publications

2026

1. Journal Article

   Riding the Wave? The Impact of the Russian Invasion on MEP Behaviour Regarding EU Enlargement to the Western Balkan Countries

   Lien Jansen, Toine Paulissen, and Steven Van Hecke

   Journal of European Integration, Feb 2026

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   The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is widely seen as accelerating the ‘return of geopolitics’ in EU policy-making, including in enlargement towards the Western Balkans. This article examines whether this geopolitical shock affected enlargement politics in the European Parliament by analysing written questions from the 9th parliamentary term. Adopting an actor-centred perspective, it assesses changes in issue salience, the actors involved, and the framing of enlargement. Across these dimensions, we find only limited evidence of geopoliticisation. The invasion did not significantly change the level of attention to the Western Balkans or the composition of actors engaging with the issue. Most strikingly, explicit geopolitical or security justifications did not increase. Instead, MEPs placed greater emphasis on candidate states implementing reforms and complying with accession criteria. The invasion is thus reflected less in geopolitical discourse than in a renewed focus on conditionality as a vehicle for advancing the Western Balkans’ accession trajectory.

2. Journal Article

   What Ends Justify the Means? Explaining Party Spending Intensity in Referendum Campaigns in Europe

   Toine Paulissen and Bart Maddens

   European Political Science Review, Mar 2026

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   This study investigates expenditure of European parties in referendum campaigns. Previous work exploring why parties initiate referendums hints at the importance of subsequent campaigns to parties, but theoretical insights regarding party behavior in campaigning contexts are fragmented and limited. We argue that party expenditure indicates the extent of their engagement, and identifying explanatory factors can offer insights into underlying strategic goals driving parties in their behavior. Drawing on referendum instrumentalization literature and existing empirical studies, we propose a framework with three strategic factors and corresponding hypotheses. These are tested using official expenditure data for 47 parties campaigning in 24 referendums in eight European countries through bivariate and multivariate analysis. Our findings mainly suggest that parties see referendum campaigns as avenues for image building, spending more on average when they initiate them and when referendums are publicly salient. Additionally, parties seemingly prioritize elections, while spending limits are ineffective in curbing expenditure.

3. Journal Article

   Why Do Parties Participate in Referendum Campaigns? Evidence from Switzerland

   Toine Paulissen

   Party Politics, 2026

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   This study examines how political parties engage strategically with referendum campaigns, a less-explored aspect of their broader referendum involvement. Building on referendum instrumentalization studies as well as cognate literatures, an analytical framework identifies five potential strategic factors that might explain why parties participate in referendum campaigns and formulates corresponding hypotheses regarding their effect. The framework is applied to 33 recent Swiss referendums, using social media and newspaper advertisements as a proxy for party participation. Binomial logistic regression reveals that public attention for a referendum, its issue’s salience to a party, and (to a lesser extent) a party’s initiator status significantly favor the likelihood of campaign participation, suggesting that Swiss parties primarily leverage referendum campaigns for policy-seeking and image-building strategies. This study therefore contributes to understanding of the interplay between referendums and party strategies in contemporary political contexts, and allows for the expansion of instrumentalization perspectives to include non-initiating parties.

2025

1. Journal Article

   Power beyond Borders? Analysing Formal and Informal Tools of the European Parliament in EU Enlargement Policy

   Lien Jansen, Toine Paulissen, and Steven Van Hecke

   Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Jul 2025

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   The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has seemingly created a new window of opportunity for (pre-)accession candidates, reigniting the European Union’s interest in the subject of enlargement. While existing literature predominantly scrutinizes the Council and the European Commission, this article focuses instead on the European Parliament – an often overlooked yet crucial institution in the accession process. This study offers a first comprehensive examination of the European Parliament’s toolbox with respect to EU enlargement. It comparatively assesses both its formal or legal powers and its informal or political powers, taking into account how they have developed since the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009 and up to the December 2023 European Council meeting. Drawing on a combination of an extensive literature review and a systematic analysis of primary documents, this study analyses five key tools at the Parliament’s disposal; agenda-setting power, the consent procedure, standing parliamentary delegations, budget allocation, and parliamentary scrutiny. The findings reveal a notable disparity between the European Parliament’s formal powers and informal powers, thereby confirming its ‘self-empowerment’ strategy and simultaneously underscoring the consent procedure and the budget as the most prominent tools available for the European Parliament.

2. Journal Article

   Depoliticizing Transnational Cleavage-Related Issues Through Social Media Advertising: The 2022 Danish Defense Referendum Campaign

   Toine Paulissen and Steven Van Jansen

   Politics and Governance, Feb 2025

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   Toine Paulissen, Lien Jansen, Steven Van Hecke

3. Journal Article

   Summary: What Ends Justify the Means? Explaining Party Campaign Spending in European Referendums

   Toine Paulissen

   Politics of the Low Countries, Dec 2025

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   Over the past century, referendums have become a key feature of democratic practice in Europe, as they are being used more frequently (Qvortrup, 2021) and for an increasingly wider range of topics and issues (Silagadze & Gherghina, 2020). Research has shown that this is driven primarily by instrumentalization efforts by political elites (i.e. parties and their politicians), who often initiate referendums (Gherghina & Silagadze, 2021) and do so mainly to achieve institutional, organizational, or electoral goals (see for instance Gherghina, 2019; Hollander, 2019). Yet, only limited scholarly work exists on how these elites engage with referendum campaigns, even though the literature has hinted at their strategic importance. They are considered more influential than electoral campaigns due to a more volatile information context (de Vreese & Semetko, 2004), within which political parties play a key role as information providers (Hartliński, 2019) that can shape referendum outcomes by providing strong and clear cues (see for instance de Vreese, 2006; McAllister & Biddle, 2024). As such, a referendum’s campaign can play a key role in achieving the goals that initially motivated its initiation (Gherghina et al., 2024).

4. PhD Thesis

   What Ends Justify the Means? Explaining Party Campaign Spending in European Referendums

   Toine Paulissen

   KU Leuven, 2025

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2024

1. Journal Article

   Direct Democracy and Party Behaviour in the Republic of Ireland: A Campaign Finance Perspective

   Toine Paulissen

   Irish Political Studies, 2024

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   Studies on the Irish referendum experience have generally accepted that political parties play a fundamental role in the direct democratic process. While this is rarely problematised, parties often campaign in referendums in order to steer them towards outcomes that are strategically beneficial. Contemporary research on Irish referendums has delved into how parties shape their campaigns to achieve these goals, but a more preliminary question is still to be addressed: to what extent do parties participate in referendum campaigns? This paper attempts to do so by examining campaign expenditure, which offers a concrete quantitative indicator for party engagement vis-à-vis referendums. Departing from theory on party behaviour and referendum instrumentalization, the article takes into account Irish regulations on campaign finance before offering a descriptive and explorative comparison of the expenditure of Irish political parties in recent referendum campaigns. Several patterns within the data are then discussed in light of potential influential factors identified in previous scholarly work. Results suggest that a referendum’s topic and its salience in the public sphere, as well as a party’s financial resources and government status, could explain party behaviour in Irish referendum campaigns, and a set of congruent hypotheses for future research are formulated in the conclusion.

2. Journal Article

   Individual and Collective Representation: The Organisational Form of Higher Education Lobbying in the European Union

   T. Paulissen, B. Fraussen, and S. Van Hecke

   European Journal of Higher Education, Jan 2024

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   Recent scholarly work on higher education institutions (HEIs) within an EU context has focused on how universities and their core activities have been affected by EU education policy. The organisation of HEIs in order to shape European decision-making on higher education, mainly through their presence in Brussels, has received much less attention. This article therefore focuses on how HEIs organise their EU representation and explains their choice for a specific organisational form, distinguishing between individual (i.e. a Brussels office), collective (i.e. via an association) and mixed representation (the combination of both a Brussels office and membership of an association). After systematically mapping the organisational form of 250 HEIs, we apply a mixed methods design to test our hypotheses derived from previous research on interest representation and lobbying. Our findings illustrate that the distance from Brussels is a key factor in the decision to open a Brussels office or join an association, whereas financial resources appear imperative for combining both forms of representation. Furthermore, we identify additional underlying motives for choosing a particular mode of representation, in particular the importance of information exchange, visibility and networking.

3. Journal Article

   Introducing the RefCFRI: A Continuous Indicator Comparing Referendum Campaign Finance Regulation in 143 Countries

   Toine Paulissen and William Horncastle

   Politics, 2024

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   As referendums become an increasingly defining feature of global democratic practice, a normative debate centres around the importance of campaign finance regulations in ensuring fair and democratic procedures that avoid biasing their outcome. Understanding how different countries approach this issue can shed light on the impact of varied regulatory approaches, as well as whether they reach their intended policy goals. Scholarly work has therefore attempted to capture this cross-national variation in comparative measures, and this study attempts to build on these efforts by expanding their scope and depth to provide a global, inclusive and methodologically robust comparative measure of referendum political finance regimes. As such, it focuses on the design and compilation of the Referendum Campaign Finance Regulation Index (RefCFRI). We depart from a novel dataset detailing the presence/absence of 39 referendum campaign finance regulations in 143 countries as of April 2024. Using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), we deliver empirical evidence for the existence of a singular dimension along which countries can be compared, namely the ‘level of regulation’. This dimension forms the RefCFRI, a continuous indicator that, together with our dataset, has the potential to contribute to political finance and referendum studies, as well as informed decision-making by policy-makers.

2023

1. Journal Article

   Referendum Campaign Financing by Political Parties: The Case of the United Kingdom

   Toine Paulissen and Bart Maddens

   Political Science, Jan 2023

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   The literature on the political finance of referendum campaigns has focussed primarily on how these are regulated in individual countries, but scholarly work is yet to empirically explore how these regulations and other factors translate into concrete spending practices of political parties. This article attempts to do this for the United Kingdom (UK), which has one of the oldest and most extensive referendum political finance regimes, with the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (PPERA). After formulating several hypotheses grounded in party behaviour and political finance literature, we offer a close examination of the PPERA’s regulations on referendum campaign finance and compare the expenditure patterns of UK political parties in five post-PPERA referendums. The findings suggest that the competitiveness of a referendum, as well as a party’s financial resources and the salience of the referendum topic for the party are possible explanations for their financial engagement in the referendum campaign. More surprisingly, our results show that expenditure limits imposed by the PPERA barely have an effect on party expenditure. Parties rarely come close to the limits imposed, but when they do bump up against the limit, they are able to circumvent this via donations, which do not count towards their spending cap.

2. Book Chapter

   How Covid-19 Hit Brussels and Beyond: The EU’s Crisis Management Tested by a Pandemic

   Steven Van Hecke, Toine Paulissen, and Britt Vande Walle

   In The EU Political System After the 2019 European Elections, 2023

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   The EU is certainly not unfamiliar with crisis management, at least not in the broad sense of the term. Its history is marked by crises and the last ten years were even labelled a polycrisis. This seemed to end after the 2019 European Parliament elections with a new Commission that wanted to prepare the EU for geopolitical policy-making that went beyond crisis management. However, the Covid-19 pandemic caused one of the biggest crises to ever hit the Union. After initial hesitation and criticism, the EU’s institutions showed remarkably strong resilience, combining short-term crisis management with mid-term policy-making and long-term innovative solutions for a number of long-standing political hot topics. This chapter analyses the EU’s response by looking at its institutions and discussing how they behaved—vis-à-vis the Member States and on the world stage—as primary actors of its Covid-19 crisis management.

3. Book Chapter

   The Life and Death of the Spitzenkandidaten: What Role Is Left for European Political Parties?

   Steven Van Hecke, Wouter Wolfs, and Toine Paulissen

   In The EU Political System After the 2019 European Elections, 2023

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   In the run-up to the 2019 European Parliament elections, European political families nominated their candidates to become president of the European Commission, as they had done previously in 2014. Although this so-called Spitzenkandidaten system was claimed to have played a significant role during the election campaign, in the end none of the candidates became Commission President. In the political battle between the European Parliament and the European Council to decide about the EU’s executive top job, the European Council was able to overrule the newly elected Parliament. As a way of Wiedergutmachung vis-à-vis the Parliament, Commission President von der Leyen promised to strengthen the EU’s parliamentary democracy. The question is, however, what this means exactly, and what role the European political families, the true supporters of the Spitzenkandidaten, will play.