Change against the odds: crisis policy feedback in a politicised EU

Since 2008, EU governments repeatedly pooled their means of fighting severe crises. This happened in an environment where EU policy-making became more politicised, above all polarising and salient. Politicisation is widely considered to constrain EU decision-making. We study how this constraint was overcome by crisis policy feedback. Our case is sovereign bailout funding, which in the 2010s had politicised EU fiscal governance as never before, raising high hurdles for further fiscal institution-building. Yet, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), introduced in 2020-2021, amounted to pre-emptive bailout funding that was publicly and controversially discussed. Based on policy process tracking data, we argue that elites strategically politicised the economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic by critically referencing the policy legacy of the European Stability Mechanism in the Euro Area crisis. Our analysis thus provides evidence for negative policy feedback, driven by top-down politicisation. The wider significance of our finding is that politicisation may no longer be a constraint on European integration but facilitating contested polity formation.