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Parliamentarians receive public funding to employ local staff in the constituency. Local staff help members of parliament to execute their representative duties, but can also become an electoral asset. Drawing on theories of personal vote-seeking we study local staff as an example of constituency service. Modelling within-individual changes in local staff size among 1174 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), we find that the number of local staff increases before both European and national elections, and more so in candidate-centred than party-centred systems. Despite a single European Parliament (EP) staff system, EU citizens are represented differently depending on where they elect their members and the electoral system that applies. Attempts to mend the EU's democratic deficit by strengthening MEPs' contacts with citizens through local staff potentially means that European public money is used to fund EP incumbents' electoral campaigns. We discuss the implications of our findings for the democratic functioning of the European multi-level system.

This article analyses party-voter congruence on European integration matters in the EU member states. Drawing on existing research, we put forward eight hypotheses which are tested with data from the EES2004 survey. We show that parties are closer to their voters on the left/right dimension than on the EU dimension. Parties are also more supportive of European integration than are their voters. Party system characteristics (number of parties, ideological range) did not affect opinion congruence. The responsiveness analysis at the party level shows that government parties were less responsive than opposition parties; party size was related to responsiveness, with opinion congruence higher in smaller parties; and responsiveness was lower among centrist parties. Voters are also better represented on the EU dimension by their parties in the new than in the older EU member states. This difference may result from the EU occupying a more central place on the political agendas of the new member states.

The paper models the consequences of committee report allocation for political representation in the European Parliament (EP). The range of legislators involved in each policy area affects the values, interests and constituencies that the Parliament represents. Thus, representation is defined as an MEP's participation in salient policy areas. The allocation of salient reports follows inter-and intra-party group dynamics. First, party groups compete for salient reports in a context of open voting rules in committee and plenum. Second, group coordinators distribute these reports among their MEPs in an attempt to maximize the cohesion of the group. The model is tested on data from the fifth European Parliament (1999-2002). The results confirm the impact of selective participation on political representation. The EP has evolved into a 'normal' Parliament featuring coalitions and competition along a left-right cleavage across party groups and a hierarchical allocation of legislative spoils within parties.

Most member states of the European Union (EU) have some difficulty in transposing EU directives. Despite the obligation to comply with EU law, member states are often slow to adopt national policies implementing directives. In this paper I analyse this problem by focusing on the coordination of transposition in the domestic policy arena. Coordination is approached as a game in which one or more higher-level players decide on policy when lower-level players are unable to make a decision. Based on the model developed in the paper, lower-level players sometimes appear to have discretion in shaping the policy transposing a directive. Furthermore, if a single player coordinates the transposition process, the implementing policy differs from the policy specified by the directive. However, a decisionmaking process with more than one higher-level player can result in deadlock, leading to a literal transposition of a directive. Moreover, deadlock between the deciding players may delay the transposition process. Both mechanisms are illustrated by two cases of decision-making on EU directives in The Netherlands: the cocoa and chocolate products directive and the laying hens directive. The analysis shows that the framework developed in this paper contributes to the understanding of transposition.

Since the introduction of the co-decision legislative procedure, the EU has had the possibility to resort to a Conciliation Committee made up of representatives from the European Parliament and the Council to reconcile differences between the two bodies. This article assesses whether the members of this committee have an incentive to take advantage of their ability to present take-it-or-leave-it offers to their parent bodies by examining whether they are representative of their full body and/or whether they represent other interests inside or outside their legislative body. It concludes that the EU Conciliation Committee is generally representative of its parent bodies and that the option to go to conciliation is not a risky tool for them to reach agreement.

Are Eurosceptic parties more likely to run negative, uncivil and emotional campaigns, as it is often intuitively argued? And with what consequences? In this article, we shed light on the effectiveness of these campaign strategies for Eurosceptic parties during the 2019 European elections. We argue that 'harsher' campaigns are 'in character' for Eurosceptic parties, and are as such more likely to be electorally successful for them. We use data from the 2019 European Parliament Elections Expert Survey, covering 191 unique parties, and show that, indeed, Eurosceptic parties are more likely to campaign in a harsh way, and more likely than Europhile parties to benefit electorally from it. All data and materials are openly available for replication.

"Copublished with the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, this study asks if the European Union (EU) has the capacity or the will to counter antisemitism. The desire to counter antisemitism was a significant impetus toward the formation of the EU in the twentieth century and now prejudice against Jews threatens to subvert that goal in the twenty-first. The European Union, Antisemitism, and the Politics of Denial offers an overview of the circumstances that obliged European political institutions to take action against antisemitism and considers the effectiveness of these interventions by considering two seemingly dissimilar EU states, Austria and Sweden. This examination of the European Union's strategy for countering antisemitism discloses escalating prejudice within the EU in the aftermath of 9/11. The author contends that Europe's political actors have responded to the challenge and provocation of antisemitism with only sporadic rhetoric and inconsistent commitment, a halfhearted strategy for countering antisemitism that exacerbates skepticism toward EU institutions and their commitments to equality and justice. This exposition of the insipid character of the EU's response simultaneously suggests alternatives that might mitigate the subtle and potentially devastating creep of antisemitism in Europe. This study offers a new approach insofar as scholarly considerations of the EU's attempts to combat racism rarely focus on antisemitism, while scholarship on antisemitism rarely considers the political context of the European Union. "--

In this probing analysis of the European Union's transnational legal system, Lisa Conant explores the interaction between law and politics. In particular, she challenges the widely held view that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has, through bold...

Regional politics is one of the key common politics of the European Union. Its objectives are the growth of economic-social cohesion and equalizing the levels of development. Such conception of development requires high budget transfers, which necessairly lead to social redistributions and disruption of the ground-principles and values the European idea is established at. Disruption of the principles of free competition is only one of unwanted consequences and controversies of the regional politics. European model of regional development prefers long term objectives and strengthening of the aggregate offer points to the antikeynesian sharacter of the regional politics of the European Union. It ifluences on the macroeconomics of the regions which use the largest subventions from cohesive and structural funds. And besides the positive macroeconomic tendencies, which are shown in construction of the infrastructure, opening of small and middle enterprises (that is in strengthening the aggregate supply), reduction of the unemployment etc., this model of the development of less developed territories is a subject of numerous criticisms. They are not directed only to the level and efficiency of expenditure the budget transfers, but to that, that these measures imperil the functioning of the free market, strengthen the authority of administration, often avoiding the national governments etc. Although it is centralized at the Union level, the regional political factors influence strongly on the regional politics sa well. As a consequence, numerous regional agencies are opened in the centre of the European Union. But, the results are not yet proportional to the efforts of central, national and regional politics. However, it must be stressed, that the European Union will keep on reducing the developmental disproportions (of the old, but as well as of the new accepted members) and strengthen the economic-social cohesion. That's why the measures of the regional politics are going to have the important role in the future economic development of the Union, but in the processes of the extension as well. Of course, there are numerous other, non-economic and contextual objectives and aspects of the regional politics of the European Union, which are the subject of the interest of other scientific disciplines.

This article examines the influence of exchange rate fluctuations on public support for the euro. Existing studies of the two euro referendums in Denmark and Sweden have explained the outcomes primarily in terms of static factors, thereby ignoring the fact that support fluctuates over time. This article provides an analysis of the short-term dynamics in public support for the euro in the period leading up to the referendums. We argue that exchange rate fluctuations matter, because people attach symbolic value to their national currency and are less likely to surrender a strong currency. They are also less willing to accept the euro when it is seen as weak vis-à-vis other world currencies. Our case-study and time-series analyses of the two euro campaigns corroborate these propositions.

We develop a utilitarian framework to assess different decision rules for the European Council of Ministers. The proposals to be decided on are conceptualized as utility vectors and a probability distribution is assumed over the utilities. We first show what decision rules yield the highest expected utilities for different means of the probability distribution. For proposals with high mean utility, simple benchmark rules (such as majority voting with proportional weights) tend to outperform rules that have been proposed in the political arena. For proposals with low mean utility, it is the other way round. We then compare the expected utilities for smaller and larger countries and look for Pareto-dominance relations. Finally, we provide an extension of the model, discuss its restrictions, and compare our approach with assessments of decision rules that are based on the Penrose measure of voting power.