Sanctioning democratic backsliding in the European Union: transnational salience, negative intergovernmental spillover, and policy change

Blauberger, Michael and Sedelmeier, Ulrich ORCID: 0000-0001-6963-4296 (2024) Sanctioning democratic backsliding in the European Union: transnational salience, negative intergovernmental spillover, and policy change. Journal of European Public Policy. ISSN 1350-1763

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Abstract

In 2021, the European Union (EU) started to use material sanctions to punish democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland. This policy change presents a puzzle for the existing literatures on international responses to backsliding. We theorise two distinctive processes that can account for why EU policy changed from inaction to enforcement. First, once the issue of backsliding in a member state has attained public salience across the other member states, their mainstream parties face domestic electoral incentives to support sanctions against illiberal governments abroad. Second, once backsliding governments also disrupt intergovernmental policy cooperation and threaten common policies at the EU level, even those actors who had been reluctant to defend EU values become more inclined to use sanctions. We demonstrate the plausibility of our explanation with evidence, first, of the increasing public and electoral salience of backsliding in other EU member states, and second, of the occurrence of a negative intergovernmental spillover through increasing attacks by backsliding member state governments against common policies.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rjpp20
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	International Relations
Subjects:	J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) J Political Science > JZ International relations
Date Deposited:	14 May 2024 10:00
Last Modified:	15 Aug 2024 23:37
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/123427

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