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Presents information on the collection of papers 'Political Economy and European Integration,' on the economic basis for European integration. Topics discussed in the paper; Focus of the article; Analysis of European integration issues in the paper.

A decade ago parties were largely absent from research on and theories of EU politics. The role of parties is now a central part of the research agenda, particularly in the area of EU legislative politics. The new research on parties in EU politics has made significant theoretical contributions, led to the collection and dissemination of new datasets, and employs some of the most advanced statistical methods in contemporary European political science. What is still missing, however, is a general theory of the role and impact of political parties, which helps to explain actors' behaviour in EU politics in a range of situations. This paper sketches some of the basic elements of what might be called a 'partisan theory of EU politics', starting from a discussion of how the policy and office incentives of national parties are shaped by the EU's 'upside-down polity'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

France's resistance to CAP reform has widely been attributed to the weakness of the state vis-à-vis organized farm interests. This paper argues that weak state theories overstate the role of administrative centralization and the organizational capabilities of farm groups and underestimate the role of ideas and of European politics in determining the transformative capacity of the French state. This argument is based on the observation that farm conservatism has persisted in the last two decades in spite of the growing autonomy of the French state vis-à-vis farm client groups. This article argues that we must pay more attention to the way European policy-making impinges upon the resources of the state and the organizational cohesion of farm groups and how the ideas held by domestic reform entrepreneurs determine their ability to win EU support for their blueprint and harness much-needed resources for carrying them out in the face of vested interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on European integration is devoting increasing attention to the reconstruction of distinctive strategic attitudes and mediating capacities at the state level. Nevertheless, contradictions and conflicts in the Europeanization of state policies, whilst crucial for understanding the dynamics of institutional change in a European multi-level polity, are still scarcely highlighted. This paper addresses this dimension based on a case study from Italy, a country in which Europeanization fostered significant policy innovations in the second half of the 1990s. Programming for the 2000-2006 Structural Funds period in Ob.2 eligible regions highlights the intergovernmental constraints facing state actors in their efforts to mediate between distributive claims in the domestic arena and national interest representation in supranational arenas, as well as the influence exerted by contradictions in the Commission's policy styles and regulatory rationales in hampering a mediated convergence between contrasting policy aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that European integration is provoked and sustained by the development of causal connections between three factors: transnational exchange, supranational organization, and European Community (EC) rule-making. We explain the transition, in any given policy sector, from national to intergovernmental to supranational governance, in two ways. First cross-border transactions and communications generate a social demand for EC rules and regulation, which supranational organizations work to supply. We thus expect that Community competences will be unevenly constructed, both across policy sectors and over time, as a function of the intensity of these demands. Second, once EC rules are in place, a process of institutionalization ensues, and this process provokes further integration. Although we recognize the importance of intergovernmental bargaining in EC politics, our theory is not compatible with existing intergovernmental theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of research on the impact of the electoral system ‘ballot structure’ on the behaviour of politicians. We offer a clear, ordinal and rules-based three-way coding (closed, flexible, open) of the electoral systems used in European Parliament elections, taking into account both the ballot type and the intra-party seat-allocation rules. For the notoriously difficult group of flexible list-systems, we show how these operated in the 2004, 2009 and 2014 elections, and introduce an additional behavioural distinction between ‘weakly flexible’ and ‘strongly flexible’ subtypes at the party-list-level. We then illustrate how the type of ballot used in an election can influence individual policy representation by looking at the vote-splits between Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the European People’s Party in a vote on tackling homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovations in European Union (EU) policy making have produced a distinctive, novel mode of policy that combines components of participatory and multi-level governance for policy implementation. In this manuscript we provide a conceptualization of what we term the EU's ‘mandated participatory planning’ (MPP) approach. This approach is increasingly used to implement EU directives, mandating the explicit formulation of certain plans or programmes on mostly subnational or cross-national levels. Drawing on three empirical examples from (mostly) environmental policy, we argue that analysing MPP as such is useful to help identify challenges and possibilities for EU policy making. Our framework provides a means to organize inquiry and compare disparate policies, and to more broadly understand the integration of policy, planning and implementation. This perspective, in turn, sheds fresh light on familiar concepts at the intersections of multi-level governance, policy implementation and participatory governance, namely multilayer implementation, participatory implementation and polycentric governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European Union's (EU's) responses to the economic and financial crisis provided a vigorous illustration for how the role of the Union's core intergovernmental bodies – the European Council and the Council – has evolved in recent years. The European Council has emerged as the centre of political gravity in the field of economic governance. The Council and the Eurogroup fulfil a crucial role as forums for policy debate. The emphasis on increased high-level intergovernmental policy co-ordination is the reflection of an integration paradox inherent to the post-Maastricht EU. While policy interdependencies have grown, member state governments have resisted the further transfer of formal competences to the EU level and did not follow the model of the Community method. Instead, they aim for greater policy coherence through intensified intergovernmental co-ordination. Given its consensus dependency, this co-ordination system can best be conceptualized as deliberative intergovernmentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the distinction between labour market- and life course-related social programmes and discusses why it matters politically. Life course risks are by and large uncorrelated with the income distribution, so the median voter will be comparably favourable towards generous provision. Left- and right-wing governments will therefore enact similar policies, and constitutional veto points will play no role for provision because no political actors will use them to block change. The median voter is less favourable towards labour market-related programmes that protect against risks that first and foremost adversely affect low-income individuals. Right-wing governments therefore have greater leeway to implement retrenchment on labour market-related programmes. Yet, in the event of external shocks to the labour market like rising unemployment and globalization, the median voter becomes gradually more exposed to labour market risks, which in turn reduces the room for right-wing retrenchment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students of European integration have come to argue that the European Union (EU) is a system of 'compounded' or 'mixed' representation characterized by the presence of different forms and styles of political representation which reflect the ideas and strategic interests of various groups of actors and institutions. The EU's system of representation did not come about by fiat. Among the founders of Europe's first supranational community, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), ideas about appropriate institutional mechanisms to represent different sets of interests were hotly contested. This article traces the origins of the EU's system of representation by sketching the answers given by the 'founding fathers' of the ECSC to questions about which interests should be represented in the nascent ECSC and how the representation of these interests should be institutionally manifested. It also takes issue with the current debate about the 'democratic challenge' faced by the EU's system of representation and offers a set of research questions which could help to advance the research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the extent to which the growing party politicization of the EU extends to the European Council. We advance the argument that three central factors shape the extent to which party politics influences European Council outcomes: the salience of an issue along the left-right dimension, the partisan composition of the European Council, and the cohesion and mobilization of transnational parties. We explore the influence of these factors empirically through an inventory of elite interview evidence as well as two case studies - the employment chapter of the Amsterdam Treaty and the Lisbon agenda. We conclude that the conditions for party influence in the European Council are demanding, and that the scope for party politicization is less extensive than in the other major EU institutions. The issues on the agenda of the European Council often cut across partisan divides, the heads of government are seldom mobilized along transnational party lines, and decision outcomes instead tend to reflect issue-specific coalition patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do governments comply with costly rulings handed down by international courts? This article focuses upon governmental compliance with ECJ rulings. The argument is that we cannot explain compliance based solely upon the instrumental calculations of actors, but must also incorporate the normative dimension of law into our compliance model to explain why actors feel 'compelled' to follow ECJ rulings even in the absence of manifest instrumental incentives. At the same time we must not lose sight of the significant analytical insights of instrumental models. An integrative compliance model is therefore created based upon Giddens structuration theory which argues that both instrumental and normative concerns motivate governmental actors in their compliance calculations. The analytical value-added of the model is illustrated upon the Working Time Directive case, where the instrumental strategy of the British government was blatant non- compliance, but where the social costs of breaking what was perceived to be `the law' weighed greater. The conclusions discuss the broader applicability of the integrative compliance model to broader patterns of compliance in the EU, and governmental compliance with the rulings of other international courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the allocation of regulatory authority in the EU. By introducing the concept of a `regulatory regime', it criticizes not only earlier accounts of the EU `regulatory state', but also current delegation approaches. As a starting point, it identifies a dilemma for the EU regulatory policy. Despite the rising need for uniform EU-level rules in the internal market, the bulk of formal powers and the institutional focus of regulatory activities continue to be located at the national level. This results in a supranational regulatory gap. Our thesis is that this gap is partly filled by transnational regulatory networks. Under certain conditions, regulatory networks offer a back road to the informal Europeanization of government regulation. However, the informalization of governance is vulnerable to strong distributive conflict, and, if effective, it raises unresolved problems of democratic legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces constructivist approaches to research on European integration. While stressing middle-range theory, it recognizes that meta-theoretical choices also matter for theorizing and analysing European integration. Tracing developments in the philosophy of science and in international relations theory, social constructivism is introduced as a way of establishing the 'middle ground' in juxtaposition to rationalism and reflectivism - not as a grand theory for the study of European integration. Crucial aspects of the integration process - polity formation through rules and norms, the transformation of identities, the role of ideas and the uses of language - are thereby opened up to systematic inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-war decades, advanced capitalist economies have developed in symbiosis with democratic political systems with a high capacity for effective regulation and welfare-state compensations. As economic integration deepens globally and even more so within the European Community, national capacities to regulate and to tax mobile capital and firms are reduced, whereas governance at European or international levels is constrained by conflicts of interest among the governments involved. Nevertheless, as the contributions to this volume show, the effectiveness of problem-solving at the national as well as at the European and international levels varies considerably from one field to another. In this introduction, I attempt to identify the factors that could explain the varying intensity and direction of competitive pressures on national regulatory systems, as well as the greater or lesser political feasibility of European or international regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewed interest in theorizing about the process of European integration is reflected in recent scholarship on the political evolution of the European Union (EU). Meanwhile, a rich and growing literature has emerged on EU policy-making in specific policy sectors. Yet the gap remains wide between theoretical models which seek to explain broad patterns of European integration and those which seek to explain the EU's policy-making process. This article conceptualizes 'policy networks' as a tool for analysing EU policy-making. Its central argument is that the EU is a 'hothouse' for different types of policy network, for two reasons. First, the EU lacks 'off-the-shelf' institutions which can facilitate informal bargaining between different types of actor. Secondly, decisions taken at the policy formulation stage have become important determinants of eventual EU policy outcomes in recent years. The policy networks model is placed within a broader theoretical framework for studying decision-making in the European Union at different levels of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]