The European Union's (EU) membership conditionality has been perceived as a highly effective means of influence on non-member states in the run-up to the 2004 and 2007 enlargements. According to the incentive-based explanation that dominates the literature, conditionality has been particularly effective when the EU offered a credible membership incentive and when governments did not consider the domestic costs of compliance threatening to their hold on power. This volume challenges much of the existing work on EU enlargement and postcommunist transition, however, by testing the conditionality...
The European Union's (EU) membership conditionality has been perceived as a highly effective means of influence on non-member states in the run-up to ...
European politicians often speak of their efforts to 'manage globalization.' At one level, this is merely a rhetorical device to make globalization more palatable to citizens and prove that policy-makers are still firmly in control of their country's fate. This volume argues that the advocacy of managed globalization goes beyond rhetoric and actually has been a primary driver of major European Union (EU) policies in the past twenty years. The EU has indeed tried to manage globalization through the use of five major mechanisms: 1) expanding policy scope 2) exercising regulatory influence 3)...
European politicians often speak of their efforts to 'manage globalization.' At one level, this is merely a rhetorical device to make globalization mo...
At the national level, political parties play an important role in making representative democracy work. They help to aggregate and communicate policy preferences, link decision-making between different legislative bodies and hold politicians accountable. In the European Union, however, the electoral connection is weak. This casts doubt on the impact of partisan politics at the European level. Are political parties able to fulfil their role as 'transmission belts' ensuring political accountability and consistent decision-making in the European Union? To answer this question we look at the...
At the national level, political parties play an important role in making representative democracy work. They help to aggregate and communicate policy...
The European Union is a key actor in international economic governance. Through its foreign economic policies it plays a central role in the negotiation of international trade agreements, the global regulation of the financial services sector, and the provision of aid to developing countries. This book shows how principal-agent theory can be used to shed new light on this complex of policy areas. In particular, the contributions to this volume analyze delegation, control, and agent strategies in a variety of principal-agent relationships shaping the EU's foreign economic policies: mainly...
The European Union is a key actor in international economic governance. Through its foreign economic policies it plays a central role in the negotiati...
After the participative and deliberative turns in both democratic theory and EU studies, we are currently witnessing a representative turn to which this volume contributes by addressing the relation between representation and democracy in the EU. Although in the Lisbon Treaty the EU conceives itself as a representative democracy, the meaning of this concept in a supranational polity is far from clear either in theory or practice. Instead, the historically contingent link between representation and democracy is today severely challenged by various processes of diversification at all levels...
After the participative and deliberative turns in both democratic theory and EU studies, we are currently witnessing a representative turn to which...
The regulation of issues like abortion, euthanasia, gun control, same-sex unions, pornography, prostitution, drugs, or gambling is commonly referred to a special class of so called morality policies. The distinctive feature of these policies is that politics are shaped by conflicts over first principle: When does life end? When does it begin? Is gambling, drug consumption or prostitution inherently malignant? The regulation of these value conflicts entails decisions about "right" or "wrong" and hence the "validation of a particular set of basic values." Yet there is still a remarkable lack...
The regulation of issues like abortion, euthanasia, gun control, same-sex unions, pornography, prostitution, drugs, or gambling is commonly referre...
The book advances the state of the European Union s policy theory by taking stock of seven promising frameworks of the policy process, systematically comparing their limitations and strengths, and offering a strategy to develop robust research agendas. Frameworks may constitute competing policy explanations depending on assumptions they make about EU institutional and issue complexity. The frameworks include detailed analyses of multi-level governance, advocacy coalitions, punctuated equilibrium, multiple streams, policy learning, normative power Europe, and constructivism. Besides generating...
The book advances the state of the European Union s policy theory by taking stock of seven promising frameworks of the policy process, systematically ...
This book confronts and discusses different conceptions of political representation with respect to their application to the system of multi-level governance in the European Union. Political representation is an essentially contested concept. Its meaning has evolved with the development of representative democracy at the level of the nation state, and normative theories of political representation often evolved as a reflection on developing practices rather than the other way around.
Since the EU is not a conventional nation state, and since the effectiveness and legitimacy of classic...
This book confronts and discusses different conceptions of political representation with respect to their application to the system of multi-level gov...
This book explores one of the central challenges facing the EU today how to reconcile enlargement with the pursuit of a stronger and more effective European Union. While the relationship between widening and deepening has been recognized for years as one of the big questions in the field of European integration, existing theoretical and empirical analyses of this relationship suffer from a variety of shortcomings. This book brings together a group of EU scholars who significantly advance our understanding of the relationship between widening and deepening. The contributors challenge a...
This book explores one of the central challenges facing the EU today how to reconcile enlargement with the pursuit of a stronger and more effective...
The last decades have witnessed a significant shift in policy competencies away from central governments in Europe. The reallocation of competencies spans over three dimensions: upwards, sideways, and downwards. This collection takes the dispersion of powers as a starting point and seeks to assess how the actors involved cope with the new configurations. Chapters discuss the conceptualization of power dispersion and highlight the ways in which we add to this research agenda. Some general conclusions are also outlined, indicating future avenues of research. Taken together, the collection...
The last decades have witnessed a significant shift in policy competencies away from central governments in Europe. The reallocation of competencie...
