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...

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...

This book assesses the ability of learning theories to explain European Union (EU) integration processes, highlighting the conditions under which EU actors in various decision-making processes learn or do not learn.

It was published as a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy.

This book is an analysis of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe. Leading Political Scientists study the developments in the 2000s and draw conclusions about to what extent EMU has been successful and what challenges lie ahead.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

Since the EU is not a conventional nation state, and since the effectiveness and legitimacy of classic...

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)...

The lack of previous research into political interest groups and taking into account policy-specific and institutional context characteristics is largely due to research designs that have been primarily focused on a small number of policy debates, with the result that contextual characteristics were largely held constant. This book brings together articles from different modules that are part of a larger European Collaborative Research Project, INTEREURO, carried out by research teams in nine different countries under the auspices of the European Science Foundation. The main goal of the...

The notion of Differentiated Integration is increasingly used in the literature on European integration. Often employed interchangeably with the notion of "flexible integration, diverging views on its nature have led to the emergence of various definitions and, to some extent, a semantic confusion. A lack of consensus characterizes the academic literature; some authors even avoid putting an explicit definition on the term.

The main objective of this book is to seek answers for the following questions: How can one define Differentiated Integration in the European Union? Should...