Suchergebnisse

The marginal involvement of the European Union (EU) in redistributive policies and its limited fiscal resources have led to a notable lack of attention by EU scholars towards the EU budget and its dynamics. Yet the nature of the budgetary data and their high usability for statistical analysis make them an excellent tool for studying and measuring policy change in the EU. In this article, I analyse an original dataset containing yearly data for the main categories of expenditure and how they have changed over the last three decades (1979–2013). Using time-series analysis, I find that the ability to form winning coalitions in the Council, the ideological positioning of the co-legislators and the inclusion of the cohesion countries have played a significant role in driving budget change.

The literature on European integration has documented several cases of creeping competences in the EU. None of these studies, however, has fully clarified the conditions under which this phenomenon takes place, nor provided any testable hypotheses on its empirical dynamics. This paper studies one case where secondary legislation was employed to extend a formal treaty-based competence (civilian research and technology policy) to an area that, for historical and strategic reasons, has always been a policy monopoly of national governments: research and technology development policy for security and defence. Through the analysis of a large pool of documentary data, I elaborate a set of linked hypotheses about the empirical dynamics of creeping competences, and show how the theory of incomplete contracting is best suited to explain this phenomenon. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractStudies on delegation to international organizations have extensively examined the determinants of supranational delegation. Yet, systematic empirical accounts on the effects of different types and degrees of delegation on policy developments remain limited. This paper addresses this gap by using a novel dataset that combines delegation data from the Treaty of Rome with data on legislation and case law developed by the European authorities (1958–2000). The analysis produces three findings. First, a higher level of delegation of legislative and executive functions has a positive effect on the volume of secondary legislation, but no effect on the volume of case law. Second, a higher level of judicial delegation has a positive effect on the volume of case law, while limiting legislative activity. Third, the precision of the Treaty provisions constrains the volume of secondary legislation. The findings show how the type and intensity of supranational delegation shape supranational policy development.

AbstractA key function of centralized budgets in federal and political unions is to act as an equalizing mechanism to support economic and social cohesion. This is also the case with the European Union's (EU) budget, which operates as a redistributive mechanism that counteracts the cross‐national and cross‐regional inequalities created by the single market. Despite the limits on cross‐national redistribution imposed by a centrifugal system of representation, the net fiscal position of member states – what they pay to the EU budget minus what they receive from it – is very diverse and has changed quite remarkably over the last decades. In this paper, we investigate how and why the net fiscal position of each member state toward the rest of the EU changes over time. We develop a novel panel dataset (1979–2014) to study how key national and EU‐level political and economic variables affect the EU redistributive dynamics. We find that redistribution via the EU budget primarily targets developments in inequality within EU member states, and that an increase in domestic unemployment may also improve the country's fiscal balance. Moreover, we find that voting power in the Council is unrelated to a more positive fiscal balance. However, we find that governments with a centre‐right profile are in general more successful in improving their redistributive position vis‐à‐vis the other member states. This may create a problem of budgetary 'rent extraction'.

Political actors need to be nimble and respond to the opportunity to reform old policies and initiate new ones. Manuele Citi and Mogens K Justesen look at how the European Commission takes advantage of politically opportune moments (the 'gridlock interval') in the European Parliament to put forward new legislation. As a 'policy entrepreneur', it is therefore able to navigate European institutions and bring about change.