The place of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) during Brexit negotiations was a highly debated one, as one of the explicit reasons invoked to leave the EU by British authorities was not to be submitted to EU law and CJEU’s rulings. The aim of this working paper is to analyse the reasons for the specific relationship model with regard to the CJEU competences that resulted from EU-UK Brexit negotiations. While the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) excludes the jurisdiction of the CJEU in favour of a dispute settlement system more respectful of the British sovereignty, an exception is made for the situation of Northern Ireland. The paper argues that the balance between conditionality and access/participation did now allow for the application of the EEA model of voluntary submission to the CJEU: if market power Europe has explained several aspects of EU’s external relations, it is of little use in the case of the UK’s relation to the CJEU. Hence, the paper explores two other possible explanations. The first one, drawing on the disintegration literature, argues that voluntary submission is more likely to happen in a context of integration than of disintegration. In other words, when the relationship between the EU and the affiliated government unfolds in a context of disintegration, where both partners seek to keep their advantages, ad hoc arrangements outside the legal framework of the EU seem plausible. However, disintegration alone is not a sufficient framework to explain the precise situation in which the CJEU is replaced by an ad hoc litigation settlement. Negotiations took place in a context of uncertainty regarding what the precise consequences of the negotiated result might be. A context of uncertainty is particularly germane to power-politics, which can reinforce the asymmetries in patterns of complex inter-dependence. The second explanation then focuses on domestic politics as the main determinant: the EU may push in favour of voluntary submission, but this model can only be chosen if it serves the purpose of the third state’s political power and is accepted by the governed.

Few existing datasets on parties and interest groups include data from both sides and a wide variety of interest groups and parties. We contribute to filling this gap by making several interconnected new datasets publicly available. The Party-Interest Group Relationships in Contemporary Democracies (PAIRDEM) datasets include cross-national data from three different surveys of (1) central party organizations, (2) legislative party groups, and (3) interest groups. A fourth dataset based on coding of party statutes and party finance data was established together with the Political Party Database. The datasets contain novel indicators on party-group relationships in up to 21 mature democracies. In this research note, we first present the main content of the datasets and the research design. Second, we present descriptive statistics documenting the extent of organizational ties between parties and groups in contemporary democracies. Third, we illustrate more advanced usage through a simple application.

What characterizes European Union soft law and what are its implications for the EU multilevel system? What is the proportion of hard and soft law in EU policy? Which types of soft law act are adopted in different policy sectors? This article introduces the conceptual and analytical framework that encompasses the EfSoLaw dataset and explains its methodology, advantages, and limitations. This dataset unites information on thousands of EU hard and soft law acts from seven different policy sectors, drawn from over fifteen years (2004–2019) and from various sources (EUR-Lex, DGs, agencies). We present implementation options of the dataset making it exploitable for other scholars and we propose hypotheses to explain the variation in the adoption of soft law in different policy sectors.