Suchergebnisse

The Central and East European (CEE) countries that had applied for membership in the European Union were confronted with far-reaching requirements in order to bring domestic policies in line with EU standards. Notwithstanding these rather uniform pressures emerging from conditionality, there is considerable variety in alignment performance across the candidate countries and over time. To account for this, we use time series cross-sectional data on the implementation performance of 13 EU candidate countries between 1999 and 2003. Our results indicate that the bureaucratic strength and effectiveness of a country positively influence its ability to adjust domestic arrangements to EU requirements. By contrast, we find no support for veto-player theories of political constraints on legislative change. We hence conclude that the implementation of the acquis communautaire in candidate countries prior to accession has been a question of bureaucratic problems rather than of political veto-manoeuvres.

In recent years, International Organizations have undergone substantive reforms in terms of their administrative structures and management. This development has so far not been subject to systematic or comparative investigations. With Management Reforms in International Organizations Michael W. Bauer and Christoph Knill present a first attempt to open this black box. How can we explain the speed, acceptance and scope of management reforms in International Organizations? How important are Secretary Generals and member states? Do International Organizations, often considered as crucial diffusion agents for public management reforms, actually live up to the standards they are promoting? Do management reforms have unintended consequences with regard to the policy output? The book delivers a comprehensive analysis of management reforms in a broad range of different International Organizations. Leading scholars in the field analyze the respective reform processes inter alia in the European Commission, the Nordic Council of Ministers, the World Bank, the OECD, the European Central Bank, the European Parliament and the United Nations

"In diesem Beitrag wird die systematische Abbauwirkung europäischer Politikgestaltung auf nationale Policies untersucht. Auf der Grundlage einer differenzierten Kategorisierung von Politikbeendigungsphänomenen - als Termination, Substitution und Abbau -und einer verfeinerten Bestimmung der beendigungsfähigen Dimensionen von Policies - nach Ziel, Programm, Instrument und Settings - werden Hypothesen über den Zusammenhang von EU-Implementationsmodi und dem erwarteten Akteursverhalten entwickelt. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die europäischen Verhaltensanreize Regelbefolgung, Ressourcenmaximierung, wechselseitige Anpassung sowie Legitimationssicherung. Illustriert an Beispielen aus aktuellen policyanalytischen Studien erschließt sich im Hinblick auf die Umsetzung von europäischer Politik ein Bild unterschiedlicher Konstellationen mit ungleichen Beendigungspotenzialen. Unsere zentrale Schlussfolgerung lautet, dass der beobachtbare Wandel nationaler Politiken unter Einfluss der EU tatsächlich eine systematische, wenn auch differenzierte Beendigungskomponente beinhaltet, die bislang jedoch empirisch wie konzeptionell untererforscht ist." (Autorenreferat)

Has globalization led to a convergence in policy-making across nations and, if so, what are the causal mechanisms? This book analyses the extent to which the environmental policies of nation states have converged over the last thirty years and whether this convergence has led to a strengthening or weakening of environmental standards (a race to the top, or a race to the bottom). It also analyses the factors that account for these developments. Based on a unique empirical data set, the study covers the development of a wide range of environmental policies in twenty-four OECD countries, including EU member states as well as Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Mexico and the USA, with particular emphasis on the impact of institutional and economic interlinkages among these countries

In recent years, there is growing interest in the study of cross-national policy convergence. Yet we still have a limited understanding of the phenomenon: Do we observe convergence of policies at all? Under which conditions can we expect that domestic policies converge or rather develop further apart? In this article, we address this research deficit. From a theoretical perspective, we concentrate on the explanatory power of three factors, namely international harmonization, transnational communication, and regulatory competition. In empirical terms, we analyze if and to what extent we can observe convergence of environmental policies across twenty-four industrialized countries between 1970 and 2000. We find an impressive degree of environmental policy convergence between the countries under investigation. This development is mainly caused by international harmonization and, to a considerable degree, also by transnational communication, whereas regulatory competition does not seem to play a role.