Suchergebnisse

Economics; Environment - De serie 'Werkdocumenten' omvat stukken die in het kader van de werkzaamheden van de WRR tot stand zijn gekomen en die op aanvraag door de raad beschikbaar worden gesteld. De verantwoordelijkheid voor de inhoud en de ingenomen standpunten berust bij de auteurs.

"The European Union is today a major player in many policy areas, going from classic economic fields as competition policy, agriculture and fisheries policy to new emergent fields as environmental policy, arterial intelligence policy, security and foreign policy and criminal justice policy. These policies comes with an increasing level of EU regulation, having also a substantive impact on the harmonization of national policies and regulations. This expansion of EU competence naturally also places new demands on their enforcement, especially when it comes to investigations with the aim of imposing punitive administrative and/or criminal sanctions. In this expanded version of his valedictory lecture Prof. Vervaele is assessing 1) to what extent the EU and its Member States have a policy on punitive enforcement in the internal market and in the Area of Freedom Security and Justice and 2) how this policy translates into the harmonization of substantive administrative and criminal law and procedural law at the national level and into the elaboration of administrative and judicial cooperation instruments and the setting up of European enforcement agencies. The assessment includes to what extent this policy takes account of the human rights obligations. Vervaele concludes with a plea for a European model for punitive law enforcement with an increased alignment between the administrative enforcement tools in the internal market and the criminal enforcement tools in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. In this model the national enforcement authorities are build in under a network cooperation scheme."--

To investigate the attitudes of Flemish secondary school students toward politics, interview data were collected (N = 242 Ms & 130 Fs, aged 12-14) in 1981, using the method employed in a French study by Annick Percheron (L'Univers politique des enfants [The Political Environment of Children], Paris, 1974). Analysis of the data reveals that most of the children bear considerable hostility toward the political system. When asked to explain their attitudes toward 18 political concepts (eg, "democracy," "communism") most of the Rs gave equally negative opinions for theories on both ends of the political spectrum. Reactions toward specific politicians were even more negative. Little difference was noted between the attitudes or knowledge of boys & girls. UMc Rs had the highest level of knowledge, while Wc Rs had the lowest. Surprisingly, Wc Rs showed hostility toward unions & tended to have conservative political opinions. 9 Tables, 4 Figures. Modified HA.

Changes in Dutch attitudes towards the European Union For decades, the Dutch were seen as relatively positive towards the European Union. However, in 2005 a majority of the Dutch population voted against the proposed European Constitution. Therefore, in this article we examine to what extent the Dutch 'no' marks a sudden change in attitudes, or is merely a manifestation of a gradual trend that started at an earlier stage of the European integration process. We raise the question to what extent attitudes towards the European Union have changed in the Netherlands, and further ask to what extent these changes can be attributed to characteristics of the context and the life course. We derive hypotheses from theories on the influence of birth cohort, societal context and life course on attitude changes. In order to test these hypotheses, we employ Eurobarometersurveys of 1973 to 2004, as well as additional data at the contextual level. Our findings suggest that in the Netherlands attitudes towards the European Union have become more negative since the early nineties, after becoming more positive in the preceding years. While characteristics of the birth cohort and the life course do not account for these changes, the development towards more political integration seems to provide an interesting explanation. However, even after adding respondents' characteristics at the individual level to our models, variance in attitudes towards the European Union is hardly explained. Even though differences between social groups exist, attitudes towards the European Union seem to be largely unexplained.

Zsfassung in engl. Sprache u.d.T.: Driving speed and attitudes towards speeding of different car user groups