows to map trends and patterns across sectors and over time. Based on the data set, work package 2 performs a statistical analysis of the correlates of joint procurement. Finally, the work package will conduct a survey experiment of public attitudes towards joint procurement drawing on the EUI/ YouGov Solidarity in Europe (SiE) survey the PI is co-directing. 3) Work package 3 analyzes joint procurement qualitatively. It uses comparative historical case studies to reconstruct the decision processes leading to the (non-)creation, configuration, and use of EU instruments of joint procurement. The focus is on three policy areas in which joint procurement has been an issue but led to different outcomes. In health policy instruments for the joint procurement have been created and used. In energy, instruments of joint procurement have been created but hardly used. In defense, there have been many proposals for joint procurement which never resulted in the creation or use of relevant instruments (yet).
DFG Programme
Research Units
