1,721,060 research outputs found
Interlinking neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism: Sidelining governments and manipulating policy preferences as "passerelles"
Get PDFThe EU's founding fathers had the protection of the EU's constituent units as a key concern and set up serious hurdles to policy innovation in the absence of unanimous governmental agreement. These institutional design features, aptly characterised as "joint-decision trap" by Fritz W. Scharpf, were only softened but not erased over time. Nonetheless, the problem of how to innovate has, at times, been overcome through eclectic means. There are indeed some well known and quite visible practices as well as some less expected and more obscure strategies that have propelled the EU's policy system beyond what has for a long time been expected. This paper argues that there are two strategic moves the European Commission (and, at times, other supranational actors such as the European Court of Justice) can use to actively overcome member state opposition: first, sidelining some or even all national governments; and, second, manipulating relevant policy preferences. These two basic strategies can be seen to interconnect the diverging basic assumptions of intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism as 'passerelles'.political science; joint decision making; unanimity; integration theory; intergovernmentalism; neo-functionalism
Interest Groups in a Multi-level Polity: The Impact of European Integration on National Systems
Get PDFinstitutionalisation; Europeanization; multilevel governance; Nation-state
The First EU Social Partner Agreement in Practice: Parental Leave in the 15 Member States. IHS Political Science Series: 2004, No. 96
Get PDFIn this paper, we analyze the impact of one specific EU social policy measure, the Parental Leave Directive. This Directive is based on the first Euro-collective agreement, concluded in November 1995 by the ETUC, UNICE and CEEP. Contrary to the rather sceptical assessments presented by many observers at the time of its adoption, our in-depth analysis of the Directive's implementation in all 15 member states reveals rather far-reaching effects. The Directive induced significant policy reforms in the majority of member states and thus facilitated the reconciliation of work and family life for many working parents. These effects were not only brought about by compliance with the compulsory minimum standards of the Directive, but also by a considerable number of voluntary reforms. We argue that domestic party politics and processes of policy learning may explain the occurrence of these "unforced" changes, which have hitherto received little attention by Europeanisation scholars
Gerda Falkner • Titel: The EU14's "Sanctions" Against Austria: Sense and Nonsense Quelle Print: CSA Review (Journal of the European Union Studies Association
No full textThe background The Austrian political system had since World War II been characterized by two major parties. Social Democrats (SPÖ) and Christian Democrats (ÖVP) were each embedded in a stable socio-political subculture. The Freedom Party (FPÖ) under Jörg Haider having steadily increased its votes since 1986, the elections in October 1999 finally resulted in three parties of approximately the same weight. Of the 183 seats in the lower house of the Austrian Parliament, the SPÖ won 65 (33%; 1995: 38%), the FPÖ 52 (27%; 1995: 22%) and the ÖVP 52 (27%; 1995: 28%). This result allowed for another "grand coalition" between social and Christian democrats as well as for a center-right government, while a center-left government between SPÖ and Green Party (14 seats or 7%; 1995: 5%) was not feasible (and the Liberal Party failed to win any seats this time). Who voted for the FPÖ, and why? Most importantly, a reorientation occurred among workers. In this group, the FPÖ could, within 13 years, double its proportion twice. The traditional worker's party, the SPÖ, was in 1999 only voted in by 35% of workers (1986: 57%). The FPÖ furthermore became the strongest party among the male electorate (32%; SP 31% and VP 26%, Grüne 5%; among women, the FPÖ scored 21% only) and among those under 30 years old (35%; 25% SP, 17% VP, 13% Grüne). Against frequent expectations, various "protest motives" were more important than the FPÖ's anti-migration policy (47%). The prime motives of voting FPÖ were to fight against misgovernment and mismanagement (65%), to promote change more generally (63%), and to sanction the members of the former grand coalition government (36%). This created a kind of dilemma: On the one hand, the result of the elections can be read as expressing a desire for change. On the other hand (and this was often neglected internationally), 63% did not vote for the FPÖ. However, only one form of stable (nonminoritarian) government except another grand coalition was possible, and this included the FPÖ, which had not been considered a suitable member of government by large parts of the political elite (including the ÖVP) until then (all data from Plasser, Ulram and Sommer 1999). Against this background, it is crucial to know that the SPÖ had been in government for 30 years and the grand coalition between the dominant parties, the SPÖ and ÖVP, since 1986 (after WWII, there had already been a grand coalition government until 1966). In addition, the Austrian system of corporatism connected the major (and basically monopolistic) interest groups of labor and industry closely to the SPÖ and the ÖVP, respectively. Under these conditions and under an economic system with relatively high levels of state influence in the economic, cultural and even academic systems, it was a frequent public complaint that party patronage flourished and mismanagement grew. (It should be noted, however, that Austrian economic performance indicators are nevertheless good in international comparison.) Another frequent concern was that the grand coalition government managed to keep the FPÖ out of government (many considered that it was too right-wing, populist, and unstable in its positions), but only at the price of adapting its actual policies to FPÖ views. Even Jörg Haider himself once stated that the Social Democratic Minister for Internal Affairs acted as an ideal policy executor for the FPÖ. Out of fear of losing votes, political statements by the FPÖ were often hardly commented on by the grand coalition parties. They tried to keep contested topic
The Convention on the Future of the EU: The European Commission and Treaty Reform
Get PDFTreaty reform has become an almost constant feature in the European Union. This article challenges the traditional intergovernmentalist assumption that state representatives are the only significant actors in this process by looking in some detail at the role played by the European Commission. The article first sets out the institutional framework within which the Commission participates in the negotiations. It then demonstrates that the Commission's influence – even though limited in the actual decision-making – is evident with respect to agenda-setting and legitimation of treaty reform. Finally, we look at the impact of the convention method on the nature of treaty reform
Worlds of compliance: Why leading approaches to the implementation of EU legislation are only 'sometimes-true theories'
Get PDFThis paper summarises the main theoretical findings of a large-scale qualitative project on the transposition, enforcement and application of six EU labour law Directives in fifteen member states. Focusing on the transposition stage, our argument starts from a theoretical puzzle: When confronting the empirical results from our 91 cases with the various hypotheses that we derived from the literature, it turns out that all causal conditions suggested by existing theories, and even two of the most prominent hypotheses (on misfit and veto players), have at best rather weak explanatory power. On closer inspection, our qualitative studies show that even their basic rationale does not hold in some groups of countries. As a solution, we offer a typology of three worlds of compliance within the fifteen EU member states covered by our study, each of which is characterised by an ideal-typical transposition style: a 'world of law observance', a 'world of domestic politics', and a 'world of neglect'. This typology provides the key to understanding when and how individual theoretical propositions are relevant.policy coordination; implementation; Europeanization
The EU's Common Agricultural Policy: a case of defensive policy import
No full textThe shift to direct payments, financed by large EU budgetary transfers, highlights the redistributive character of the CAP (Daugbjerg and Swinbank 2009). Today, the EU spends a considerable amount of resources on farm policy, total CAP spending (including newer rural development concerns) representing slightly less than 45 per cent of the EU budget. While this has decreased (from 70 per cent in 19804), it still makes the CAP, with its emphasis on redistribution, an anomaly in a EU so dominated by the regulatory logic of intervention that it has been dubbed a �regulatory state� (Majone 1994)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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