Conference Agenda

This paper delves into the leadership dynamics at the apex of the administrative hierarchy within the European Parliament, seeking to comprehend the degree to which administrative leadership has played a role in shaping both the institution and the broader political framework of the European Parliament. Drawing on an institutional approach, administrative leadership is defined as behaviour that moulds the institutional character of an organization and contributes to the development of a polity. The article also posits that leadership is context-dependent and influenced by the political development of the European Parliament. Based on high-level interviews with Secretary Generals who led the European Parliament's administration from 1986 to 2022, the findings indicate that administrative leadership has an institutional character, but it varies according to the historical political context of the European Parliament. The conclusion underscores the necessity of studying political and administrative leadership together as public leadership to understand how the European Parliament leads in the European Union.

Recent scholarship has found that institutional and administrative factors may impact asylum policies in Europe. This reaffirms that States remain the primary implementers and defenders of the international protection system. However, these studies provide only a partial explanation to the complex environment surrounding asylum decisions.The different formal structures involved in decision-making should also be taken into account. The paper examines how administrative structures affect decision-making in national asylum systems, by using a Qualitative Comparative Analysis methodology. The quality of asylum decision-making is influenced by several factors, including political isolation, administrative capacity, historical experience, the number of asylum claims lodges, the geographical location of the host country, the political context and the street level bureaucrats within the administration.The determinants proposed for this study have been extensively documented and are explained in the proposal.

Every democratic political system can be characterized by the presence of political actors’ competing views in various policy areas. The European Union is not an exception in this regard. Nevertheless, the European Union (EU) is also based on fundamental values as envisaged in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. These core values should be common to all EU Member States and the EU as a whole. In a certain way, we can think about the EU’s core values as being out of the scope of ‘normal politics’ dominated ideological divisions or other kinds of divides such as North-South, East-West, or large-small Member States to name a few. However, political developments of the last decades have shown us that even when it comes to topics such as the protection of democracy or guarantees of the rule of law, political actors at the EU level are not necessarily as united as one would expect. The aim of this article is to evaluate whether there are any observable cleavages in EU politics within the field of EU’s fundamental values. By doing so, the analysis targets the only directly elected EU institution and arguably the most vocal proponent of the EU democracy: the European Parliament. This study intends to identify and analyze the positions of relevant political actors within the European Parliament concerning recent and broader instances when the EU core values came to the forefront, namely the rule of law crisis and Article 7 mechanism, and EP’s reaction to the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine. This analysis builds on data gathered from the parliamentary debates, EU political parties and EP groups’ documents, and interviews with the Members of the European Parliament.