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"Spain and the European Union" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Democratic Deficit in the European Union" published on by Oxford University Press.

This paper considers the relationship between Europeans' religious characteristics & support for the European Union. Using Eurobarometer data from the 1970s through the 1990s, we find that Catholics have been far stronger supporters of European integration than Protestants have, & that the devout in both traditions have been more in favor of the integration process than have nominal adherents. The effects of religion survive both longitudinal & intensive cross-sectional analyses incorporating alternative explanations for support of the EU. These findings suggest that, if religion is declining as a social & political force, underlying support for European unity may also be dwindling. Public approval of the European Union may thus depend increasingly on the economic performance of national governments & of the Union itself. 2 Tables, 72 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd.]

We examine whether the EMU has led to greater labour market flexibility, differentiating between reform that enhances the capacity of an economy to adjust to economic shocks and reform that aims to increase long-run output. Based on a panel model and using OECD data on labour market reforms for 27 OECD countries over the period 1994—2004, we find that the two types of labour market reform are driven by different variables. Most importantly, our results suggest that the EMU has had no effect on reform that enhances the economy's capacity to adjust to shocks. Most of our evidence for reform that increases long-run output suggests that the EMU has not affected this type of reform either.

This study examines transparency and censorship in the Council of Ministers of the European Union from 1999 to 2009. We measure transparency by considering the timeliness of record release and the levels of censorship applied to records when (and if) they are released. We show that legislation introduced in 2001 (Regulation 1049) triggered a massive shift towards greater transparency, in line with its intention. However, we also show that the trend towards greater transparency has been interrupted by the enlargement rounds in 2004 and 2007. We attribute this fact to inexperience on the part of the new member states and the resulting need for censorship while these states adjusted to the negotiation styles in the Council.

Why are some interest groups able to lobby political decisions successfully whereas others are not? This article suggests that the issue context is an important source of variation because it can facilitate or hamper the ability of interest groups to lobby decision-makers successfully. In order to test the effect of issue characteristics, this article draws on a new, unprecedented data set of interest group lobbying in the European Union. Using quantitative text analysis to analyse Commission consultations, this article studies lobbying success across 2696 interest groups and 56 policy issues. The findings indicate that lobbying success indeed varies with the issue context, depending on the relative size of lobbying coalitions and the salience of policy issues, whereas individual group characteristics do not exhibit any systematic effect. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

"Finland and the European Union" published on by Oxford University Press.

Does trust in national institutions foster or hinder trust in the institutions of the European Union (EU)? There is no agreement in the literature on popular support for the EU about the direction of the relationship between trust in national and European institutions. Some scholars argue that both will be positively related, others have proposed the opposite hypothesis: low levels of trust in national institutions will lead citizens to higher levels of support for the EU. We argue that both hypotheses are true but operate at different levels: whereas more trusting citizens tend to be so in both the national and the European arenas, we also find that at the country level the relationship is negative: living in a country with highly trusted and well-performing institutions hinders trust in the European Parliament. We test our hypotheses using data from the European Social Survey and Hierarchical Linear Modeling. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

The increasing importance of civil society and civil society actors in recent decades has ensured that they now feature prominently in the European Union's enlargement strategy with the EU now possessing a series of policies on civil society in line with its perceived importance in the expansion of the Eurozone. Drawing on interviews with civil society organizations and in conjunction with an examination of EU Civil Society Policy and the legal and institutional environment in Turkey, this book questions the impact that these policies have had on Turkish civil society suggesting that it is, at best, limited. Instead this book argues that the EU could not accomplish its expected objectives within the framework of its civil society policy in Turkey due to a universalist understanding that ignores the current domestic structure of Turkish civil society as well as disregarding its political nature and the autonomous character of Turkey's civil society actors. The result is one of the most wide-ranging and in-depth studies on Turkish civil society and European Union, as such it is an important text for students and scholars of EU enlargement and civil society.

Has the European Union (EU) succeeded in socializing citizens to support the democratic values it claims to promote? On the face of it, the prevailing skepticism precludes any expectation of a successful socialization of EU citizens to the EU values. Yet, according to the socialization hypothesis, citizens' support for these values is expected to increase as countries accumulate more years of the EU membership. Using survey data to isolate distinct dimensions of democratic values, we examine differences among countries in this regard, as well as changes within countries over time. Results confirm the socialization hypothesis, showing that support for democratic values is generally higher in countries with more years of the EU membership, and that this support trends upwards over time.

The European Union (EU) is assumed to suffer from a democratic deficit. It is often posited that in the EU there is only a weak and indirect connection between public preferences and policy change. This article investigates empirically whether any relationship exists between public support for European integration and EU policy output (1973—2008). Using a new indicator of policy output — the volume of important legislation produced in a semester — I discover a surprising relationship between public support and legislative production. Employing vector autoregression (VAR), I demonstrate that public EU support Granger-causes legislative output but not vice versa, and that the relationship is strong up to the middle of the 1990s but non-existent afterwards. The effect is robust to the inclusion of indicators of the state of the economy and government preferences. In addition, I discover that the average level of EU support in the Council of Ministers follows unemployment levels with a four-year delay.