Project Details
Projekt
Competence, control, and the reconfiguration of the EU’s finances
Applicant
Professor Dr. Markus Jachtenfuchs
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 532657320
The goals of the project are to provide a theoretical account and a comprehensive empirical analysis of the mobilization of financial resources by the EU and the controls attached to them and an analysis of the significance of these competence-control tradeoffs effects for EU polity formation. The project aims to provide a theoretical account of the structure of EU finances (the regular budget and extra-budgetary funds) in terms of financial resources and their control and the factors driving this structure and its changes over time. More specifically, it asks which competence-control tradeoffs shape the finances of the EU, what causes these tradeoffs and how they evolve. By analyzing finances, the project will look at a dimension of polity-building that state-oriented theories have found to be of high importance and conceptualize the link between the integration of financial resources, their control and the development of the EU. The explanation of the evolution and outcome of competence-control tradeoffs will be based on the interaction between the demand and supply of competence and control from specific actors. Empirically, the project aims to provide a systematic description of the EU’s finances and their controls since the 1950s. The goal is to be as comprehensive as possible and cover all financial resources available to the EU, permanent or time-limited, within the regular budget or outside of it and the statutory, constitutional, judicial, and political controls attached to them. The comprehensive empirical approach makes it possible to look at the differences in the competence-control tradeoffs in the various schemes in the governance of the EU’s finances across topics and over time. The project will create a dataset on the finances of the EU which includes financial data and their controls on a yearly basis. It will also perform a quantitative text analysis on the demand for EU fiscal competence and its controls. Comparative case studies will probe into causal mechanisms of EU competence-control tradeoffs at critical junctures.
DFG Programme
Research Units
