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Over the past few years, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline has been one of the most divisive issues in EU politics, with some member states opposing the project, others supporting it, and a third group adopting a neutral stance. Which conditions explain these varying national positions? Our study offers the first systematic attempt to examine preference formation with regard to Nord Stream 2 across the entire EU membership. Drawing on elite surveys, we compile an original dataset to position EU member states in the Nord Stream 2 debate. We then perform a Qualitative Comparative Analysis to uncover the determinants of the differing positions taken by member states. The Nord Stream 2 controversy is employed as a testing ground for new intergovernmentalist theory, which argues that preference formation is not just shaped by material and (geo)political conditions, but also by the preferences of other member states. Our study finds that material benefits and the role of Russia are relevant conditions for position formation on Nord Stream 2. However, in this case, we did not find evidence for the importance of other member states' preferences.

© 2018 The Authors. Regulation & Governance Published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd This article lays out a framework for the conditions under which a civil society organization lobbies the state and when it turns to the market. This strategic choice cannot be understood solely from within current frameworks of lobbying strategies; insights from interest group studies must be complemented with the social movement literature's understanding of market-based strategies. We build an overarching framework by extending the inside and outside lobbying dichotomy to include strategies that target the market. We also argue that it is crucial to understand the relations between both lobbying venues, as their relative power affects the choice not only between inside or outside lobbying, but also between the state or the market. The result is a richer framework more suited to capture the breadth of contemporary civil society organization lobbying behavior and, more importantly, to facilitate the comparative assessment of different strategic choices in future empirical research. ispartof: Regulation & Governance vol:14 issue:3 pages:1-13 status: Published online

What accounts for the variation in EU actorness in cases of contested statehood in the European Neighbourhood? A comparative analysis of the EU’s policies vis-à-vis three territorial conflicts – Kosovo, Abkhazia and Western Sahara – demonstrates the intricate relationship between external conditions and internal EU capability leading to substantial involvement, partial involvement or non-involvement in conflict management. Using insights from the EU actorness debate and the literatures on contested statehood and EU external governance, the paper offers a conceptualisation of the EU’s conflict management role and a contingent explanation of the EU’s varying commitment to managing conflicts in three cases of contested statehood. The paper finds that external determinants have a considerable weight in EU’s policies which existing research tends to overlook owing to its predominant focus on EU’s internal institutional procedures and instruments. It teases out the external action-enabling and action-hindering factors, in particular the external structural constraints arising from the nature of statehood contestation and the agency of other international and local players in the three conflicts in the European Neighbourhood.

Supplementary materials files: online appendix; replication data Research on differentiated integration (DI) in the European Union has burgeoned in recent years. However, we still know little about citizens’ attitudes towards the phenomenon. In this article, we argue that at the level of individual citizens, liberal economic values increase support for DI. Stronger preferences for equality, in contrast, make opposition to the concept more likely. Similarly, concerns about discriminatory differentiation at the member state level lead citizens to oppose DI. We test the theoretical claims by analysing survey data on citizens’ attitudes towards a ‘multi-speed Europe’. Supporters of DI, indeed, are marked by liberal economic attitudes. In contrast to general EU support, we do not find robust correlations with socio-demographic variables. Moreover, the data reveal striking differences amongst macro-regions: support for DI has become much lower in Southern European states. We attribute this opposition to negative repercussions of the Eurozone crisis. Work on this article was generously supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement 822419.

This article assesses the impact of administrative capacity and political governance factors on the absorption of structural and cohesion funds (SCF). We drew on EU‐27 country level data and developed a dynamic panel data model for the 2007–15 implementation period. By using a tobit estimation technique, the results indicated that government effectiveness and public diversion of funds significantly affect the recipient countries ability to absorb EU funds. The results revealed that increasing government effectiveness and combating corruption had significant stronger boosting effects on the absorption of SCF, especially in the new member states (NMS). This might explain why bottlenecks of administrative capacity and political governance are highly relevant for NMS and why these countries generally faced lower absorption rates, as compared to EU‐15. Moreover, the results also underlined that the recent great recession reduced the ability of countries to absorb SCF. Against our expectations, domestic financial capacity and political decentralization were not shown to be decisive for EU funds absorption. In policy terms, our study suggests a focus on administrative capacity‐building and fighting corruption in NMS and across lagging regions of older member states in order to improve absorption rates, while also focusing more on the efficiency and effectiveness of European cohesion policy. Finally, several suggestions are made on how our analysis can be replicated and taken forward by analysts of the European Union's internal development cohesion policy.

Developed and developing countries are increasingly cooperating on migration management, and human rights NGOs have harshly criticised these instruments for cooperation. This article asks how and to what extent parliaments are challenging policies for international cooperation on migration management. On the one hand parliaments have traditionally been described as ?moral tribunes? in international relations, due to their principled support for human rights. On the other hand, parliaments are increasingly operating in political systems marked by anti-immigrant sentiment and increased support for right-wing populist parties. How do parliaments navigate between these two poles when it comes to international cooperation on migration management? Based on examples from Australia, the EU and Israel, this article shows that the use of non-legally binding instruments for cooperation limits the formal role of parliaments, but also and more importantly that there is a lack of political will to scrutinise these instruments and hold executives to account (notwithstanding attempts by some members of parliament or some political groupings to challenge policies through informal means). The lack of political contestation implies that, as far as migration management is concerned, ?politics stop at the water's edge?.

There has been increased interest in trade policy following the UK’s EU membership referendum. However, relatively little scholarly analysis has been produced on how Brexit will affect EU trade policy. Instead, the received wisdom has been that Brexit will shift the EU’s trade policy position in a less liberal direction. This is based on a ‘static’ analysis where the UK variable is simply removed from the figurative ‘function’ determining EU trade policy. We argue that this neglects the potential role of more ‘dynamic’ effects. First, the negotiations to determine the nature of the EU–UK future economic partnership are likely to involve a lengthy process with a still uncertain, and possibly evolving, destination. The outcome and process of arriving there will influence how economic operators and policymakers adapt their preferences and behaviour, including through possible relocation and the formation of new alliances. This will shape EU trade policy in potentially counterintuitive ways. Second, the absence of clear material structures from which actors can ‘read’ their interests highlights the importance of considering the role of ideas and political framing. How the vote for and consequences of Brexit are interpreted will likely shape what is considered an appropriate policy response. Examining EU trade policy since the Brexit vote, the article finds that rather than push the EU in a more illiberal direction, the referendum result has been used to reinforce the European Commission’s external liberalisation agenda. The Commission’s discursive response to Brexit and Donald Trump has been to portray the EU as a champion of free trade in an era of global populism.

Advocacy is typically conceived of as an activity where advocacy groups seek and policymakers grant influence. In this paper, we turn the classic approach to advocacy upside down and ask under what conditions policymakers seek to exert influence on the positions adopted by opposing or allied advocacy groups. Two strategies that policymakers can use in their interactions with advocacy groups are proposed: amplification and persuasion. We build on resource exchange theory and the concept of political opportunity structures to explain which strategy a policymaker uses. The analysis relies on a unique database, which draws from 297 interviews with policymakers from 107 different countries at global climate change and trade conferences. Our results demonstrate that, overall, policymakers seek out advocacy groups more when they are faced with increased levels of political pressures. Namely, elected politicians are more prone to seek out opposing societal interests than non-elected policymakers. Moreover, policymakers from democratically accountable countries, who work on salient issues, are more inclined to mobilize their advocacy group allies.

Can voters be persuaded by referendum campaigns? This article develops a theoretical model that synthesises the existing literature on campaign effects and issue-voting by arguing that the strength of pre-existing attitudes conditions voter receptivity to campaign arguments, thereby also determining their eventual vote choice. Using original panel data for the 2015 Danish opt-out referendum, there is evidence that attitude strength matters for whether voters are responsive to persuasion during campaigns. The article finds that voters with the most strongly-held attitudes felt well informed and certain about the consequences of the vote even before the start of the campaign, whereas voters with moderately-held attitudes are found to be more prone to believe those campaign arguments that are consistent with their EU attitudes, changing their vote intentions accordingly. Finally, voters with weakly-held attitudes were equally persuadable for the No and the Yes side of the campaign, but they are also the least pre-disposed to pay attention to campaign messages. The conclusions discuss the broader implications of the findings for our understanding of EU referendum campaigns.

The COVID‐19 emergency has had a dramatic impact on market incomes and income support policies. The lack of timely available data constrains the estimation of the scale and direction of recent changes in the income distribution, which in turn constrain policymakers seeking to monitor such developments. We overcome the lack of data by proposing a dynamic calibrated microsimulation approach to generate counterfactual income distributions as a function of more timely external data than is available in dated income surveys. We combine nowcasting methods using publicly available data and a household income generation model to perform the first calibrated simulation based upon actual data aiming to assess the distributional implications of the COVID‐19 crisis in Ireland. Overall, we find that the crisis had an equalizing real‐time effect for both gross and disposable incomes, notwithstanding the significant hardship experienced by many households. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

While policy and academic discourses point to important shifts in EU development policy, it remains difficult to ascertain the level of these changes. The main aim of this article is to propose a research agenda on change and continuity in EU development policy. Drawing on the literatures on paradigm change and post-development, this involves four key questions for future research: (1) How can we map the EU's current paradigm? (2) How can we map changes and continuities in this regard? (3) How can we explain changes and continuities? (4) What role do policy experiments play in this regard? In addressing these four questions, the article pays particular attention to what we already know from existing literature and to what issues could guide future research. We highlight that ostensibly significant changes are often 'merely' second order changes that do not challenge underlying philosophical ideas of the Eurocentric, modernist and colonial paradigm. Specifically, we point at the importance of studying whether policy experiments 'reinvent' this paradigm or induce paradigmatic change. In the conclusions, we summarize the research agenda and reflect on the need of a better acknowledgement of the 'PIEUriverse' of alternatives to 'development' within Europe.

In the aftermath of the EU's diplomatic mission to resolve the Orange Revolution in 2004, several Russian policy makers perceived the EU as an aggressive actor which sought to undermine Russia's influence in the post-Soviet space. About a decade later, Russian policy makers are mocking the EU's limited abilities in the ongoing Ukraine crisis. The purpose of this article is to explain the reasons for this change of the EU's abilities by focusing on its state-building in Ukraine. The article examines the EU's state-building initiatives in Ukraine between November 2013 and July 2015. The article assesses the factors which shape the EU's state-building in Ukraine. It argues that the EU's state-building was hampered by two interrelated factors. First, the EU did not possess the policy tools to counter-balance Russia's affirmative foreign policy towards Ukraine which was reflected in Crimea's annexation to Russia. Second, as a consequence, this annexation turned Ukraine into a case of contested statehood.

Understanding where (ineffective) organizational rules come from is of vital importance for both public administration scholars and practitioners. Yet little is known about the underlying mechanisms that explain why external rules may cause organizational rule breeding and, as a by-product, red tape. Using a combination of archival and interview data, the authors empirically study rule-breeding processes in the case of Gasunie, which is a heavily regulated Dutch gas transport organization. The archival findings indicate that rule stocks have increased substantially over time at every policy level. Furthermore, the interview data support the notion that policymakers at different levels are jointly responsible for excessive rule breeding and, ultimately, organizational red tape.

This article investigates the drivers of the parliamentarisation of war powers. Building on recent findings in the study of war deployments, we argue that the existing literature has predominantly focused on parliamentary drivers of parliamentarisation, leaving potential executive interests untouched. To fill this gap, we propose a rational-choice institutionalist based framework for identifying the motivations and strategies of both parliamentary and executive actors in episodes of parliamentarisation. We apply this novel heuristic device to the case of Belgium, and the parliamentary approval of the military interventions in Libya (2011) and Iraq (2014-) more in particular. Building upon data from interviews and document analysis, we show that stronger parliamentary involvement in the decision about military deployment is not just the result of increased parliamentary pressure, but equally, and perhaps most importantly, of the willingness and strategy of the executive to seek legitimacy or support. free access to article via: https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pa/gsx081/4797534?guestAccessKey=4e570ea3-0ed9-495d-9a49-acdbb5544ca8 ispartof: Parliamentary Affairs vol:71 issue:3 pages:674-696 status: published

One of the main objectives of EU trade policy is to establish wider protection for its regional specialty foods, known as Geographical Indications (GIs). In spite of US opposition, the EU has successfully considered additional protection for its GIs a red line in recent trade agreements. A key piece to the puzzle of this success is that whereas the literature has typically treated trade and non-trade issues as a dichotomy, GI protection encompasses both trade and non-trade aspects. In the EU, trade agreements are negotiated by the Commission but require member state approval. Both Greece and Italy have threatened not to ratify CETA over insufficient GI protection, so GIs clearly matter. This article develops and tests a theory of GI protection using new data on GIs listed for protection in 11 recent EU trade agreements. It finds that EU trade agreements are more likely to protect GIs with higher sales values and from countries in the South of Europe, where GIs are highly salient because of gastronationalism. These findings illustrate how economic, cultural and political factors shape and enable EU policy exports through trade agreements.

This article explores the conception of law that underlies the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), building on Opinion 2/13 on EU accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as a topical example. Joxerramon Bengoetxea’s metaphor of the CJEU being a ‘Dworkinian court’ fails to explain fundamental aspects of the Court’s case law which are incompatible with Dworkin’s theory of law. Instead, the CJEU is committed to an EU legal system which conforms to Joseph Raz’s theory of the necessary conditions for legal systems: comprehensiveness, openness and a claim of supremacy. Within this paradigm, the supremacy claim of EU law is in need of demystification because it is inherent to any legal system. Paradoxically, while Opinion 2/13 suggests that the EU should be given special treatment in its accession to the ECHR, the Court’s underlying conception of the EU legal system is essentially mimetic of the typical characteristics of national legal systems. This mimetic nature of the EU legal system entails a dissociation between the political and the legal nature of the EU: while the EU is certainly not a state, its legal system is no different from national legal systems.

First published: 27 October 2017 Why do governments include parliamentarians in the delegations to international negotiations? Conduct of the diplomatic negotiations is among the most tightly controlled prerogatives of the executive, and executives have been historically dominant in the conduct of foreign policy. This article draws on the participation of members of parliaments in national delegations to the Review Conferences of the Non-Proliferation Treaty over the past 40 years. The emerging patterns show that legitimation through oversight is unlikely to be the reason for participation. Drawing on literature on institutional variation in legislative-executive relations, the data indicate that executives are more interested in co-opting the parliamentarians, in order to make them less opposed to the government's policy. Nuclear Proliferation International History Project

In the 20 years after its introduction, the principal-agent model has seen increasing use to study political processes in virtually all policy domains in which the EU is active. Relaxing the strict assumptions that guided the original economic applications has greatly widened the scope for potential applications. This very phenomenon has also created an existential challenge to the model’s contemporary use, which is combining the reductionist aims of the model (from which it derives its strength) with the complex empirical settings to which it is increasingly applied. To facilitate this balancing exercise, we propose a two-step approach to principal-agent analysis, in which the mapping of the principal-agent proof relation is separated from the effective analysis that examines the reasons, modalities and consequences of delegation and control in the EU. In doing so, we show how the principal-agent model can continue to provide new insights at the various stages of the research process.

This paper uses reputation theory to address a century-old puzzle: what guides the choice of coordination efforts in large politico-administrative systems? Max Weber, founder of the modern study of bureaucracy, famously considered a hierarchy superior to other organizational models. However, modern governments are not organized as one big hierarchy, but as a set of parallel hierarchies, typically 15-20 ministries. This raises a coordination challenge, which in practice has proven surprisingly difficult to meet. Based on reputation theory we argue that concerns of audience management are likely to be an important factor when deciding on the level of coordination. We investigate this argument in the European Union’s central executive institution, the EU Commission. Based on more than 7,000 cases from the EU Commission’s internal digital coordination system we analyze the impact of audience sensitivity and audience involvement on coordination efforts. Our findings suggest that audience concerns are important drivers of agencies’ interdepartmental coordination. This article uses reputation theory to address a century-old puzzle: what guides the choice of coordination efforts in large politico-administrative systems? Max Weber, founder of the modern study of bureaucracy, famously considered a hierarchy superior to other organizational models. However, modern governments are not organized as one big hierarchy but as a set of parallel hierarchies, typically 15–20 ministries. This raises a coordination challenge, which in practice has proven surprisingly difficult to meet. Based on reputation theory, we argue that concerns of audience management are likely to be an important factor when deciding on the level of coordination. We investigate this argument in the European Union’s central executive institution, the EU Commission. Based on more than 7,000 cases from the EU Commission’s internal digital coordination system we analyze the impact of audience sensitivity and audience involvement on coordination efforts. Our findings suggest that audience concerns are important drivers of agencies’ interdepartmental coordination.

This study examines the information demands of decision-makers from across the globe in their exchanges with interest organizations. It proposes two explanatory factors that drive these information demands: democracy and development. We argue that decision-makers’ information demands vary depending on whether they hail from developed countries or developing countries, as well as the extent to which their political systems are democratically accountable. We test our expectations based on interviews with 297 decision-makers from 107 different countries who were active during transnational trade and climate change negotiations. Our findings demonstrate that decision-makers from less developed countries exhibit a higher preference for interactions with organizations that provide them with technical information. Decision-makers from democratically accountable countries, by contrast, tend to place relatively greater value on political information provided by interest groups.

Published online: 03 November 2016 This article argues that not all business politics is quiet politics' and it explores the conditions of when this is likely to be the case. Drawing on a remarkable lobbying success in the process of reforming banking in Europe, it shows that it was neither capture nor quiet politics within the financial expert community that led to the lobbying success. Business lobbyists from Germany, supported by representatives from other countries, obtained a favourable regulatory treatment of bank lending to small and medium-sized businesses thanks to noisy business politics. Noisy business politics seeks political influence through pressuring by raising the salience of an issue and expanding the conflict. This strategy is most likely to succeed if the mobilization of opponents can be countervailed through the use of frames that are widely perceived as legitimate and create positive perceptions.

The article explores the recent shift in the European Union's approach towards candidate states in the Western Balkans.(1) It argues that the European Commission has started to pay greater attention to parliaments in candidate states in order to promote and secure accession-related reforms. As a result, national parliaments in candidate states have greater opportunities to shape the content of these reforms, including those in the rule of law sector. Consequently, the article elaborates on the factors that could potentially affect Balkan parliaments' involvement in the accession process.

The political influence of interest groups manifests in different ways. Interest groups may affect which political problems attract attention as well as the political decisions aimed at solving these problems. Crucially, different types of groups may be successful in respect to these different dimensions of influence. Economic groups have been described as engaging more in “insider” politics affecting public policy decisions, whereas citizen groups engage more in “outsider” politics affecting agenda setting. This study investigates the multidimensional character of interest group influence and links it to group type as well as lobbying strategies. The study is based on original survey data collected among Danish and British interest groups in 2011–2014. We find two related but distinct dimensions associated with agenda-setting and decision-making lobbying success. The analyses show that citizen and economic groups influence politics in different ways due to their choice of strategies and their different types of resources. Thus, group type has a direct as well as an indirect effect on lobbying success. This relationship is present in both pluralist UK and corporatist Denmark.

This study presents novel research on the economic geography of Belarus. The 118 regions of Belarus are examined in relation to the Eurasian Customs Union (EACU) through the period 2005–2014. Our estimation methods specifically take spatial and dynamic processes into account. We observe that EACU membership has corresponded to a slowdown in the process of regional economic convergence in Belarus, and intensified economic competition with a geographical dimension among regions. Furthermore, we find some evidence that urban and industrial regions, and regional clusters of private business activity have benefited more from the EACU relative to less urbanized areas. Additionally, spatial clusters and outliers are identified and compared across the periods prior and after the establishment of the EACU. Our preferred estimation model results suggest half-lives of convergence of about 9.4 and 31.5 years for the pre-EACU and EACU periods, respectively. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical model, which is aggregated across individuals to analyse the labour force participation rate, and empirical results to provide evidence of a U-shaped relationship between women’s labour force participation and economic development. Design/methodology/approach The U-shaped relationship is investigated by employing a panel data approach of 40 countries around the world over the period 1960–2005. It is investigated whether the labour force behaviour of women in different age groups can be lumped together by considering ten different age groups. Findings The paper finds evidence in favour of the U-shaped relationship. For every age group and explanatory variable in the model, a particular point is found where the regime of falling participation rates changes into a regime of rising participation rates. Research limitations/implications To evaluate this relationship, microeconomic analysis with primary data can also provide significant insights. Social implications Every country can narrow the gap between the labour participation rates of men and women in the long term. Fertility decline, shifts of employment to services, part-time work, increased opportunities in education, and the capital-to-labour ratio as a measure for economic development are the key determinants. Originality/value In addition to the U-shaped relationship, considerable research has been carried out on demographic transition. This paper brings these two strands of literature together, by econometrically investigating the impact of demographic transition on female labour force participation given its U-shaped relation with economic development, i.e., turning points for different explanatory variables are calculated and their implications for economic growth are discussed.

First published: 22 March 2017 Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in research on advocacy success, but limited attention has been paid to the role of public opinion. We examine how support from the public affects advocacy success, relying on a new original data set containing information on public opinion, advocacy positions, and policy outcomes on 50 policy issues in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Claims by advocates are measured through a news media content analysis of a sample of policy issues drawn from national and international public opinion surveys. Our multilevel regression analysis provides evidence that public support affects advocacy success. However, public opinion does not affect preference attainment for some of the lobbying advocates whose influence is feared the most, and the magnitude of its impact is conditional upon the number of advocates who lobby on the policy issue in question. Danish Council for Independent Research [0602-02642B] VIDI from the Dutch NWO [452-12-008]

The absence of politicization is widely considered an essential feature in ensuring the credibility of international organizations concerned with human rights monitoring. Nonetheless, hardly any empirical research has been conducted to systematically assess its presence and identify its consequences. Therefore, this article investigates the extent to which the state reporting process of the Treaty Bodies and the Universal Periodic Review are perceived to be politicized, and what consequences politicization has on their credibility. It claims that whereas politicization carries exclusively negative consequences in the Treaty Bodies, it has some unexpected positive consequences in the case of the Universal Periodic Review.

WOS: 000398181400003, Social Sciences Citation Index, Innovation is important for countries in the competitive global economy. It is one of the main criteria for countries to be superior, to remain competitive, and to produce high technology products. Countries allocate different types of incentives to encourage innovation activities in their countries. Innovation is also one of the strategic issues for the European Union (EU). The aim of this study is to compare the innovation performance of four EU candidate countries, Macedonia (FYR), Iceland, Serbia and Turkey. The entropy-based Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) approach is proposed in this paper. First, the importance of each variable is computed by the entropy method to reflect on the differences among the variables in the calculation process. Subsequently, the TOPSIS method is performed by using the value and importance of variables for prioritisation of the candidate countries with respect to their innovation performance. Four case studies are conducted to show the viability of the proposed approach. Each cases study uses different reports, namely The Global Competitiveness Index, Innovation Union Scoreboard, Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM) and Global Innovation Index. The results of this study show that the proposed approach provides the same ranking as Innovation Union Scoreboard and KAM.

An increasing number of studies have compared climate change adaptation policies within and between different countries. In this paper we show that these comparative studies suffer from what is known as the ‘‘dependent variable problem’ – the indistinctness of the phenomenon that is being measured, and disagreement on its scope and boundaries. This problem has been signaled in other scientific fields where it proved to hamper meaningful comparisons and policy evaluations, transnational learning, and policy transfer. This paper aims to raise consciousness of the dependent variable problem in comparative studies on climate change adaptation policy by exploring its origins and proposes ways to deal with it. Three main sources of the problem are discussed: (1) conceptual indistinctness of adaptation policy and the heterogeneity and lack of consistency of what is being compared between cases. (2) Inadequate research designs to compare cases. (3) Unclear indicators and explanatory variables to compare across cases. We propose a way to operationalize the concept of adaptation policy, provide a narrower description of the research designs for policy change or outcomes analysis, and finally discuss possible measurements concepts

Noback I., Broersma L. and van Dijk J. Gender-specific spatial interactions on Dutch regional labour markets and the gender employment gap, Regional Studies. This paper analyses gender-specific employment rates and the gender employment gap in Dutch municipalities for 2002. The novelty of this analysis is that it takes into account the extent to which gender-specific education, income, and unemployment influence the male and female employment rates and gender gap. Men and women often do not compete for the same jobs, but rather it is found that high male unemployment has an indirect, positive significant effect on female employment rates. The gender employment gap narrows with female education and in urban areas and it widens with the care-prone age composition of the municipal population.

The development of the EU asylum and migration policy is often explained as the result of ‘venue-shopping’, that is, the move by policy-makers to an EU policy venue in order to avoid national constraints. This article demonstrates\ud that, contrary to what would have been expected on the basis of this widespread view, EU co-operation on asylum matters has actually led to a rise in the legal standards\ud applicable to asylum-seekers and refugees. This outcome can be mainly explained by broader changes that have gradually affected the EU ‘system of venues’ and have thereby decreased the likelihood of more restrictive measures being adopted in the EU asylum policy venue. This has important implications for the EU governance of asylum and migration in general.

This paper examines whether differences in welfare regimes shape the incentives to work and get educated. Using microeconomic data for more than 100 000 European individuals, we show that welfare regimes make a difference for wages and education. First, people-based and household-based effects (internal returns to education, and household wage and education externalities) generate socioeconomic incentives for people to get an education and work which are stronger in countries with the weakest welfare systems, that is, those with what is known as ‘residual’ welfare regimes (Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal). Second, place-based effects and, more specifically, differences in regional wage per capita and educational endowment and in regional interpersonal income and educational inequality, also influence wages and education in different ways across welfare regimes. Place-based effects have the greatest impact in the Nordic social-democratic welfare systems. The results are robust to the inclusion of a large number of people-based and place-based controls. Keywords: welfare regimes, wages, education, incentives, regions, EU

Collaborations between China and the European Union (EU) member states involve not only connections between China and individual countries, but also interactions between the different EU member states, the latter of which is due also to the influence exerted by the EU’s integration strategy. The complex linkages between China and the EU28, as well as among the 28 EU member states, are of great importance for studying knowledge flows. Using co-authorship analysis, this study explores the changes of the network structure between 2000 and 2014. Our results show that EU member states with middle- or low- scientific capacities, in particular those who joined the EU after 2000, have been actively reshaping the network of scientific collaborations with China. The linkages between middle- and low- scientific capacity countries have been tremendously strengthened in the later years. The network positional advantage (measured by the degree of betweenness centrality) has shifted from a few dominant nations to a wider range of countries. We also find that countries like Belgium, Sweden and Denmark are in important positions connecting the relatively low-capacity ‘new’ EU member states with China. The ‘new’ EU member states—that have relatively low scientific capacity—intend to cooperate with China jointly with ‘old’ EU member(s).