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Open research questions in European Union Policy and Governance

280 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 11,359 European Union Policy and Governance papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • Nevertheless, while a decision on the full application of the Schengen acquis in Croatia was adopted in the December 2022 JHA ministerial meeting, no consensus could be reached on the decision on the full membership of Bul- garia and Romania, as Austria and the Netherlands still had concerns.

    Achievements of the Hungarian Presidency of the Council in Promoting the Schengen Area as a Strategic Asset for the EU · 2026 · DOI

  • Phenomenon-driven research (PDR) establishes when a phenomenon warrants investigation but offers little structured guidance on diagnosing why a state change occurred or which aspect of the phenomenon drove it.

    Analysing State Changes: A Diagnostic Framework For Phenomenon-Driven Research · 2026

  • Do citizens support deeper market integration when they perceive that their state retains the ability to opt out? Do preferences for harmonization versus flexibility vary by policy domain? Future work should explore how preferences for “opt-out” provisions and shared authority interact with public attitudes toward the EU. This is an important limitation, because Nordic elites have typically adopted a strongly economic perspective on what https://doi.

    New or old politics? Understanding public preferences for the EU single market · 2026 · DOI

  • At the same time, the institutional structure of the EU has a number of features due to its status as a supranational association, whose authority is strictly limited to the competences conferred by its Member States.

    The Role of the European Commission in Soil Protection in the European Union · 2025 · DOI

  • However, in-depth academic studies that shed light on its authentic and significant contributions to integrating the Andean Community (CAN) are still lacking.

    European Union interregionalism in the Andean Community integration process: a political, economic, and cultural analysis · 2024 · DOI

  • Conversely, the latter period—2011 to 2020—witnessed a proliferation of research, marked by an expansion into previously under-investigated topics, countries, and methodologies.

    Euroscepticism: a meta-analysis · 2024 · DOI

  • However, it remains to be seen whether the EU CSDDD represents a first step towards much more far-reaching international standards leading to more fundamental progressive changes in the global economy.

    The EU CSDDD: Potential Entry Points for Transferring Power Resources within Global Value Chains · 2024 · DOI

  • The juxtaposition of the EU’s actual response and the obligations written on paper may lead to the conclusion that the EU’s actions are insufficient under EU law.

    The Polish–Belarusian Border Crisis and the (Lack of) European Union Response · 2023 · DOI

  • This article aims to further examine the stabilitocratic argument and its potentially destabilizing implications in terms of the EU/IC’s practices in BiH while focusing on their reaction to the recent still under-researched 2018 civic protests and bottom-up mobilization triggered by the violent death of young student David Dragičević.

    Bosnia and Herzegovina at 26: Probing the Country’s “Stabilitocracy” Through the Case of David Dragičević · 2023 · DOI

  • While ES theory has long been interested in regional international societies, its general approach remains limited to a methodologically internationalist frame that fails to capture the dynamism and historical change of regional formations.

    European Regional International Society and the Political Economy of the Global Sugar Regime · 2023 · DOI

  • While previous studies have investigated whether and under which conditions individuals support or reject different types of EU solidarity, little is known about how political parties position themselves on the issue.

    All for One, and One for All? Analysing Party Positions on EU Solidarity in Germany in Challenging Times · 2023 · DOI

  • Today, this fervent yet understudied period of racial theorisation at the margins of Europe has come to light, revealing the plastic, unstable, and often contradictory ways in which Italians have been racially categorised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by positivist scientists and anthropologists such as Cesare Lombroso, Alfredo Niceforo, and Giuseppe Sergi, and later during the Fascist Era, by Aryanist scholars and intellectuals.

    Theorising from the European South: Italy, Racial Evaporations, and the Black Mediterranean · 2023 · DOI

  • The findings contribute to filling in a significant gap in the literature about Bologna in the UK in making a distinction between its two memberships in the EHEA and the differences and complexities of the roles they play in constructing UK’s overarching agenda in HE particularly in the post-Brexit context.

    UK membership(s) in the European Higher Education Area post-2020: A ‘Europeanisation’ agenda · 2022 · DOI

  • The data analyses illustrate that an integrated but fragmented cooperation network could be explored, and in several aspects remarkable differences can be measured on country-, regional, and sub-regional levels implying that territorial and institutional factors might have an important role in this specific area as well.

    Patterns of Cooperation in the European Defence Sector – A Network-Approach-Based Investigation of EU Projects · 2022 · DOI

  • The article additionally points to concerns about the resulting far-reaching changes in material constitutional law and fundamental rights protection; these are particularly acute for the post-totalitarian and post-authoritarian constitutional tradition, which, whilst adhered to by more than half of the Member States in both Western and Central and Eastern parts of Europe, is little known in the mainstream EU discourses.

    A Paradigm Shift in the Role of Courts? Disappearance of Judicial Review through Mutual Trust and other Neofunctionalist Tenets of EU Law · 2022 · DOI

  • We conducted an online survey among students at the University of Göttingen (N=730) and asked them closed questions on the EU enlargement, the allocation of authority at the EU level, the way democracy works at the EU level, and an open question on their wish for the future of the EU.

    Integrationists, Critical Europeanists and Pessimist Europeanists: EU attitudes among students in a German university · 2022 · DOI

  • Abstract While extant work on British Euroscepticism has highlighted vestiges of historical empire imaginaries in discourses opposing EU integration, the emotional dynamics of such frames remain curiously underexplored.

    Euroscepticism, Anti‐Nostalgic Nostalgia and the Past Perfect Post‐Brexit Future · 2022 · DOI

  • Recent European-related events, including but not limited to the immigration crisis, international economic and political competition on a global scale (as well as relations with third parties such as Russia and the United States), prompt us to revise liberal intergovernmentalism as proposed by Andrew Moravcsik at the beginning of 90s last century.

    Between national interests and European values: towards the theory of Principled Intergovernmentalism · 2021 · DOI

  • Abstract Recent research indicates that bottom‐up EU politicization shapes top‐down EU policy enforcement, yet leaves open questions on the pervasiveness of these effects in policy areas that are depoliticized by design.

    Walking the Tightrope: Politicization and the Commission's Enforcement of the SGP* · 2021 · DOI

  • Considering that the EU has not yet defined the nature of the strategic partnership, the first objective of this paper is to identify the instrument from a general perspective and to distinguish it from the default category of cooperation.

    The EU concept of the 'Strategic Partnership': Identifying the 'unifying' criteria for the differentiation of Strategic Partners · 2020 · DOI

  • These two factors, widely identified in the literature as factors influencing small states’ performance, contributed to the Czech inability to shape GDPR at the European level, as well as the lacking information campaign and implementation domestically.

    Czech backlash against the GDPR: A small state’s mismatch between domestic and international priorities · 2020 · DOI

  • The Gray Zone engages with an under-researched field within the widely studied European Union (EU) border policy and migration studies: the everyday life and work of state agents patrolling the EU borders.

    Gregory Feldman. The Gray Zone. Sovereignty, Human Smuggling, and Undercover Police Investigation in Europe · 2020 · DOI

  • Ontologically, EU’s human rights policy (a) has been side-lined to the advantage of democracy promotion, (b) has not been analysed through the lenses of the partners, (c) has not been institutionally dissected.

    The perceived rationale, variegated institutional take and impact of the EU’s human rights policy in Armenia and Georgia · 2020 · DOI

  • Responsibility on this path to the EU, however, lies equally with the political leaders of this country who, unfortunately, do not work towards strengthening the state of BiH; with the Peace Implementation Council, which is insufficiently decisive about fulfilling its commitments; and finally also with BiH citizens who have allowed their domination by ethnic parties and who would rather leave the country than oppose the growing hopelessness.

    Twenty five years of the Dayton Agreement: peace project or difficult journey towards a functional state · 2020 · DOI

  • Adapting the hypotheses put forth in absorption literature to the specifics of the EIF, I confront capacity-based explanations to (under-explored) preference-based ones in a comparative fashion.

    Does administrative capacity matter? The absorption of the European Fund for the integration of migrants · 2020 · DOI

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280 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 11,359 European Union Policy and Governance papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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