The article explores the Europeanisation of football, focusing on two dimensions of this process: its affective and regulatory dimension. Developments such as the creation of pan-European club competitions and growing cross-border movement of players mean that ‘Europe’ plays an ever more important role in football on an affective level. The same is true on a regulatory level, where EU law and policy have come to impact on various aspects of football, ranging from transfer rules, to club financing, to the sale of broadcasting rights. We argue that only by examining the interaction between these two dimensions can we truly understand what is ‘European’ about football. The article shows that there continues to be strong support in football for the cultural elements of the European Sport Model, including a commitment to local identity, sporting merit and solidarity. By contrast, its governance aspects are increasingly coming under pressure, as the recent European Super League saga illustrates. Our findings suggest that the EU can – and should – do more to improve regulatory standards in football and push for a greater representation of fans and other stakeholders that have currently no, or limited, voice in the football pyramid.

This article explores parallels between the ‘shunning’ and ‘seeking’ of membership of the EU in the context of Brexit and stalled enlargement in south-east Europe, via a focus on the partial, fragmentary and contested governance of citizenship. The case studies place Union citizenship into a wider political and socio-economic context, demonstrating its central importance as an enabler of personal freedom. At the same time, they highlight how the denial or removal of Union citizenship can engender individual strategies to recover lost or denied benefits. From the analysis, parallels emerge between Union citizenship and national citizenship; both offer a promise of equality, but a reality of differentiation and inequality. At the same time, by delving deep into the case studies, it proves possible to illuminate the complex and often ‘messy’ constitutional edifice of the European Union, involving sometimes contradictory processes of Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation affecting citizenship regimes at all levels.

This article places the current legal framework governing posted work within the debate on ‘Europeanisation’ in order to assess to what extent the Posted Workers Directive may be seen as a successful tool to ‘Europeanise’ national labour law systems as assessed against its dual objectives of promoting the transnational provision of services while also guaranteeing respect for the rights of workers. In doing so, the article contextualises and analyses the Posted Workers Directive which allows for the identification of remaining gaps in protection. The article concludes with an assessment of the European Commission’s most recent proposal to amend the Directive.

This article forges a link between support for European integration and adoption of tobacco advertisement restrictions in Swiss cantons. Leaning on the policy diffusion literature, this article argues that the more voters support deeper European integration, the more likely cantonal governments are to restrict tobacco advertising. Policymakers use voters’ support for more European integration as a signal that they support regulatory policies that are strongly associated with the European Union (EU) in the political and media debate, such as tobacco advertisement bans. This effect ought to be especially strong in the absence of adverse economic interests, such as the presence of the tobacco industry. To buttress these claims, the present article uses statistical analysis, specifically event-history analysis. Apart from the insights about Swiss tobacco control policy, this article contributes to our understanding of indirect EU influence on cantonal policymaking and policy diffusion.

In the EU accession literature, there is a tendency to downplay the role of discourse in facilitating norm diffusion, particularly when domestic resistance towards European norms is strong. The assumptions in this thinking are that critical deliberations and civil society activism simply lack the potency required to elicit norm conforming behaviour in accession states and that the only realistic hope for achieving this rests with the introduction of material incentives that make the costs of normative adaptation lower than its rewards. I focus on developments in the field of LGBT politics to challenge these assumptions and to specify the conditions under which discursive strategies are likely to stimulate the domestic uptake of contentious norms. I highlight shared identity as a crucial factor in the success of discursive influence, contending that under conditions of identity convergence, a cultural environment prevails in which norm promoters can more effectively ignite a process of deliberative reflection, shame norm-violators into conformance and cultivate resonance around controversial ideas. I develop these arguments through an analysis of LGBT and accession politics in Croatia and Serbia, contending that Croatia’s strong identification with Europe accelerated LGBT recognition there while Serbia’s relatively weaker identification with Europe slowed it down.

This article explores how Member States respond to the challenge of complying with EU law obligations, whilst remaining alert to the demands of domestic politics in the context of contentious areas of EU competence. It is argued that in the case of free movement we can see the United Kingdom drawing upon three overlapping strategies in order to tread the fine line ‘between law and political truth’: it exploits as much as possible any uncertainties within free movement law; it draws upon the proximate field of domestic immigration law in order to reinterpret free movement law; and it argues for new resources to be brought into the field of free movement, in particular resources which restrict the freedoms of Member States. A discursive frame of migration governance provides the analytical construction within which the argument is located. The article is therefore a contribution to debates about (legal) Europeanisation and compliance, as well as the more specific challenges facing the UK in the latter half of the 2010s, namely a renegotiation of and referendum on EU membership.

Based on extensive new empirical fieldwork (via a case study of the reform of the territorial State in 2007–2010), this article interrogates the meaning of the prefectoral institution in France. The central puzzle this article addresses is the survival of a pre-democratic institution – the Prefect in – a democratic, decentralizing and Europeanised Republic. Changing conditions have required institutional resilience and adaptation in a period of state restructuring and rescaling. The case study of the prefectures as old institutions is framed using language and tools of new institutionalism across three dimensions: the timing and sequence of decision-making, the logic of appropriateness, and interaction. Beyond the narrow case of the prefectures in France, the article makes the case for combining modes of institutionalist analysis in order to penetrate generalities about the black box of institutions.

This paper illuminates a critical stage of the implementation of European law: the transposition of European Union (EU) directives. Directives must be transposed into national policies in order to give effect to European law, yet most national authorities experience considerable transposition difficulties. For this reason, the study of transposition has become a focal point within the broader research agenda on non-compliance in the European Union. Highlighting several popular explanatory variables but noting the sometimes contradictory results that follow from empirical testing, this paper outlines an approach that views transposition as a process taking place largely within ministerial agencies rather than across government systems. By using variables related to these domestic processes in our empirical analysis, the paper shows how such an approach can help to explain the way in which member states transpose EU directives.