Steering or Building? How Crisis Type Shapes Organizational Change in the EU

How do crises reshape the internal organization of EU institutions? Existing research treats crises as catalysts for change but offers limited guidance on what kinds of organizational reforms different crises generate. Building on Schimmelfennig’s (2024) attack/failure typology, I argue that attack crises spur steering-oriented changes, whereas failure crises spur operationally-oriented changes. I code 101 organizational changes in the European Commission and the Council across 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 organizational 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 paper 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.