Policy congruence has been identified as the main driver of European Parliament (EP) alliances. Yet, radical right parties are divided between three EP groups: European Conservatives and Reformists ...(ECR); Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD); Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF). This article investigates why four radical right parties in the ECR and EFDD - the Danish People's Party, the Finns Party, the Sweden Democrats and UKIP - neither joined the apparently more ideologically homogenous ENF nor allied all with one another in 2014. Using Chapel Hill data, we find no policy logic explaining their alliance behaviour. Rather, our interviews with those in the parties indicate that they privileged national 'respectability' calculations when deciding alliance strategies. We therefore propose an alternative theory of EP group formation that sees some radical parties play a two-level game in which the perceived domestic 'office' and 'votes' benefits of European alliances outweigh those of 'policy'.
The research deals with the phenomenon of low voter turnout in European Parliament elections. The article pays attention to young first-time voters who will encounter their first European Parliament ...elections in June 2024. It examines their attitude to polling in the context of school activities related to public affairs implemented in the school educational activities. Based on the qualitative survey conducted on pupils aged 17-18 attending secondary schools located in ten different member countries the research tackles the question whether the public secondary education may affect the incentives of first-time voters to cast their vote in the European Parliament elections. Consequently, the research focuses on the good practices and possible stimulus given by schools that may encourage to get to vote the representatives in the European Parliament. The outcomes of the research provide suggestions to enhance the formation of voting habits of young voters and increase their interest in both national and European public affairs.
Air Passenger Rights Bobek, Michal; Prassl, Jeremias
2016, 2016., 2016-01-28
eBook
Regulation 261/2004 on Air Passengers’ Rights has been amongst the most high-profile pieces of EU secondary legislation of the past few years, generating controversial CJEU judgments, from ex parte ...IATA to Sturgeon. The Regulation has led to equally challenging decisions across the Member States, with domestic courts holding that a Regulation could not be relied upon by an individual claimant, or even threatening outright to refuse an application of its provisions. The economic stakes are significant for passengers and airlines alike, and despite the European Commission’s recent publication of reform proposals, controversies appear far from settled. At the same time the Regulation should, according to the Treaty, have the same direct and general application in all the Member States of the Union. How, then, can this diversity be explained? What implications does it have for the EU’s regulatory strategy at large? This book brings together leading experts in the field to present a series of case studies from 15 different Member States, as well as an overview of the extra-territorial application of Regulation 261, combined with high-level analysis from the perspectives of aviation law and EU law. Volume 3 in the series EU Law in the Member States
How has the new structure of European Union (EU) economic governance affected the ability of parliaments (national and European) to scrutinize and control economic policy? Departing from the premise ...that executive power needs to be matched by appropriate parliamentary control, this contribution argues that parliamentary powers have been compromised in EU economic governance. Although budgetary powers remain formally at the national level, governments' decisions have become constrained and national parliaments find themselves on the losing side of a reinforced two-level game. This loss in parliamentary powers is not compensated at the European level, as at that level political authority is effectively left suspended between the national governments, who are unaccountable as a collective, and the European Commission, which lacks a political mandate of its own. Against this background, a final section identifies guidelines for organizing parliamentary accountability in settings, like EU economic governance, in which executive power has come to be shared across levels.
EU Competition Litigation Strand, Magnus; Bastidas, Vladimir; Iacovides, Marios C
2019, 2019-05-16
eBook, Conference Proceeding
Open access
All EU Member States have now transposed Directive 2014/104/EU on damages actions for breaches of competition law into national law. The Directive (and the soft-law instruments accompanying it) not ...only marks a new phase for private enforcement of competition law but also, more generally, provides a novel and thought provoking instance of EU harmonisation of aspects of private law and civil litigation. Following up on a previous volume in the Swedish Studies in European Law series, published in 2016, this open access book offers contributions from top practitioners and scholars from all over Europe, who present and discuss first experiences from the implementation of the new damages regime in various jurisdictions. Topics covered include theoretical and practical reflections on the state of private enforcement in Europe, the balancing of conflicting interests pertaining to public and private enforcement of competition law respectively, and specific legal issues such as causation and the estimation of harm. The authors explore problems solved, problems created, and future challenges in the new regime of private enforcement of competition law in Europe, offering predictions as to issues that may have to be settled through recourse to the European Court of Justice. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Swedish Studies Network.
Abstract
Citizens' ability to hold corrupt politicians accountable is a key feature of democratic political systems. Particularly in the European Union (EU), such accountability mechanisms are often ...argued to malfunction due to the EU's complicated and opaque institutional structure, which could compromise voters' basic abilities to detect political malpractice in Brussels. Putting EU voters' attentiveness to the test, we provide quasi‐experimental evidence of the causal effect of a recent corruption scandal in the European Parliament. Leveraging an ‘Unexpected Event during Survey Design’ identification strategy in France and Germany, we document a sizeable negative effect of the so‐called Qatargate scandal on public trust in the European Parliament. This provides causal evidence on the presence of attentiveness to EU politics within these electorates. Given the EU's complex institutional structure, we derive two alternative implications from this finding.
While an argument that the far right supports Putin is popular, comparative analysis of far-right parties’ stances on Russia is generally lacking. In the wake of the 2022 Russian (re)invasion of ...Ukraine, this becomes increasingly problematic. This study aims to fill this gap and provide an initial answer(s) to an increasingly important question of who supports Putin's Russia within the Western world. First, I examine the immediate reactions to the 2022 (re)invasion of far-right parties across the European Union. Based on the findings, new sub-categories within the far right in terms of stances on Putin’s Russia are proposed. Second, I provide a comparative analysis of the roll-call votes in the European Parliament on resolutions condemning Russia’s actions and test the proposed sub-categories.
Although directionality in interpreting has attracted considerable scholarly interest, to date, there are no observational studies providing empirical evidence on the directionality effect in the ...performance of professional interpreters who regularly work in both directions. Our aim is to partially fill this gap by exploring the relationship between disfluencies and directionality in simultaneous interpreting. To this end, we compare A-B and B/C-A interpretations from plenary debates of the European Parliament. Using English and Polish subcorpora extracted from the EP- Poland corpus, we performed quantitative analyses focusing on three types of disfluencies: anomalous pauses, hesitation markers, and false starts. Our initial assumption was that, in line with the prevalent belief, cognitive load is lower for into- A interpreting. Accordingly, we hypothesised that into-B interpretations should exhibit significantly more disfluencies. However, we have found no directionality effects related to disfluencies. Therefore, our results do not support the advantage of into-A interpreting. This finding raises some doubts about the legitimacy of favouring interpreting into the native language to the extent it is done now in many institutions.
PDF
