One of the most remarkable democratic developments in Europe in recent decades has been the empowerment of the only directly elected supranational assembly in the world: the European Parliament (EP). ...We first review the development of the legislative powers of the EP vis-à-vis the other European Union (EU) institutions, discussing the theoretical models of the power of the EP and the main empirical methods that have been used to evaluate these models. We then turn to the impact of the growing power of the EP on political organization and behavior inside the legislature. We demonstrate that the “electoral connection” is weak and discuss what this means for understanding legislative politics in the EP. The concluding section demonstrates differences in behavior across policy areas, which have received scant attention, and suggests avenues for further research.
In the literature on European integration, politicization as concept is often attributed major importance. This article shows how the literature variously discusses the politicization of European ...Union (EU) institutions, the politicization of EU decision-making processes or the politicization of EU issues. Similarly, the literature attributes three different functions to politicization: it functions to crystallize opposing advocacy coalitions, to raise the question of legitimacy and to alter the course of European integration. Despite this diversity, this article argues we are in fact dealing with an encompassing process. To further our understanding of politicization of European integration, politicization as process is defined as an increase in polarization of opinions, interests or values and the extent to which they are publicly advanced towards policy formulation within the EU. Furthermore, attention is directed to practices of representative claims-making in the public sphere through which relationships of delegation and accountability can be altered in discourse.
Despite the enactment of legislation on public interest disclosures, whistleblowers still face significant retaliation. Perceptions and expectations of loyalty to a firm, organisation or a government ...continue to be seen as antithetical to 'voice', that is, the disclosure of wrongdoing, thereby triggering strategies of organisational exit and punishment. Real change can occur if whistleblowing is elevated to a civic duty of equal importance to other civic duties, such as to protect and defend the rule of law, human rights and democracy and to report suspected criminality to authorities. In this article, I justify whistleblowing on a good citizenship concept which transcends particular national institutional characteristics and critically examine the content and contribution of the European Union's Directive on Whistleblower protection. By deploying a tripartite lens blending analytical questions and a discoursive theoretical perspective with a comparative assessment of instruments in the Member States and the EU, the discussion makes the case for the urgent change in the culture of punitive treatment of whistleblowers in the European Union and for further institutional reform when the Directive is reviewed in the future.
Entrepreneurship is believed to be shaped by institutions; however, the paper assumes that trust in institutions is a fundamental prerequisite for the impact of institutions on entrepreneurship. The ...aims of the paper are to determine (i) whether trust in European institutions affects the level of entrepreneurship in European Union countries, and (ii) whether there are any differences in this impact regarding the types of institutions and (iii) a country’s government budget size. Based on yearly panel data for 27 European Union countries in the years 2004–2019 and estimations of panel regression models, the results show that confidence in institutions is a significant factor in explaining entrepreneurship. However, institutional trust has no homogeneous effect on entrepreneurship, as the impact depends on the kind of institutions related to their functions and values as well as on the country’s characteristics in relation to the size of the government’s budget. Practical implications suggest the possibilities of supporting entrepreneurship—especially in countries with a relatively lower public redistribution—by raising the level of confidence in the European Central Bank. The originality of the paper is related to distinguishing institutional trust based on the type of institutions and the country’s characteristics of governmental budget size.
This article examines whether the empowerment of the European Union's (EU) supranational institutions has had an impact on the development of EU asylum. By systematically investigating EU asylum law ...before and after 'communitarization', it argues that its 'policy core' has maintained a high degree of continuity. An advocacy coalition under the leadership of the interior ministers managed to co-opt pivotal actors in the newly empowered European Commission and European Parliament. By contenting themselves with changes of secondary order, these EU institutions accepted and institutionalized the restrictive and weakly integrated core of EU asylum set by the Council in the first negotiation round. Their role and decisions were driven not only by the negotiation dynamics and political expediency, but also by new inter- and intra-institutional norms fostering consensual practices.
A central tenet of the New Economic Sociology is that trust is a central factor in the sound functioning of markets. Previous research has mainly used a national-scale network approach to argue that ...personal relations generate trust in market relations. In contrast, this article shows, from a comparative perspective, how political structures influence consumer trust. First, using aggregate data, it shows how consumer trust in markets varies across the 28 European Union (EU) member states. Second, it uses regression models to examine the effects of varying levels of political embeddedness on consumer trust, taking consumer policy as a proxy. The results support the view that it is not only personal relations that generate trust in market relations but also political structures. This argument echoes institutional economic sociological approaches, and it adds to them a trust dimension. It furthermore encourages a more finely grained comparative analysis to better account for the effects of social macrostructures on trust.
This article explores the politics behind the design of EU regulatory institutions. The EU has established an extensive 'Eurocracy' outside of the Commission hierarchy, including over 30 European ...agencies and a number of networks of national regulatory authorities (NRAs). The article examines the politics of institutional choice in the EU, explaining why EU policy-makers create agencies in some policy areas, while opting for looser regulatory networks in others. It shows that the design of EU regulatory institutions - 'the Eurocracy' - is driven not by functional imperatives but by political considerations related to distributional conflict and the influence of supranational actors.
The delegation of policy-making tasks to EU agencies and their remarkable growth in number over the past two decades mark a striking new development in the EU's institutional make-up. While most of ...the nascent literature on the EU's 'agencification' addresses the conditions for agency creation and the implications of agency governance from the perspective of democratic accountability, there is a lack of empirical research systematically scrutinising the institutional structure and degree of formal-institutional independence of these agencies. This article offers a comprehensive empirical assessment and measure of the variation in institutional independence displayed by the entire set of 29 EU agencies operating under the EU's three pillars and tests hypotheses explaining variation in formal independence among agencies.
What is Europe? Triandafyllidou, Anna
2022, 2023, 20221007, Letnik:
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This authoritative yet accessible introduction to understanding Europe today moves beyond accounts of European integration to provide a wide-ranging and nuanced study of contemporary Europe and its ...historical development. This fully updated edition adds material on recent developments, such as Brexit and the migrant and Eurozone crises.
The concept of Europe is instilled with a plethora of social, cultural, economic, and political meanings. Throughout history, and still today, scholars writing on Europe, and politicians involved in national or European politics, often disagree on the geographic limits of this space and the defining elements of Europe. Europe is, therefore, first and foremost a concept that takes different shapes and meanings depending on the realm of life on which it is applied and on the historical period under investigation. At a given point in time, depending on the perspective we adopt and the situation in which we find ourselves, Europe may represent very different things. Thus, we should better talk about 'Europes' in the plural. What Is Europe? explores these evolving conceptions of Europe from antiquity to the present. This book is all the more timely as Europe responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Britain's departure from the European Union, financial slump, refugee emergencies, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
This book offers a fully updated introduction to European studies from an interdisciplinary perspective. It is a crucial companion to any undergraduate or graduate course on Europe and the European Union.
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