Steering or building? How crisis type shapes organisational change in the EU

How do crises reshape the internal organisation of EU institutions? Existing research treats crises as catalysts for change but offers limited guidance on what kinds of organisational reforms different crises generate. Building on an attack/failure typology of crises, the article argues that attack crises spur steering-oriented changes, whereas failure crises spur operationally-oriented changes. To test this, the article relies on an original data set of 101 organisational changes in the European Commission and the Council in five crises, including the rule of law crisis and Brexit, COVID-19 and the migration crisis, and the Russia–Ukraine war as a mixed case. The findings strongly support the theoretical expectations that attack crises produce steering-oriented organisational changes concentrated on enforcement, compliance monitoring, negotiation management, and political coordination, while failure crises produce operationally-oriented changes. The pattern is robust to recoding contested cases and to alternative decisions about the universe of cases. This article contributes to institutionalist theories of crisis-driven change by specifying how crisis origins shape not only policy outputs but also the administrative architecture that produces them.