Suchergebnisse

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.

Why does European integration proceed? This article tests among three theories of representation. (1) The "permissive consensus" theory argues that political elites have been able to pursue their own policy interests because of public disinterest. (2) Stimson's (1991) "policy mood" theory argues that public disinterest is a sign that political elites are hewing close enough to public preferences. (3) The "cue-taking" theory argues that a disinterested public's preferences will be correlated with political elite policy positions not because elites are responding to public preferences, but because political elites shape weakly held preferences through their policy positions. A two-stage least squares regression model is used to test among the theories. The results provide support for the policy mood theory. 3 Tables, 42 References. Adapted from the source document.

Examines recent developments among European transnational political parties and their role in relation to European integration; focus on the Party of European Socialists (PES) and the European People's Party (EPP).

In this article, we analyze how European Union Politics has evolved over the last 25 years. Our analysis demonstrates that the goals the editorial team has pursued over this quarter century have only partly been reached. While the journal has helped to consolidate EU studies as a field of research in its own rights, several problems of representation persist in the journal and the social sciences in general. We identify besides the well-known gender gap that especially authors from the (European) South and East continue to be underrepresented in submitted and published articles. While less represented and successful at the submission stage, our results show that female scholars are more likely than male author teams to publish high-impact articles. Our findings indicate that studies of political behavior, broadly conceived, and articles using quantitative methods are well-represented. The article concludes with some remarks on how the journal might help to further professionalize the study of the EU in the coming years.