Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article examines the impact of the recent EU enlargement on European governance. Enlargement is treated as a kind of external shock to the existing governance system, broadening and diversifying the European public space. The prevalent hierarchical mode of governance is increasingly inadequate under these new circumstances and the Union will have to embrace more flexible, decentralized and soft modes of governance.

AbstractIn the multilevel system of the European Union (EU), national governments have been empowered at the expense of parliaments. We study the executive power shift in EU politics in the formation of national preferences. This article shows that governments are more likely to integrate parliaments and external actors, such as other governments and EU institutions, when they advocate extreme bargaining positions in EU negotiations. We theoretically develop this argument and provide an empirical study of Eurozone politics, covering the preference formation of 27 EU member states. The analysis shows that the executives are overall the dominating power: most of the time, governments form national preferences on their own. When governments integrate additional actors, they mostly rely on external actors and do so to avoid blame and to shift responsibility. These findings question whether the integration of national parliaments in EU politics indeed addresses democratic accountability concerns.

This study analyses the dynamics of entrepreneurship in Portugal and other European Union countries from 2010 to 2014. We used the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data collected through representative samples of the population of each country to analyze three main areas: entrepreneurial activity, entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial aspirations. Our results show that in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, the total early-entrepreneurship rate in Portugal was the same as the average in EU countries but in 2014 it was higher. However, this rise in entrepreneurial activity in Portugal in 2014 was mainly necessity-driven and not improvement-driven. The results also show that despite the fact that Portugal was perceived to have poor opportunities for new business during this period, Portuguese people believe more strongly than people in other countries that they have the required knowledge and skills to start a business. In general, although entrepreneurial attitudes in Portugal are characterized by average entrepreneurial intentions, lower perceived opportunities, higher perceived capabilities to start a business, their fear of failure would prevent them from starting a business. These results are relevant with regard to rethinking the promotion of entrepreneurship in Portugal. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

The importance of biodiversity conservation as a major environmental issue has come to the forefront in recent years. In particular, biodiversity conservation is a critical issue in tropical developing countries, where biodiversity levels are highest and where the threats to this resource are most severe. This paper looks at the policies that European Union countries have undertaken in order to support biodiversity conservation efforts in tropical developing countries, both in terms of official government policies, and in the work of European NGO's and academic institutions. The paper focuses on in situ conservation efforts. There is no common EU policy, and efforts vary widely from country to country. While governments, NGO's and academic institutions often work together, the efforts undertaken by NGO's and academic institutions are more likely to target biodiversity hotspots, and to involve a grass-roots approach to conservation.

"Budgetary Treaties and European Union Politics" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Offering a fresh view on the EU constitutionalisation process, the new edition of The Tangled Complexity of The EU Constitutional Process presents three main points: the idea of constitutional complexity, the tension between constitutional evolutionism and constitutional constructivism in the process of European integration, and the functional nature of conflicts in the evolution of the EU. Because of its prodigiousness, European law produces consternation among constitutionalists accustomed to traditional patterns of power. Yet, constitutional pluralism is under siege. Populist governments have abused constitutional-pluralistic concepts like those of national identity, and scholars have also criticised constitutional courts for the abuse of the national identity argument provoking a worrying escalation of constitutional conflicts. This book argues that while constitutional conflicts have frequently been depicted as elements of disturbance along the path towards legal coherence, constitutional conflicts are physiological and might even be functional to the development of the European legal order, which should not be understood in a deterministic manner. The new edition expands its scope of application beyond judicial interactions, to consider the role of the parliaments as actors of a complex legal system and will be of particular interest to academics and students in the disciplines of Law, International Relations and Political Science"--

SUBNATIONAL OR REGIONAL PARLIAMENTS with legislative competences are increasingly active in EU affairs and are recognized as POTENTIAL ACTORS IN THE EU'S MULTI-LEVEL SYSTEM BY EU LAW. However, studies on the territorial effects of European integration and on the Europeanization of parliaments as well as parliamentarism have so far disregarded this group of parliaments. In the existing theoretical concepts of 'multi-level parliamentarism' subnational parliaments do not have a place until now. The book addresses this theoretical and empirical gap. Referring TO STUDIES ON PARLIAMENTARISM, FEDERALISM, AND EUROPEANIZATION the contributions discuss how to include subnational parliaments in the existing research. A total of 74 subnational parliaments from eight member states is affected by the new system, which allows them to participate in the so-called Early Warning Mechanism of subsidiarity control. The situation in six EU member states is analyzed in detail. The country chapters illustrate and analyze how subnational parliaments in the federal member states (Austria, Belgium, Germany) and in the decentralized/devolved ones (Great Britain, Italy, Spain) functionally adapt to the new opportunity structure and discuss the repercussions on legislative-executive relations as well as on interparliamentary relations. With contributions from Gabriele Abels; Katrin Auel and Martin Große Hüttman; Peter Bursens, Frederic Maes and Matthias Vileyn; Peter Bußjäger; Josep-María Castellà Andreu and Mario Kölling; Ben Crum, Annegret Eppler; John Erik Fossum; Anna-Lena Högenauer; Sabine Kropp; Robert Ladrech; Erik Miklin; Matteo Nicolini; Werner J. Patzelt; Tapio Raunio; Werner Reutter; Gerhard Stahl and Bert Kuby; Gracia Vara Arribas. Prof. Dr. Gabriele Abels is Jean Monnet Chair for European Integration; since 2007 she has a chair for comparative politics and European integration at the University of Tuebingen. Ass.-Prof. Dr. Annegret Eppler is Assistant Professor for European Integration Studies at the University of Innsbruck.