European integration in matters of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) has progressed with the Treaty of Lisbon, the acquis is consolidated, EU institutions gained in competence and the legislative procedure favors the majority rule instead of intergovernmentalism. Nevertheless, JHA remains a controversial issue area for state governments, as they face the conundrum of external (migration flows) and internal pressure (populism and extremism).
Focusing on agency in EU institutions, the project aims at evaluating actor’s strategies in intra-institutional decision-making, by establishing a typology of strategies, determining their conditions of application and success. The main goal is to open the "black-box" of the Council of Ministers, where national governments exploit the topic of migration, borders and security to respond to populist pressure. Case studies are used to investigate actor strategies in different contextual settings and evaluate their success. Using process tracing, qualitative content analysis and in-depth expert interviews, salient cases are analyzed: “Schengen Governance Reform” (2011-2013), “Smart Borders Package” (2013-on hold), Asylum relocation quotas (2015-ongoing).
Preliminary results show that state-interest strategies, for example arguing with domestic populist pressure, are unsuccessful in absence of a supporting coalition by influential states, non-coalition based strategies are generally unsuccessful. Between institutions, there is an increasing battle of competences, with the European Parliament challenging the Commission and the Council alike. Both within and between institutions, the most common conflict settlement strategy is resorting to informality; conflict resolution is not political (ex. vote trading) or financial (ex. side payments) but textual: adopting a general wording and leaving as much discretion as possible to states for implementation.
