Suchergebnisse

This article examines the role of norms and culture in perceptions of the European Union. Conceptually, it offers a distinction between the image of the European Union as a normative actor and attitudes toward one's country's relations with the European Union. It also explores whether the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), a cultural event which symbolizes the cultural understanding of contemporary Europe, is related to perceptions of the European Union. Empirically, it uses a public opinion survey ( n = 1050) following Israel's hosting of the ESC in 2019. The findings indicate that Israelis distinguish between the image of the European Union as an entity with positive features and their attitudes toward Israel's connections with the European Union.

"The Food Policy of the European Union" published on by Oxford University Press.

The availability of datasets scraped from the European Union's websites has greatly advanced the systematic analysis of European integration. But despite their enormous value, European Union databases contain almost no information about policymaking during Europe's first two decades, and for later periods, they suffer from far more inconsistencies and errors than has been previously recognised. This article draws upon extensive archival research and manual coding to identify and correct several of these limitations. I present a new dataset (EUPROPS) containing information on proposals for European Union policy from 1958 to 2021 and their outcomes. To illustrate the value of the dataset, I present some surprising initial findings about patterns of policymaking across this 60-year period and identify avenues for future research.

Research on European legislative decision-making has entered a stage of quantitative analysis. The quantitative approach promises to advance the current dialogue by allowing for the evaluation of competing approaches across multiple policy domains and over time. At the same time, the quantitative study of EU decision-making introduces a number of drawbacks: it is difficult to identify one definitive source for legislative information, and case-level data are not directly accessible in a machine-readable format. In order to identify the most crucial pitfalls and provide a reliable data source, we evaluate the most frequently cited, publicly available EU legislative database, CELEX, and compare it with a less publicized legislative database referred to as PreLex. We find that CELEX documents legislative events, whereas PreLex records inter-institutional activities in the legislative process. Unsurprisingly, each of these databases has particular advantages, and we discuss which of the two might be better suited for the analysis of specific research questions.

Recent studies suggest there is a direct trade-off between transparency and efficiency in legislative politics. We challenge this conclusion and present a bargaining model where one particular kind of transparency – the publication of legislative records – works to overcome problems of incomplete information. We also present empirical findings from legislative activities in the Council of the European Union from 1999 to 2014 and from 23 interviews with senior officials in Brussels. Our results show that increased transparency, in the form of publication of legislative records, does not lead to gridlock or prolonged negotiations. On the contrary, recordings of governments' positions help facilitate decision-making as it increases credibility of policy positions. This, in turn, lowers risk of negotiation failure and screens out marginal amendments.

Party politics in the European Parliament (EP) consists of competition between transnational party groups, each consisting of multiple national member parties from the 27 member states of the European Union (EU). Identifying the policy space that these parties inhabit and their ideological positions is both practically and conceptually challenging. In this article we characterize this policy competition by tracking EP political groups from three separate, original expert surveys taken in 2004, 2007 and 2010. We look at the relative positioning of the groups on multiple dimensions of policy, as well as changes in party group policy since 2004. Additionally, we characterize the policy cohesion of party groups by examining the relative positions of each group's constituent parties, using independent national-level expert surveys. The results reinforce previous findings that EP party groups occupy the entire range of the left–right spectrum and, moreover, that their national party makeup consists of parties that are broadly cohesive in terms of their policy locations.

Congruence in the European Parliament has been analyzed in terms of agreement between voters and national candidates/parties. The question whether voters and Europarties are congruent on major dimensions of contestation (left-right and European Union) remains unanswered. Acknowledging the 'split-level' structure of preference aggregation in the European Parliament, we theorize the interrelationships between these levels. Our model incorporates a typically neglected factor: the interplay between national parties and Europarties. We establish that voter–Europarty congruence is different from, and determined by, voter–national party congruence; moreover, national party–Europarty congruence moderates this relationship. Our findings shed new light on the quality of representation in the European Parliament and have key implications for understanding transnational democracy in the European Union.

This paper examines member state bargaining success in legislative negotiations in the European Union. Bargaining success is thought to be determined by factors attributable to intervention behaviour, relative policy positions and power. Intervention relates to a member state's efforts to make its position known over the course of negotiations, relative policy positions relate to a member state's position in the policy space under negotiation relative to other actors' positions, and power refers to the size of the member state. New measures for bargaining success are introduced that account for the saliency of the legislative proposals under consideration. The results presented suggest that there are more winners than losers when measuring bargaining success. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This article explores the differences in radical right parties' voting behaviour on economic matters at the European Parliament. As the literature highlights the heterogeneity of these parties in relation to their economic programmes, we test whether divergences survive the elections and translate into dissimilar voting patterns. Using voting records from the seventh term of the European Parliament, we show that radical right parties do not act as a consolidated party family. We then analyse the differences between radical right parties by the means of different statistical methods (NOMINATE, Ward's clustering criterion, and additive trees) and find that these are described along two dimensions: the degree of opposition to the European Union and the classical left–right economic cleavage. We provide a classification of these parties compromising four groups: pro-welfare conditional, pro-market conditional, and rejecting. Our results indicate that radical right parties do not act as a party family at the European Parliament. This remains true regardless of the salience of the policy issues in their agendas. The article also derives streams for future research on the heterogeneity of radical right parties.