About our Projects

The unit consists of nine focused sub‑projects plus a coordination hub. Topics include boundary governance, crisis response, resource allocation, and institutional evolution—using both historical records and comparative case studies.

 

Mark Dawson

Populism and the Constitutional Re-Configuration of Europe

How do rising populist movements shape EU law?

This project led by Mark Daswon, examines how national control claims from populist parties engage with EU legal principles, and how the EU Courts respond, shedding light on whether populism constrains or reconfigures the Union’s legal order.
Philipp Genschel

Competence, control, and joint procurement in the EU

When will EU member states centralize public procurement at the EU level?
The project analyses the creation, configuration, and use of instruments of joint procurement in the EU. It traces the emergence and phasing out of EU procurement instruments empirically between 1957-2022 and across sectors.
Mattias Wendel

Courts as Cross-Level Guardians of Values— Re-Balancing Competences Through Judicial Control in the EU

Mattias Wendel’s project examines the role of courts in the EU. It focuses on the often neglected impact of cross-level judicial control on the horizontal separation of powers, i.e. the balance of competences between the legislative, executive and judicial branches.
Ana Bobić

Judicial conflict and the reconfiguration of control in the EU constitutional order

How do ordinary national courts contest and transform supranational judicial control in the EU? The project maps competence-control trade-offs in judicial contestation by the diverse and under-researched world of ordinary national courts.
Markus Jachtenfuchs

Competence, control, and the reconfiguration of the EU’s finances

The EU’s finances project investigates how the EU has mobilized financial resources over time, how these resources have been shaped by the tension between competence and control, and what these tradeoffs reveal about EU polity formation.
Christian Freudlsperger

Joint implementation in the EU: Squaring the competence-control circle? (IMPLEMENT.EU)

The core interest of this project is to analyse why, how, and to which effect the EU relies on “joint implementation”, i.e., the physical involvement of supranational alongside national resources in the monitoring and enforcement of EU policies on the ground. 
Miriam Hartlapp

Reconfiguring EU through Spending (ReSpend)

How does the EU spend its money?  

The ReSpend project led by Miriam Hartlapp examines how the European Union allocates and disburses financial resources, particularly in the areas of social and industrial policy. The project applies competence-control (cc) theory to understand how institutional arrangements affect EU spending practices and outcomes.
Frank Schimmelfennig

Reconfiguring EU external boundaries: competence and control

The integration crises of the past decade have put the configuration and governance of the external borders of the European Union (EU) in the political and scientific focus.This project examines the development of the external border regime of the EU from the vantage point of competence-control-theory.
Susanne K. Schmidt

Courts as Governors in the Internal Market? - the interaction between judicial control and competence

How does judicial control influence the implementation and interpretation of EU law by member states? Focusing on case studies in Germany, France, and others the project examines how case laws shape both the enforcement and the very definition of EU competences.
Markus Jachtenfuchs

Coordination Project

Apart from facilitating the work of the group as a whole by organising meetings, interactions and external communication, the coordination project has two substantive tasks: 1. Support and develope a competence-control theory of European integration and 2. Coordinate and create a comprehensive EU resources dataset with a common theoretical framework.