Does Europeanization stick? National policies and sustained Europeanization strategies by domestic migrant and refugee organizations

Abstract

How domestic civil society organizations (CSOs) “Europeanize” their political activities has become a popular area of research. Most Europeanization research has focused on how groups Europeanize, or why some choose to Europeanize and others do not. Although these are important questions, scholars have not thoroughly investigated what drives the Europeanization of organizations’ political activity in the first place, or how enduring it tends to be. Using survey data of CSOs across Europe working in the area of migrant and refugee rights, along with domestic policy data, this study aims to fill this gap by analyzing how domestic policies facilitate or constrain sustained interactions with European Union (EU) officials and EU organizations. It contributes to research that aims to determine whether Europeanization tends to resemble sporadic interactions, or regular patterns that endure over time. This study goes beyond past research in two main ways: First, it broadens the empirical lens by including CSOs across every EU Member State, and secondly, it adds a precise temporal dimension in evaluating the frequency of interaction with specific EU actors over given periods of time, allowing for an assessment of how enduring (or sporadic) Europeanization tends to be on a larger scale and with more precision than previous studies have been able to achieve.