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Scientists often distinguish three groups of countries in the post-socialist area. The hub of the first group is Russia, the country that – as a self-contained entity – has often been a core subject of the traditional so-called 'East European studies'. In spite of all the difficulties following the demise of the Soviet Union, the political leaders of Russia managed to maintain strong ties with a small circle of states (e.g. with Belarus or Kazakhstan). The second group is comprised of the countries of East Central Europe (that is the Baltic states, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia) which, slowly but surely, have stopped being the subject of interest of East European studies. Their membership in the EU and their political aversion to Russia has led to the situation whereby the most important coordinates of their political development are being determined in Brussels and in cooperation with the other members of the EU. ; Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu "Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia". Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00.

Thetransformation of the political environment of Western Europe in the mid-1960's has been only partially completed. On the one hand, in many economic sectors relations among the six members1 of the European economic communities are set within the context of a new process and a new institutional method of community building and are being modified by the notion of a common interest beyond six sets of national interests. But, on the other hand, the relations among the Six in the "political" realm—that is, in the sphere of foreign and defense policy—have not yet been transformed by common institutions. It is in this area that the confrontation between traditional methods of interstate relations and the new community m thod is currently taking place, and it is here that the ultimate validity of the concept of European unification will face its most difficult test. Therefore, a crucial question in Europe today is whether or not the Six will be able to organize their political life on a collective basis as they have done in many economic sectors.

This article focuses on the relationship between the economy and electoral participation. Specifically, it aims to address the following question: what is the effect of the current economic crisis on European electoral turnout? According to the literature, economic reasons play an important role in both electoral participation and people's party choices. The effects of a severe economic downturn, as the one ex-perienced in Europe during the last decade, are however only partially known. Does the economic crisis mobilize or weaken electoral participation? Does it have any impact at all? In order to assess the role of the economy, this work will employ the last three waves of the European Election Studies datasets and combine them with national economic indicators. Findings from competing multilevel models confirm a limited effect of the economic crisis at the personal, national and attitudinal level, particularly for the 2014 elections of the European Parliament.

La creciente presencia de las medidas y propuestas desde la Unión Europea en materia de formación inicial del profesorado parece cada vez más evidente. Sin embargo, parece necesario identificar en qué grado existe una armonización entre los países en esta cuestión. Con ello, pretendemos identificar algunas tendencias que nos ayuden a reflexionar sobre las políticas educativas de la Unión Europea y de las concreciones de países concretos. Para la consecución de este objetivo general utilizaremos la metodología comparada. Los resultados y conclusiones del estudio muestran las tendencias que podrían ser susceptibles de integrarse en las políticas educativas nacionales con las necesarias adaptaciones en el pleno respeto a las propias características y tradiciones educativas de cada país. ; The measures and proposals of the European Union in the field of initial teacher education are increasingly evident. However, it is necessary to identify the stage of harmonization on this issue between countries. Thus, we aim to identify some trends to help us to reflect on the initial teacher training policies of the European Union and individual countries. To achieve this overall objective we will use the comparative method. The results and conclusions of the study show trends that could be susceptible to integrate into national education policies with the necessary adaptations that they respect the characteristics and educational traditions of each country.

Bond market integration clearly changes in response to economic and financial conditions, since the level of risk aversion changes and investors require time-varying compensation for accepting a risky payoff from financial assets. In this paper we examine the dynamic behaviour of European Government bond market integration using an asset pricing model based on that of Bekaert and Harvey.

Consociational institutional arrangements in deeply divided societies are often criticised for cementing the underlying conflict cleavage, encouraging the continued dominance of conflict-based party competition and voter behaviour and prohibiting the emergence of 'normal' (that is, non-conflict-based) dimensions of political competition. However, drawing on evidence from a post-election survey at the 2009 Northern Ireland election to the European Parliament, I find that EU issues determined intra-bloc vote choice (at least in the nationalist community). This suggests that there is potential for regional integration projects, such as the EU, to contribute to the 'normalisation' of politics in a consociational system by acting as the source of an externally generated dimension of political competition. Adapted from the source document.

Integrated capital markets facilitate risk sharing across countries. Lower home bias in financial investments is an indicator of risk sharing. We highlight that existing indicators of equity home bias in the literature suffer from incomplete coverage because they consider only listed equities. We also consider unlisted equites and show that equity home bias is much higher than previous studies perceived. We also analyse home bias in debt securities holdings, and euro area bias. We conclude that European Union membership may foster financial integration and reduce information barriers, which sometimes limit cross-country diversification. We calculate home bias indicators for the aggregate of the euro area as if the euro area was a single country and report remarkable similarity between the euro area and the United States in terms of equity home bias, while there is a higher level of debt home bias in the United States than in the euro area as a whole. We develop a new pension fund foreign investment restrictions index to control for the impact of prudential regulations on the ability of institutional investors to diversify geographically across borders. Our panel regression estimates for 25 advanced and emerging countries in 2001-14 provide strong support for the hypothesis that the larger the assets managed by institutional investors (defined as pension funds, insurance companies and investment funds), the smaller the home bias and thereby the greater the scope for risk sharing.

This paper takes a first step in analysing how a monetary union performs in the presence of labour market asymmetries. Differences in wage flexibility, market power and country sizes are allowed for in a setting with both country-specific and aggregate shocks. The implications of asymmetries for both the overall performance of the monetary union and the country-specific situation are analysed. It is shown that asymmetries can have important effects, and that there are substantial spill-over effects. Among other things, it is found that aggregate output volatility is not strictly increasing in nominal rigidity but hump-shaped. A disproportionate share of the consequences of wage inflexibility may fall on small countries. In the case of country-specific shocks a country unambiguously benefits in terms of macroeconomic stability by becoming more flexible, but in general an inflexible country does not necessarily achieve more output stability by becoming more flexible. As this may be desirable for the monetary union as a whole, there is a risk of a ?reform deficit? in an asymmetric monetary union.