Punctuated politics: the rise and fall of politicization in the EU's refugee crisis

The refugee crisis of 2015–2019 exposed deep tensions within the EU's compound polity, generating episodic bursts of political conflict and contestation over policy issues. This paper, drawing on punctuated politicization, conceptualizes politicization as an episodic feedback system linking three demand-side forces, namely problem pressure, public salience, and political pressure to the politicization of policy issues inside the EU's policy process, specifying the mechanisms that generate punctuated patterns observed in prior research. With an innovative dataset based on Policy Process Analysis, a Bayesian vector error-correction model traces both short-run shocks and long-run equilibria among the four variables. Results show that in the refugee crisis, public salience operates as a key enabling condition, as asylum surges politicize EU decision-making only when they trigger parallel surges in public attention; politicization itself cannot self-perpetuate, failing to affect public attention or asylum inflows absent continued external reinforcement; and political pressure activates countervailing forces, as gains for radical-right parties are followed by lower salience and fewer asylum applications, revealing a self-limiting feedback loop that drives the system back toward equilibrium.