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Based on an original protest event analysis (PEA) dataset covering 30 European countries, this paper provides three sets of results. Despite its unlikeliness due to lockdowns and social distancing measures, protest during COVID-19 has hardly been put to a halt even if, as a result of the restrictions imposed by the lockdown measures on the opportunities of public collective actions, protest occurred at significantly lower levels compared to pre-COVID-19 times, in terms of number of events and, above all, in terms of the number of participants. Moreover, protest was refocused on COVID-19-related issues, in particular on protest against the restrictions imposed by the government lockdowns, while non-COVID-19 issues, in particular economic issues, were crowded out. In addition, protest during the COVID-19-crisis also responded to highly contingent national context conditions which varied between the different regions of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the conflicts associated with the so-called 'Dieselgate' affair. It explains the interaction of civil society, law firms and political actors which reshapes the legal systems in Europe. Once the federal government in Germany had decided that European car owners should not get any kind of financial compensation, a transnational coalition of consumer organizations and law firms successfully initiated a legal mobilization campaign to counteract the political decision. As a consequence, collective litigation rights were strengthened in Germany and at the European level. Theoretically, the paper refers to the literature on adversarial legalism. Whether this judicialized style of conflict resolution is spreading to Europe ('Eurolegalism') has been a hotly debated topic in political science. Our main argument is that the Dieselgate case is a catalyst event to foster the transformation process towards 'Eurolegalism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates which countries are seen as leaders in combatting AMR in Europe, and why they are seen as leaders. We do this by testing the explanatory capacity of three models specifying features of leaders attractive to followers. They are (1) performance, (2) power and (3) common interests. We use data from a survey among experts in the AMR field in 29 European countries, along with empirical indicators, to measure the three models. Our findings show that only eight of the 29 European countries are seen as leaders and that Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands are considered the three top AMR leaders in Europe. Denmark is the top leader in the animal sector and Sweden in the human sector. We also find demand for several possible types of leadership and followership in the AMR problem. Performance explains the leading role of the top three countries, as they all score low on indicators of the severity of AMR. Power and influence explain why France, Germany and the UK are seen as AMR leaders. We also find support for the role of common interests. This factor may explain why neighbouring countries are often seen as leaders in AMR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fear of falling behind has been a driving force of European integration. Historically, Europe's response to the looming angst of declining competitiveness has been more market-creation, not market-direction. Recently, however, Europe has – in the name of safeguarding Europe's technological sovereignty – taken on a much more active role in directing economic activity towards sectors and technologies deemed geopolitically or geoeconomically important. In this paper, we attempt to explain this 'geo-dirigiste' turn. We reconstruct the evolution of EU industrial policy through the lens of Europe's fear of falling behind, drawing not only on primary (including archival) and secondary sources, but also on original interviews and deep transfer learning applied to an original dataset of 66.548 documents. Focusing on Europe's changing technological and geopolitical context, its coalitional underpinnings, and the role of ideational politics, we document and explain the historic shift away from market-creation and towards supranational market-direction in EU industrial policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of trans-governmental policy regimes in Europe has fundamentally changed the role of National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs). Here we move away from the idea that there is a meaningful divide between the domestic and the European levels of governance and suggest that a different logic has emerged in recent decades, combining multiple chains of delegation and innovative coordination schemes. NRAs have come to occupy a 'broker' or intermediary position between domestic and European polities, that is no longer adequately described by the prevailing, mainly dyadic models of bureaucratic autonomy conceived just for national states. In this paper, we build the concept of entangled agencies to make sense of the linkages between NRAs and European Agencies (EAs) and provide some preliminary empirical evidence to show how they effectively articulate various levels of government, presenting empirical findings on the connections that ties NRAs representatives with EAs management boards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This paper follows European countries as they struggled through the first wave of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. We analyze when countries were confronted with the virus, how long it took until the number of new infections peaked and at what level of infections that peak was achieved via social distancing and lockdown policies. Most European countries were able to successfully end the first wave of the pandemic – defined as a two-week incidence rate smaller than 10 cases per 100,000 people. We find that countries in which the virus made significant landfall later in time enjoyed a latecomer advantage that some of these countries squandered, however, by not responding quickly enough and that an early lockdown was more effective than a hard lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the large literature on gender differences in politics, there have been relatively few empirical studies testing the effects of gender in public administration. This paper examines how male and female public managers show attitudinal differences toward innovation in the public sector. We hypothesize that male and female managers differ in three aspects. Firstly, female managers are more result-oriented than rule-following, and more oriented toward societal interests. Secondly, female public managers are more open to new ideas and creativity, and more willing to challenge the status quo. Yet, thirdly, female leaders are less eager to take risks when would-be innovations may put their organizations in peril. Thus, we argue that female managers are more prudent and entrepreneurial than their male counterparts. We test these hypotheses using a data set of 5,909 senior public managers from 20 European countries. The results of multilevel model analysis find statistically significant gender differences in attitudes toward innovation. Despite the small size of gender impacts, our findings challenge prevailing stereotypes on women's entrepreneurial attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crises of the European Union and the geopolitical shifts in its international environment have generated a backlash against the post-Cold War 'debordering' of European integration. Whereas integration theories focus almost exclusively on the EU's internal boundaries and developments, this framework paper conceptualizes and theorizes integration as a process of internal debordering and external rebordering. It sketches the history of European integration in a bordering perspective and proposes general assumptions about the EU's bordering process. Accordingly, rebordering pressures result from widening boundary gaps at the EU's external borders, exogenous shocks to cross-border transactions, growing community deficits of debordering, and their politicization. Whether external rebordering succeeds and how it interacts with internal boundary formation, depends on EU-level boundary negotiations and the relative costs and benefits of external vs. internal rebordering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since they first entered the European Parliament in 1979, the EU has proven to be a strong legitimising tool for far right parties, providing them with funding, visibility and a higher degree of credibility and respectability. While recent literature has explored some of these dynamics, the role of the far right's ideological positioning on Europe as a source of public legitimacy has been neglected. This paper argues that as a relatively new and contentious political issue, Europe can function as a powerful ideological resource for far right parties by allowing them to convey a more acceptable political message. This argument is illustrated through a case study of two key aspects of the Rassemblement National's ideological approach to the European Union: the party's claim to be pro-European but anti-EU and its opposition to EU integration on grounds of sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sheds light on an unexplored phase and a neglected actor in EU constitutional politics: the preparation of Treaty reform by the Group of Government Representatives. Striving to explain whether and under which conditions constitutional decisions in Europe were de facto taken by officials, the paper proceeds in three steps. First, possible functions of preparation in complex negotiations are conceptualized and two conditions for effective preparation are proposed: a preparatory body's issue and process resources as well as consensual pre-agreement. A second section introduces the role of government representatives in preparing EU reform, checks their collective resources against the criteria developed in section 1 and assesses their preparatory agency as strong. Third, I analyse the effectiveness of preparing for Amsterdam, using the negotiations on free movement and flexibility as plausibility probes. The analysis demonstrates that officials play a key role even in the bastion of high politics that is Treaty reform, where the final European Council is only the 'tip' of a long-term negotiation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The open method of co-ordination (OMC) has received much attention in the recent EU literature. The predominant view claims that the OMC is not only a new but also an effective policy-making instrument. This paper raises doubts about both claims by offering a comparison of soft law policy co-ordination in three international organizations. More specifically, this paper compares the European Employment Strategy to the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines of the EU, the OECD Economic Surveys, and the IMF Article IV Consultations. Based on expert interviews, it seeks to demonstrate that these procedures are forms of multilateral surveillance that do not differ in kind. Such a comparative analysis of the OMC refutes claims to its novelty. Having compared the four procedures, a more general model of multilateral surveillance consisting of six elements is generated that facilitates further comparisons. This paper concludes that governments select voluntarist procedures mainly to secure their own competencies rather than to realize common goals. Effective problem-solving is therefore not necessarily the dominant objective of soft law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Parliament (EP) has often criticized the agencification of the European Union. Yet in practice it often uses its legislative powers to strengthen the powers and independence of European agencies. To explain this paradox, this paper analyses the six cases where the 2004-2009 EP legislated to create a new European agency. It argues that the Parliament overcame some of its doubts about agencification by proposing amendments which brought the legislation closer to its own legitimation beliefs. Moreover, the EP has developed a substantial repertoire of amendments which it now more or less repeats every time it is confronted with a proposal for a new agency. Many of these amendments are designed to shore up control of agencies, sometimes in novel ways which suggest that the Parliament has in part made its peace with agencification by becoming more amenable to the control of agencies by methods involving multiple principals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Its monopoly power to formulate policy proposals and set the European Union's (EU's) legislative agenda guarantees the European Commission considerable prominence in EU legislative studies. It is commonly conceptualized as a unitary actor, acting cohesively - often in its own supranational interest - in EU decision-making. Recent theoretical developments and empirical studies, however, cast doubt on this conceptualization. This paper takes up these matters and investigates the decision-making mechanisms and dynamics of the Commission's executive politics. Two case studies show that the formal division of power along portfolios puts formally responsible Commissioners in a privileged position to influence the content of legislative proposals in internal decision-making. This influence, however, is circumscribed by the opposition of other Commissioners. At least in the cases studied here, Commissioners' position-taking and conflict in internal decision-making follow a national and, to some extent, a sectoral rather than a partisan pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The indicators developed for the open method of co-ordination (OMC) in social inclusion might, according to their authors, serve to establish a common language for the discussion of social inclusion issues, set the agenda for inclusion policies, and provide benchmarks for the identification of best practices. To examine whether ‘learning by numbers’ is taking place, this paper scrutinizes the use of the indicators in the area of child poverty and exclusion. The discussion uses a theoretical account of the institutional preconditions for the transmission of OMC-based learning into the policy processes of member states which distinguishes between ‘normal policy-making’ and ‘paradigm shifts’. The indicators are designed to contribute to the advance of knowledge about normal policy-making, but it is shown that the OMC/inclusion disseminates a new policy paradigm which bears little relationship to the indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the claim that there is a problem with delayed transposition of directives within the EU, using a new dataset on the transposition of directives in the fields of utilities and food safety regulation in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Spain and Greece. This dataset overcomes most of the problems that have plagued previous data. In 65 per cent of the cases transposition was delayed, and the average delay was seven months. There is thus indeed a problem with delayed transposition. In order to explain this problem, a sociological institutionalist approach is used. The findings point to the importance of administrative routinization. Whether or not transposition is accomplished with little delay depends on whether there are administrative departments with the explicit task to specialize in transposition, and whether they have had the time and resources to develop routines or standard operating procedures for doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A co-ordinated approach to fiscal policy in the euro area is desirable from a political economy standpoint if it protects against the harmful side effects which can arise from member states' fiscal policies. At the same time, however, closer economic co-ordination between national governments is perceived by some as a threat to the independence of the European Central Bank and with it the credibility of its price stability mandate. A variant of the open method, which is known as multilateral surveillance, has been assigned the unenviable task of minimizing the costs of macroeconomic co-ordination, while at the same time delivering the benefits. Whilst the open method poses little threat to the independence of the ECB, its effectiveness is contingent, in the absence of legal obligation and the threat of financial penalties, on the impact of peer pressure and consensus-building mechanisms. This paper assesses the potential of these mechanisms and then draws lessons about the scope and limits of the open method in the light of Portugal's recent breach of the Stability and Growth Pact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction between bargaining and monetary policy involves three relationships: the interaction of the bargainers with (a) each other; (b) the monetary regime; and (c) their rank and file. Research has centred on (a) and (b) and neglected (c). However, in practice, interaction (c) gains in importance, since bargaining is a multi-level process in the eurozone. Analytically, this interaction should not be neglected, since the monetary regime can target the bargainers more effectively than their rank and file. This paper conceptualizes the interaction between bargaining and monetary policy in a way which includes all three relationships. Based on a comparison of fifteen European countries, it is shown that the responsiveness of alternative bargaining institutions to the monetary regime depends on their capacity for making the rank and file comply, and that these institutions also differ in which monetary parameter they are sensitive to. The implications of these findings for EMU are discussed in the paper's final section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When states over- and under-react to perceived transboundary threats, their mistakes can have equally harmful consequences for the citizens they mean to protect. Yet, studies of intelligence and conventional foreign policy tend to concentrate on cases of under-reaction to threats from states, and few studies set out criteria for identifying cases of under- and over-reaction to other kinds of threats or investigate common causes. The paper develops a typology of over- and under-reaction in foreign policy revolving around threats assessment, response proportionality and timeliness. Drawing on pilot case studies, the contribution identifies combinations of factors and conditions that make both over- or under-reaction more likely. It is hypothesized that three factors play significant causal roles across the cases: (1) institutions have learned the wrong lessons from previous related incidents; (2) decision-making is organized within institutional silos focused on only one kind of threat; and (3) actors have strong pre-existing preferences for a particular outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Designing political institutions is a balancing act between upholding democratic ideals and accommodating constraints. Advocates of deliberative governance in the European Union live this tension in a particularly polarized manner, torn between the deliberative ideal of consensual decision-making and the reality of power politics. To which extent does deliberative governance provide a suitable conceptual framework as well as a mode of governance in its own right for European policy-making? This paper applies five features of deliberative governance suggested by Teague (2001) in his study of European social policy to the genesis of the Bologna Process and subsequent domestic reforms. The Bologna Process has, since the Sorbonne declaration of 25 May 1998, aimed at creating a European Higher Education Area. This study concludes that deliberative governance has the potential to start a long-term process of progressive domestic policy change and therefore deserves further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European regulatory space has been expanding rapidly since the 1990s. The double movement towards a single market on the one hand and a Single European Regulatory Space on the other is evident almost everywhere. A new regulatory architecture is emerging and is expressed in the extension of regulatory capacities beyond the European Commission via two major forms of institutionalization: agencies and networks. This paper explores the politics and architecture of the institutionalization and administrative rationalization of the EU regulatory space and demonstrates (a) how agencies replace networks in a process that might best be called 'agencification'; (b) how agencies compete with networks and are often able to create, employ, and control them, creating what might best be called 'agencified networks'; and (c) how networking empowers agencies creating a new type of regulatory organization that might best be called a 'networked agency'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European Union (EU)-level agencies have emerged as important actors on the EU's policy-making scene. To date, we know relatively little about the personnel working in EU agencies: what attitudes do EU agency staff members hold on issue-dimensions relevant for the EU integration process? How do they perceive of their role in EU policy-making? Moreover, we know little about the cohesiveness of attitudes of agency staff within and between different EU agencies. The aim of this contribution is conceptually and empirically descriptive. It draws on original data from an online survey of professionals working in EU agencies to gain insights into the attitudes held by EU agency staff on three substantive attitudinal dimensions: conceptions relating to legitimate and accountable EU governance, conceptions about the preferred level of centralization of political authority in the EU, as well as views on economic governance in the EU. While the conceptual focus of this paper is on attitudes and not on behaviour, the attitudes held by EU agency staff and their relative homo- or heterogeneity is likely to affect perceptions and evaluations of the political environment and interpretations of the challenges agency staff members face in their substantive area of work. The findings of the survey will enable us to draw broader conclusions about the type and quality of accountability relationships as well as of the EU's democratic legitimacy. Moreover, the data will permit to inform arguments about the actor quality of EU agencies, which are often conceived as efficient institutional solutions to overcome credibility problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agency creation at the European Union (EU) level differs from that at the national one. European regulatory agencies (ERAs) have limited formal powers and separation from other actors, resembling networks rather than stand-alone agencies. ERAs for economic regulation have been created later and in smaller numbers than for social regulation. Using a historical rational analysis, this paper argues that past delegations to other non-majoritarian institutions at the EU and national levels condition the creation of European agencies. The Commission has defended its existing role and powers, accepting ERAs when they aid its strategy to increase its own reach and ensuring that it has many controls over them. When member states have created independent regulatory agencies (IRAs), those IRAs have defended their autonomy and resisted strong ERAs. Formalized EU networks of IRAs have hindered the establishment of powerful ERAs and when created, ERAs have involved layering and conversion of those networks. Hence formal delegation to ERAs has been limited and uneven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European regulatory networks (ERNs) constitute the main governance instrument for the informal co-ordination of public regulation at the European Union (EU) level. They are in charge of co-ordinating national regulators and ensuring the implementation of harmonized regulatory policies across the EU, while also offering sector-specific expertise to the Commission. To this aim, ERNs develop 'best practices' and benchmarking procedures in the form of standards, norms and guidelines to be adopted in member states. In this paper, we focus on the Committee of European Securities Regulators and examine the consequences of the policy-making structure of ERNs on the domestic adoption of standards. We find that the regulators of countries with larger financial industries tend to occupy more central positions in the network, especially among newer member states. In turn, network centrality is associated with a more prompt domestic adoption of standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of experts in shaping European transport policies and the transport clauses in the Treaty of Rome in the formative post-war years of European integration. It argues that transport experts had a specific understanding of how to work together on the international level that clashed with the idea of creating a High Authority of independent experts without intimate knowledge of transport. Moreover, their ideas had been embedded in a policy network which co-ordinated the work of a number of international organizations. This network worked hard to prevent that a newly to be established Common Transport Policy would get off the ground. The paper explores the usefulness of the epistemic community concept to understand the activities of the network and what it accomplished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European Union (EU) negotiations take place within the framework of a set of formal and informal institutions. Member states negotiate in the organizational context of the Council and the European Council, take decisions through alternative procedures and decision rules, and sustain a set of norms for the conduct of negotiations. While the effects of these institutions on negotiation behaviour and outcomes have received extensive attention, the question of why these particular institutions have been established or evolved remains underexplored. This contribution makes an argument in favour of systematic attention to the design of negotiation institutions in the EU, and suggests that we should draw on general theoretical approaches to institutional design for these purposes. Moreover, rather than engaging in the exercise of trying to prove or falsify theoretical approaches, we should exploit the potential for explanatory complementarities in concrete empirical domains. To this end, the paper advances a domain-of-application approach to institutional design and illustrates its applicability to EU negotiation institutions through four empirical illustrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an expansion of research on policy learning in different subfields. The methodological and empirical work continues to face challenges in determining the constitutive elements that foster such transformations in governance through learning. Careful attention needs to be paid to the regularities and patterns, as well as the limits, contingencies and incongruities that shape or hinder the diffusion of cross-national and cross-temporal rules, norms and institutions. In looking at the policy cycle, the process of policy learning focuses predominantly on the organizational environment, the modes of learning, and the implementation effects, without acknowledging the normative implications in terms of accountability and legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the main temporal factors impacting on the European Commission and sheds light on its particular relationship to time. By way of illustration, it discusses two relatively recent, but increasingly significant, features of the Commission's work: its planning and programming cycle and its use of impact assessments. These two techniques are at the core of the Commission's quest for exemplary management and of its endeavour to promote 'better regulation' principles. Taken together, they can transform EU policy-making and bring about a greater predictability and transparency of EU action. They cannot, however, fully capture the more political and discretionary role of the Commission, which must adapt to a diverse and changing EU agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Europe's 'political space', its dimensionality and its impact on European policies have received increased academic attention lately. Yet, one very basic element of this political space, the party composition of EU member states' governments, has never been studied in a systematic way in the rich literature on European integration. In this paper we explain why the EU literature should pay more attention to the analysis of Europe's party-political 'centre of gravity'. We give a systematic overview of the party composition of member governments from 1957 to 2003. This includes analyses of how the support for integration, the left/right political conviction, and the ideological homogeneity or heterogeneity of the member states affected the Council over the course of time. We draw on expert surveys, the data of the Comparative Manifesto Project, and data about government composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically analyses whether 'Futurum', the online discussion forum linked to the Convention on the Future of Europe, constituted a public sphere - and, if so, what kind. Although the debates were discursive and had an institutional context, they were not filtered into the convention process and had an unrepresentative group of participants and thus they sit ill at ease with established conceptualizations of the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This concluding paper sets the special issue in the broader context of literature on Europeanization. I consider what sort of empirical picture emerges from the issue and other literature, and highlight some puzzles in domestic politics to which that portrayal directs our attention. We see disjunctures between the EU's policy importance and low political mobilization around it, between general demobilization and bursts of activity around referenda, and between variation in citizens' views of the EU and little variation in mainstream political parties' programs. Then I consider the main ways in which Europeanization scholars explain these puzzles. I argue very briefly for an analysis that stresses the cross-cutting nature of pro- and anti-EU views in French (and other countries') politics, which leads to reactions from political parties to muffle internal dissent. To conclude I modestly extend this analysis to hypothesize a little-noticed mechanism of indirect EU effects on national politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the state of affairs regarding formal and quantitative studies on decision-making in the Council of the European Union. We compare recent empirical studies in the field and distinguish between work that utilizes actors' ideal preferences, their revealed positions in the bargaining process, and their subsequent voting records in the area of EU legislative politics. We argue that document analysis remains an underemployed tool that could help formal modellers in confronting their theories with quantitative empirical information. [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]

In this paper I take issue with the services directive, commenting on the article by Nicolaïdis and Schmidt (2007). Unrestrained services trade, I argue, would broaden competition and benefit Central Eastern and Western Europe alike, in the presence of compensating factors or in the long run. Despite the welfare-enhancing effects, the services directive did not succeed in realizing the home-country principle. Instead the host-country retains its rights with regard to freedom of establishment, to posted workers and to self-employed persons temporarily crossing European borders. For employees, moreover, abolishing the host-country rule was never considered. I explain this result drawing on Machiavelli's, Rawls' and Olson's insight that numerically few losers can successfully oppose benefits for the whole economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the potential of the open method of co-ordination (OMC) and of laboratory federalism for policy innovation and learning in a multi-level system of jurisdictions. Our analysis shows that both can be seen as institutions that establish processes of generating and spreading new knowledge about appropriate public policies. However, the respective learning mechanisms are very different: in laboratory federalism learning takes place through a purely non-centralized process of experimentation with different new policies. In comparison, the OMC relies on a benchmarking process carried out on a higher-level jurisdiction from which, in a rather centralized way, policy recommendations are derived. In both cases, serious learning problems resulting from limited transferability of experiences gained with policies and from lacking or distorting incentives arise. We find that to fully use their potential the OMC should become an integral part of laboratory federalism, thus supporting the smooth working of yardstick, interjurisdictional and regulatory competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we seek to understand the impact of the macro-political context on power configurations within policy subsystems. For this purpose we systematically compare policy networks in three major policy subsystems and seven Western European countries (and the EU) on the basis of a typology for the power configurations within policy subsystems. We link the European, domestic and policy-specific context to our typology of policy networks. To test the hypotheses we conduct empirical network and reputational analysis of 345 interviews with key policy-makers. The results point not only to the importance of the EU context, but also to the complex interplay of domestic and policy-specific contexts for understanding domestic power configurations. Domestic power configurations vary not only from country to country, but also within the countries depending on the policy domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU budget has only recently started to feature in theories of European integration. Studies typically adopt a historical-institutionalist framework, exploring notions such as path dependency. They have, however, generally been rather aggregated, or coarse-grained, in their approach. The EU budget has thus been treated as a single entity rather than a series of inter-linked institutions. This paper seeks to address these lacunae by adopting a fine-grained approach. This enables us to emphasize the connections that exist between EU budgetary institutions, in both time and space. We show that the initial set of budgetary institutions was unable, over time, to achieve consistently their treaty-based objectives. In response, rather than reform these institutions at potentially high political cost, additional institutions were layered on top of the extant structures. We thus demonstrate how some EU budgetary institutions have remained unchanged, whilst others have been added or changed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regionally based processes of political and economic integration, security co-operation, and even social identification have become increasingly important and prominent parts of the international system. Nowhere have such processes gone further than in Western Europe. Somewhat surprisingly, similar patterns of regional integration have been steadily developing in East Asia – a region many observers consider unlikely to replicate the European experience. This paper uses an historically grounded comparative approach to examine the historical preconditions that underpinned the formation of the European Union, and then contrasts them with the situation in East Asia today. While the overall geopolitical and specific national contexts are very different, such an analysis highlights surprising similarities and differences, particularly in the role played by the United States in both periods. A comparative analysis allows us to understand and rethink the incentives for, and constraints on, regional integrative processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question ‘who speaks for the Europeans?’ involves a basic contradiction in European constitutional engineering: federalist autonomy developed against democratic representation on the basis of popular sovereignty of equal citizens. Working on a European Constitution includes the search for a fair balance between the modes of representation. This paper shows, however, that the balance remains precarious. Asymmetries in the de iure institutional settings and in de facto social and economic development permanently reshuffle the balance. Older theories of federalism in the age of classical modernism started from a rational model of symmetric states' rights. Postmodernist thinking with its patchwork scenarios developed more tolerance towards asymmetries. The neo-liberal paradigm leads away from ‘participatory federalism’ in the direction of a ‘federalism of competition’. In the early federations the poor territories in a ‘class struggle from below’ asked for subsidies from the centre. In recent federations a ‘class struggle from above’ is developing. The rich states fight for asymmetries because they feel punished if they have to subsidize the poorer areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Haas's work on Europe has been immensely influential, so much so that the study of European integration has long been synonymous with Haas and his intellectual legacy. His name, however, does not figure prominently in recent contributions to the rapidly growing field of comparative regional integration. In part, this is an oversight and thus unfortunate since several of his insights travel well and are quite relevant to present-day debates. However, it also is, in part, Haas's own fault. While his early work on European integration is of unmatched brilliance and depth, some of his later theorizing suffers from a series of methodological infelicities that have detracted from his fundamental contributions to comparative regional integration. This paper traces and critically assesses the evolution of Haas's thinking on integration with special focus on regions outside Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explaining the 'task expansion' of the European Community has been at the heart of neofunctionalism. While previous studies have focused on the transfer of competencies from the national to the European level, this paper also looks at the procedures according to which policy decisions are taken at the European level (scope). Distinguishing between scope and level reveals an interesting puzzle. It is common wisdom that the integration of external and internal security has seriously lagged behind. Since the Maastricht Treaty we have witnessed a significant task expansion of the EU into these two last bastions of national sovereignty. But while the achieved level of integration is rather similar, the scope of integration differs significantly. Justice and home affairs have subsequently been brought under the supranational framework of the first pillar. Common foreign and security policy and European defence policy, by contrast, are still firmly confined to the realm of intergovernmentalism. This disparity between level and scope of European integration poses a serious theoretical challenge-not only to neofunctionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jurgen Habermas has had a long-standing interest in the process of European integration, viewing it as an inescapable response to the pitfalls of globalization and the shortcoming of nation-state bounded welfare systems. He believes that, in the form of political and economic integration, Europe is being given a `second chance'. He argues, however, that in order to fulfil its democratic potential, a European form of solidarity, expressing itself via a post-national public sphere, is a development that cannot be left to historical fate; a `legally mediated solidarity' is the key to the formation of a post-national identity in Europe. In particular, he singles out the development of a post-national form of social policy as a crucial component of future solidarity construction. The present paper critically explores this potential role for law and social policy in Europe, casting some doubt on the value of both to Habermas's vision of a cosmopolitan solidarity and public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporaneous welfare states use different mixes of income. payroll and indirect taxes to Fund expenditures. The paper investigates how this mix affects the labour market. It briefly discusses the evolution of tax mixes over rime and countries before dealing with three claims in more detail. First, countries with high levels of payroll taxation are expected to exhibit a worst aggregate labour market performance than countries relying on income taxation. Second, this finding should hold for low-skilled sectors in particular. Third since all countries have opened up their goods and capital markets, the impact of taxation on labour market outcomes should have increased over time. these claims are empirically evaluated by a cautious, step-by-step analysis of cross-country and temporal variation in the tax mix for eighteen OECD countries. `Whereas the evidence for the first two claims is substantial, evidence on internationalization remains inconclusive. The results help to explain why welfare stares show diverging forms of vulnerabilities for employed people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses Italian parties' manifestos for national and European elections from 1979 to 1999 with the 'Wordscore' programme in order to gauge whether party positions with regard to the European Union have changed and whether the salience of the European Union has increased. Results indicate that, although there is no sign of increased salience, the leading Italian political parties have repositioned themselves in their attitudes towards the European Union, indicating that the European political space matters for national parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union's immigration policy develops cautiously. Nation-states view immigration control policy as critical to maintaining sovereignty and are slow to relinquish their policy monopoly. This paper analyses the Commission's 2001 communication on an open method of co-ordination in immigration policy, which proposes the creation of a European immigration regime of co-ordination, lacking the imposition of binding external conditions or quotas. Upon tracing the development of EU immigration policy and discussing the OMC and its soft law character, the ‘Communication’ is reviewed. A survey of its main tenets shows that while security thinking remains prominent, there is equal emphasis upon liberalization and co-ordination. ‘Fortress Europe’ is far from inevitable. However, though the OMC appears to be an appropriate mechanism for effecting co-ordination leading to a common regime, the member states have not embraced the format to avoid the further introduction of new ideas and actors into the process. [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]

Recent work on the issue of welfare entitlements in Central and Eastern Europe has focused on discovering the variation in citizens' preferences both within and between the post-communist states and across individual social policy areas. Empirical results suggest that substantial attitudinal differences exist along both of these dimensions. In this paper we build on extant work in two ways: first, rather than focusing on aggregated attitudes towards entitlements, we examine the micro-level influences on both government responsibility for and government spending on welfare assistance; and, second, we expand the spatial scope of other studies to include countries from Western Europe. This allows us to generate conclusions about how the different political contexts (stable democracies versus recent transitions) affect individual welfare beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercial consultancies in the realm of public affairs and interest intermediation have become an important player within the European Union. This paper presents findings from a survey of commercial interest intermediation. It illustrates that the business has grown and established itself gradually as an accepted and legitimate route of monitoring and influencing European policy-making. Moreover, we perceive that a certain integration and concentration of the business is under way at the European and global level. It is argued that these developments have an impact on European interest intermediation, first, because this business makes public affairs and interest intermediation more systematic, plural and competitive, and, second, because the business serves as an interface between European and global, internal and external affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the dramatic restructuring of the telecommunications sector during the 1980s and continuing through the present decade. The European Commission has worked hard for that restructuring, but the activities of the Commission can hardly be explained using the standard analytical repertoire found in international relations or comparative political research. After a look at the state of current integration theory, the article analyses the role of the Commission in the field of telecommunications taking the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) initiative as an example. It argues that the Commission has worked eagerly and successfully to extend its prerogative. The Commission's approach, however, has swung between the impulse to develop industrial policies under the active guidance of the Commission and the aim of liberalizing and deregulating markets. Policy-making in the Community is not straightforward, but takes place in a system of multi-level governance. Levels of policy-making and interdependence are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]