Residual executive power (REXPO). EU institutional balance and regulatory patterns after the Covid19 crisis

REXPO investigates shifts in EU regulatory practices following the Covid-19 pandemic. To contrast the pandemic the EU has mobilised unconventional legal tools such as financial assistance, cohesion policy or soft-law coordination, which fundamentally deviate from the community-method as the traditional EU law-making process. REXPO analyses the impact of this post-pandemic landscape on EU governance. Its central research question asks how the EU response to the pandemic has changed the nature of EU regulation and how new regulatory practices have affected the EU institutional balance in general and EU executive power in particular. The project focuses on the relationship between executive power and the unconventional regulatory instruments mobilised to face the crisis. It resorts to four empirical case-studies encompassing: the temporary recovery instrument NextGenerationEU, the unemployment financing scheme SURE, the distribution of vaccines, and soft-law coordination in the field of health policy. As these tools are all steered by the Commission, REXPO argues that they have strengthened the Commission's executive functions, while moving away from the Community Method. Using a historical institutionalist lens, REXPO defines this increase in the Commission's executive power as "residual", because it emerged as a secondary result of choices necessary to fight the pandemic and not from an intentional attribution of competences by political leaders. REXPO combines empirical and theoretical research and adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach to shed light on the legal and political consequences of the pandemic for EU governance and, eventually, for its democratic legitimacy. Whereas scholarship has focused on the political impact of the crisis and on the legality of the measures adopted, these interstitial institutional changes have passed unnoticed. However, precisely these changes can trigger a transformation of EU executive governance.