JEPP Awards Best Paper Prize 2024 to Luuk Schmitz and Timo Seidl

Luuk Schmitz, a senior researcher at the MPIfG, and Timo Seidl, a professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have been awarded the Best Paper Prize 2024 by the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP) for “Moving On to Not Fall Behind? Technological Sovereignty and the ‘Geo-Dirigiste’ Turn in EU Industrial Policy” (JEPP 31 [8], 2147–74, 2024). Their award-winning article examines the current shift in EU industrial policy toward Europe taking a more active role in directing economic activities in geopolitically important sectors. The authors argue that Europe has historically responded to fears of economic decline with market creation, while the more recent “geo-dirigiste turn” has led to increased state direction of markets. For their analysis, Seidl and Schmitz combined a computer-assisted text analysis of 66,548 documents with qualitative interviews to reconstruct the evolution of EU industrial policy through the lens of European fears of falling behind. The JEPP prize jury highlighted how the article sheds new light on the development of this policy field, praising it in particular for combining sophisticated computational text analysis with an informed qualitative narrative and for embedding current developments in a larger historical context. Luuk Schmitz has been a senior researcher in the Research Group on the Political Economy of European Integration at the MPIfG since 2023. He focuses in his research on decarbonization, post-neoliberal countermovements, and European integration and works with computer-assisted text analysis, among other methods. Timo Seidl is Professor of Political Economy at TUM’s Munich School of Politics and Public Policy.