Suchergebnisse

Integration in Europe has been a slow incremental process focusing largely on economic matters. Policymakers have tried to develop greater support for the European Union by such steps as creating pan-European political institutions - and yet significant opposition remains to policies such as the creation of a single currency

Nations often turn to international courts to help with overcoming collective-action problems associated with international relations. However, these courts generally cannot enforce their rulings, which begs the question: how effective are international courts? This book proposes a general theory of international courts that assumes a court has no direct power over national governments. Member states are free to ignore both the international agreement and the rulings by the court created to enforce that agreement. The theory demonstrates that such a court can, in fact, facilitate cooperation with international law, but only within important political constraints. The authors examine the theoretical argument in the context of the European Union. Using an original data set of rulings by the European Court of Justice, they find that the disposition of court rulings and government compliance with those rulings comport with the theory's predictions--

A common concern regarding the viability of institutional reform of the EU is whether European citizens constitute a political community that facilitates democratic governance. One important aspect of this concern is whether public perceptions are structured so as to ease or impede political discourse across Europe. To investigate this question, the authors examine whether the EU mass public organizes its attitudes toward EU policy issues in systematic and meaningful ways. Specifically, they examine whether EU citizens' attitudes across a broad range of policies decided at the EU level are structured consistently with several prominent models of the EU policy space. Using Eurobarometer data, the authors show that citizens' policy positions on EU issues are systematically organized along a single dimension that is different from domestic Left-Right.