Politics & Public Policy

By Karolina Borońska-Hryniewiecka (Polish Academy of Science & Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne) & Jan Kotýnek Krotký (Masaryk University) On 9 May 2026, we celebrate Europe Day and the fourth anniversary of the closing event of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) hailed as a landmark transnational democratic experiment. During CoFoE hundreds of […]

Kateryna Suprun In the increasingly turbulent economic environment facing many European higher education institutions (HEIs) (Pruvot et al., 2025), performance-based funding (PBF) remains a popular instrument for allocating at least part of core public funding (European Commission, 2023). Traditionally, PBF involves governments rewarding HEIs for meeting specific objectives – an approach often assumed to improve […]

Although I am currently immersed in the London local elections — speaking with residents, listening to concerns, and experiencing democracy at its most immediate level — I didn’t want to miss the chance to reflect on Hungary’s 12 April vote. I have analysed Hungarian politics for many years, and this election is among the most […]

Cristina Pinna Over the past decade, research security has moved from a technical concern discussed among specialists to a central issue in European research policy. What began as a debate about protecting sensitive technologies has expanded into a broader question about how knowledge should be governed in a changing geopolitical environment. Today, it shapes funding […]

Zahra Jafarova In the shifting landscape of European higher education, neoliberal reforms used to be celebrated as tools for financial efficiency and institutional autonomy. But how does such a market-oriented framework function when it is instrumentalized by a regime drifting away from democracy towards authoritarianism? In Hungary, the transformation of the university system stands out […]

This piece was originally published on the UK in a Changing Europe site.   It’s something of a truism to say that Brexit is a process, not an event, but nowhere is this more evident than in the UK’s continuing difficulties in managing the pieces of legislation it adopted during its time as a member […]

By Marius Guderjan (Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Mario Kölling (Department of Political Science, Spanish National Distance Education University) Although the COVID-19 pandemic seems something of the past and meanwhile overshadowed by other crises, we should still remember its profound impact on public health, people, employment and businesses. In 2020, the real […]

By David Howarth (University of Luxembourg) and Lucia Quaglia (University of Bologna) Financial market integration has been a core objective of European integration since the 1950s. Over several decades, the European Union (EU) has adopted hundreds of legislative acts aimed at removing barriers to cross-border finance and harmonising the regulation and supervision of capital markets. […]

I notice it’s been some six months since my last post here, which reflects on both the new pace of UK-EU relations and the lack of anything useful to add to the debate. I did bestir myself to write about the return of finance-based framing back in November, as various people noticed this was a […]

Bao-Chau Pham When the European Union‘s Artificial Intelligence Act finally entered into force on 1 August 2024, it was widely described as a landmark: the world’s first comprehensive framework for regulating AI. Throughout the policy-making process from early 2018 onwards, much of the debates focused on how the Act regulates – its risk categories and […]