Responding in time: the European Commission’s communicative responsiveness to public opinion and functional pressure in the case of migration (2002–2024)

As their authority grows, European institutions have to balance public pressure for responsiveness with a functional approach that reflects their traditional technocratic mandates. The EU integration literature stresses the conflicting nature of functional responses and responsiveness to public opinion, but contemporary views of technocracy in political theory also allow for a more conciliatory relationship. Building on this literature, we present a causal mediation model that describes how functional pressures and demands for responsiveness may conflict, but may also reinforce each other. We apply this model to understand the communicative responsiveness of the European Commission in migration between 2002 and 2024. We use time pressure invocations as the most condensed form of communicated priorities. Accordingly, we analyse (i) fine-grained communication data from the European Commission with a fine-tuned LLM model; (ii) asylum numbers, as a measure of functional problem pressure; and (iii) pooled European survey data to capture public opinion. We present consistent evidence that in its communications the Commission was unresponsive to both functional pressure and public opinion until the Lisbon Treaty. With the subsequent increase in its authority, the Commission’s communications show evidence of communicative responsiveness, both directly in response to functional pressures and indirectly through public opinion.