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152
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Introduction
I work on on institutional design in regional organizations (EU and Latin American organizations). I am interested, in particular, on mechanisms explaining implementation, compliance and enforcement. My focuss is on why actors choose institutions with specific institutional profiles, how they operate and what are the effects.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
May 2008 - present
February 2002 - June 2002
Position
- Visiting Scholar
Description
- During this period, I developed my research on the Convention on the Future of the EU
October 2016 - January 2017
Publications
Publications (152)
Existing literature often attributes non‐compliance to either a lack of resources or implementation costs. However, the rule of law crises in Hungary and Poland present a different picture: a deliberate strategy aimed at not complying with EU enforcement actions. This article differentiates this model from previous ones and terms it ‘defiant non‐co...
El proyecto Designing Compliance with COVID-19 Public Policies (ComplyCOVID CSIC) examina, por una parte, qué factores explican el cumplimiento de los ciudadanos con las medidas adoptadas por las autoridades para intentar controlar la pandemia. Por otra parte, el proyecto también investiga los factores tenidos en cuenta por los decisores públicos p...
Far from being an abstract concept, international, European, and Spanish legal orders clearly conceptualize “rule of law”. Catalan secessionism, appealing to the democratic principle, challenged the common understanding of rule of law in the period between 2012 and 2017. This article offers a detailed explanation on how secessionism fundamentally d...
In the conflict over the secession of Catalonia, the institutions dominated by supporters of Catalan independence, most specifically the Catalan Parliament, constructed a narrative that presented the quest for independence as a conflict of sovereignty opposing the Spanish state and its central authorities against the democratic principles embodied...
Report addressed to the European Parliament
and the Commission on policy
recommendations and on Treaty changes and
amendments to the EU Charter of Fundamental
Rights
Why do democracies agree with contested illiberal regimes on the creation of regional institutions for election monitoring? This article tackles this puzzle by analyzing the creation of the Union of South American Nations’ (UNASUR) Electoral Council (ECU) and its electoral “accompaniment” missions. The case of the ECU is particularly relevant, sinc...
The Rule of Law Report, firstly introduced by the European Commission in 2020, monitors annually the rule of law situation in member states. This exercise helps to identify and to anticipate breaches and prevent further erosions. This Policy Brief proposes a series of methodological improvements for upcoming editions that might help to strength the...
Communication Strategy of the EU for best practice and policy recommendations: Work Package 15 - Deliverable 1
Despite the EP´s growing role, its influence and scrutiny capacity remain considerably weaker than the role traditionally reserved for parliaments in economic and fiscal policy decision-making at the national level. The EP has exploited any opportunity to enhance these powers: in particular, the European Parliament has a record of using crisis and...
The crystallisation of a core EU meaning of the rule of law and its (limited) normative influence beyond the EU: Work Package 7 -Deliverable 3
After six years as co-editor, the 2021 volume closes my tenure at the EPSR. This small piece summarizes my perceptions and opinions on the state of the discipline judging from the flow of submissions.
Qualitative political science research can significantly increase its credibility if researchers take robust steps toward replicability and enhanced transparency. Making explicit decisions on planning and implementing research, together with commitment to comprehensive reporting, improves transparency. Three instruments serve to this objective: in...
The strategies and mechanisms used by
national authorities to systematically
undermine the Rule of Law and possible
EU responses
Several European Union (EU) governments have infringed the obligation to respect 'rule of law' as demanded by the European Union Treaty but, despite its supranational features, the EU has done little to sanction those violations. Why? The European Union's institutional features paradoxically permit (and even encourage) logics that might be inhibiti...
The publication pattern of EPSR confirms the findings of established scholarship on gender and publishing; women publish less than men (roughly, 30% to 70%). This gap reflects a previous submission gap; i.e., men submit even much more than women do. EPSR editorial process does not show signs of discrimination: single or leading female authors have...
This Working Paper addresses the key questions surrounding the meaning and scope of the EU rule of law: primarily whether, and the extent to which, supranational understandings of the rule of law differ, if at all, from the national understandings. The Paper comes to the conclusion that the rule of law can and should be considered a core and consen...
This working paper aims to assess the extent to which the European Commission is correct in asserting that the rule of law is not only a well-established principle whose core legal meaning is shared across the EU. In tandem with the second working paper for work package 7 prepared within the framework of the RECONNECT research project, it will move...
The EU has been facing the Rule of Law crisis for almost a decade now. Undermining the separation of powers directly affects the Rule of Law in a given state, but at the same time it affects the EU integration as well, since the Rule of Law is one of its fundamental values. The paper builds on previous RECONNECT research, such as that on the meanin...
The “amorality of secession” is not a thought-provoking title. It rather refers to the approach chosen for this collective volume. According to the Collins dictionary “amoral is often wrongly used where immoral is meant. Immoral is properly used to talk about the breaking of moral rules, amoral about people who have no moral code or about places or...
The theory of democratic secession argues that separation of a parent state is legitimate with the only requirement of being backed by a majority of voters. There are four critiques againts such conception that this paper develops: the unlimited conception of democracy as pure majoritarianism; the impossibility of deduce the boundaries of the seced...
The Internal Market and the Future of European Integration - edited by Fabian Amtenbrink April 2019
From its initially limited role under Article 50 in the withdrawal negotiations, the EP has constructed a central role for itself in the process. How was the EP able to shape the rules to its advantage? As instruments to enhance its own role, the EP combined the unconcealed brandishing of its veto threat with the promotion of strong internal unity...
Why have the three EU institutions involved in the application of rules for complying with article 2 values failed to coordinate themselves to enforce compliance via article 7? This paper argues that they follow different logics that lead to coordination problems.
Why do states adopt binding and enforceable democracy clauses at the regional level, thereby permitting neighboring states to monitor and potentially sanction their breaches of democracy? To answer this question, the authors test a set of hypotheses in two South American intergovernmental regional organizations, MERCOSUR and UNASUR . Following the...
Commission's expectations on eventual compliance explain its different behaviour when dealing with Rule of Law (RoL) crises in Hungary and Poland. Whilst the Commission activated the first stage of the procedure of article 7 against Poland in December 2017, it resisted to launch the same procedure against the Hungarian government despite mounting c...
Tras la sucesión de crisis que comienzan prácticamente con el fracaso de la
Constitución europea y se agudizan con la crisis económica y financiera, parece que
la Unión Europea, lejos de ser aniquilada o debilitada por el Brexit, ha encontrado
una ventana de oportunidad inesperada que puede permitir afrontar las reformas
que los actuales desafíos r...
Research on enfranchisement of EU citizens in EP elections has explained its original design (Lodge 1982; Closa 1992) and its national implementation (Herman 1979; Bieber 1984; Duff 1994). A number of other regional organizations have created supranational parliaments and some studies have explained the logic behind their creation (Malamud and Sous...
This is the first book to jointly scrutinise two existential issues for the EU: withdrawal of a
member state (ie Brexit) and territorial secession (affecting Scotland, Catalonia and beyond).
The book applies normative and empirical analysis, explores new approaches and
discusses the deep theoretical problems unleashed by these processes. Featuri...
This is the first book to jointly scrutinise two existential issues for the EU: withdrawal of a member state (i.e. Brexit) and territorial secession (affecting Scotland, Catalonia and beyond). The book applies normative and empirical analyses, explores new approaches and discusses the deep theoretical problems unleashed by these processes. Featurin...
This is the first book to jointly scrutinise two existential issues for the EU: withdrawal of a member state (i.e. Brexit) and territorial secession (affecting Scotland, Catalonia and beyond). The book applies normative and empirical analyses, explores new approaches and discusses the deep theoretical problems unleashed by these processes. Featurin...
Demands for secession from EU member states create a novel situation for the demarcation of the internal borders of the Union. When combined with withdrawal of the original state from the EU, this adds the complexity of simultaneously re-drawing internal and external borders. Situation differ among the territories in which political actors have voi...
Introducción El cambio de ciclo en la integración regional en América Latina está marcado, entre otros factores, por cambios ideológicos en los gobier-nos de algunos Estados claves (por ejemplo, Argentina y Brasil) que afectan, esencialmente, a sus percepciones de la democracia. Durante la primera década de los 2000, los gobiernos progresistas hici...
This book provides the definitive reference point on all the issues pertaining to dealing with the 'crisis of the Rule of Law' in the European Union. Both Member State and EU levels are considered. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the concrete legal bases and instruments that the EU may avail itself of for enforcing rule of law, and...
This book provides the definitive reference point on all the issues pertaining to dealing with the 'crisis of the rule of law' in the European Union. Both Member State and EU levels are considered. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the concrete legal bases and instruments that the EU may avail itself of for enforcing rule of law, and...
This book provides the definitive reference point on all the issues pertaining to dealing with the 'crisis of the rule of law' in the European Union. Both Member State and EU levels are considered. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the concrete legal bases and instruments that the EU may avail itself of for enforcing rule of law, and...
Ensuring that the EU can efficiently address the problems caused by its own Member States' failure to comply with the foundational values of the Union and, in particular, the Rule of Law, requires establishing, first of all, the normative foundation for enhanced EU monitoring and enforcement of the foundational values of Article 2 TEU – with a part...
Arguments in favour of a more explicit and clearer EU stance on secession from a member state – two different cases for secession and their implications – the inadmissibility of unilateral secession within the EU – consensual secession does not create a legal entitlement for automatic membership – the need to follow the route of Article 49 TEU – no...
Processes of integration face a continuous dilemma: how can states achieve the provision of certain public goods which they alone are not capable of providing, while, at the same time, clinging to a jealous defence of the national sovereignty inherent in the very notion of statehood. Organisations of regional integration have traditionally provided...
Comparative Regional Integration: Governance and Legal Models is a groundbreaking comparative study on regional or supranational integration through international and regional organizations. It provides the first comprehensive and empirically based analysis of governance systems by drawing on an original sample of 87 regional and international orga...
Comparative Regional Integration: Governance and Legal Models is a groundbreaking comparative study on regional or supranational integration through international and regional organizations. It provides the first comprehensive and empirically based analysis of governance systems by drawing on an original sample of 87 regional and international orga...
Article 50 has explicitly formalized the exit option that previously existed in an implicit form. The provision entitles to an unilateral, unconditional but not immediate withdrawal from the European Union which renders relatively easy in procedural terms to trigger the process. Several utilitarian reasons explain why a member state may wish to lea...
This brief paper introduces the key idea and the structure of the edited volume ‘Reinforcing Rule of Law Oversight in the European Union’, which is due to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. This book aims to discuss the normative issues related to the role of the EU in the Rule of Law enforcement field and to list and to scrutinize...
Highlights Recent events in some Member States show that the EU's values (article 2, TEU), in particular the Rule of Law, are not exempt from being challenged. Constitutional changes in Hungary, executive non-compliance with constitutional court rulings in Romania, and expulsion of Bulgarian and Hungarian Roma citizens in France are some of the epi...
The consolidation of regionalism as a broad field of research attracting scholars across disciplines demands an inquiry on its scientific foundations. This inquiry should consider the object of research, the methods and the theories used. First, regionalism scholars lack a consensually agreed definition of their subject. Second, research focuses ma...
The effects of the economic and fiscal crisis and the institutional instruments created to deal with it have led several actors (from governments and EU bodies to scholars) to propose different EU reforms. Several options exist to accommodate future constitutional development which, in some cases, may require Treaty revision. In this case, future c...
Against any superficial impression of uniformity, the Treaty of Lisbon offers a
significant number of mechanisms for flexibility (i.e. establishing different
obligations and/or with different deadlines for accomplishment for different
member states). External treaties complete the vast array for flexibility in
European integration. Their full deplo...
In the heat of the economic crisis, the demands for treaty revision have re-emerged in the EU agenda. However, any future reform will have to deal with the strictness of the revision procedure, which is caused by the obstacles that the combination of the unanimity requirement and powerful veto players may create at any moment during ratification. T...
This article examines national parliamentarians' approval of the increased budgetary capacity of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in autumn 2011. Following the analysis of vote outcome and plenary debates in 11 euro states, it is found that the financial position of a state (creditors versus debtors) does not explain the patterns of...
Las medidas introducidas para gestionar la crisis han transformado la arqui-tectura institucional de la gobernanza macroeconómica y fiscal de la UE en cuatro dimensiones. Primero, los cambios han petrificado (es decir, elevado a un rango normativo superior) determinadas opciones en esos ámbitos políticos. Segundo, en términos sustantivos, la consti...
This paper summarizes the debates held at a Round Table in the European University Institute on withdrawal from the Union and secession from an EU member state. The approach is not to look at domestic debates but to seek a European view on the topic. Four issues articulated the discussion: the normative arguments for and against secession/independe...
Since its inception, the European Union (EU) has revised its foundational treaties several times, resulting in national ratification processes involving different actors, with varying success. This book focuses on the politics of ratification of EU Treaties and reviews the processes of ratification of EU primary legislation.
Existing research and...
Democratic conditionality accession clauses have become increasingly common in certain international organisations. Similarly, provisions on suspension of membership because of breaches of democratic order have emerged. Why do regional organisations introduce these kin of clauses? In most cases, they developed after 1989 in a new geopolitical clima...
Courts in a given institutional context are aware of the implementation costs of their decisions. Contrary to some interpretations of Higher Courts’ reasoning, these have decided, in most cases, that EU treaties are compatible with national constitutional law. In cases on the constitutionality of EU treaties, a negative decision on a given treaty o...
El nuevo Tratado de Estabilidad, Coordinación y Gobernanza en la Unión Económica y Monetaria ha prescindido, por primera vez en la historia del proceso de integración europea, del requisito de la unanimidad para su entrada en vigor. En su lugar, ha introducido la regla de 'casi ¾' (esto es 12 de los 17 miembros del euro deben ratificar para que el...
Memory has become an object of dispute in the EU. Different groups and states do not have a full convergence of views and this raises the question as to whether the EU should or should not be involved. A pluralist conception of justice would argue that the recognition of memory is not excluded as a form of justice. Adopting this view, this paper ar...
The Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (TSCG) removes the unanimity requirement for entry into force. This innovation is possible because, technically, the TSCG I not an EU Treaty. It is not constructed as a reform of the EU Treaties following Article 48 which prescribes unanimity. So far, EU treaty...
During the last years, several subjects have advanced claims for developing within the EU specific elements of what is often referred to as policies of memory. Whilst this trend could be perceived as one more instance of transference of domestic issues to the EU level, the distinctive trait of these claims is that claims on memory are associated bo...
La Presidencia española de la Unión Europea en el primer semestre de 2010 ha tenido un marcado carácter iberoamericano, como muestra la celebración de la VI Cumbre de Jefes de Estado y de Gobierno UE-América Latina y el Caribe en Madrid en mayo 2010. El saldo de dicha presidencia arroja importantes resultados, en especial en los referido a las nego...
Carlos Closa and Antonio Barroso show that Spanish intellectuals have long shown a "benign neglect" towards the EU and European integration. As a result of the link established between democratization and Europe in the post-Franco period, the latter occupied an almost totally uncontroversial position. This provoked a vacuum which specialised intell...
Tema: Se analiza la conveniencia de que la estructura político-administrativa encargada de gestionar la posición española en los asuntos relativos a la UE sea suficientemente robusta para poder abordar de forma más eficaz y democrática el nuevo escenario introducido por el Tratado de Lisboa. Resumen: En algunos países de la UE, entre los que se enc...
Referendums found their way into Spanish politics only in the 1931 Constitution of the Second Spanish Republic. No previous constitution had considered forms of direct democracy. (A small exception was the local consult for local finances. This was foreseen in Article 69 of the 1987 Statute of Autonomy of Cuba and Puerto Rico.)1 The Constitution of...
The short period of time that has elapsed since the designation of the first permanent President of the European Council makes it difficult to make any assessment so far. However, beyond the formal aspects, how the incumbent performs will be decisive for the posts future consideration. Furthermore, this initial moment is critical in that it will pr...
The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty brings a number of institutional innovations. Among these, the Treaty includes a number of modalities of differentiated integration which did already exist (such as enhanced cooperation or opt-outs) and it adds some new forms: �oriented� enhanced cooperation; opt-ins and permanent structured cooperation on...
The European Union (EU) policy of the Zapatero government (2004–8) combined continuity with the Socialist policies of the 1990s with some new additions in the form of a commitment to domestic constitutional reform, including a reference to the EU in the Spanish constitution. The Socialists' EU policy also manifested important continuities with the...
The 2004-2008 Zapatero’s government EU policy combined continuity of former socialist policies in the 1990s with some new additions in the form of a commitment with domestic constitutional reform including a reference to the EU in the Spanish constitution. The use of referendum to ratify the EU constitution, even though decided by the socialist gov...
The new Treaty of Lisbon does not close, most likely, the constitutional process in the
EU. Even though the date for the re-launching of the process cannot be advanced,
from a Spanish point of view it is necessary to elaborate a medium and long-term
constitutional strategy. This should be based on a sustained constitutional discourse
that inspires...
Referendums are not the most common instrument of democracy in EU member states. In spite of this, the negotiation of the EU Constitution prompted a number of governmental choices of this mechanism for ratification of the new treaty and no less than ten governments announced their intention to use it. The reasons for these choices must be looked fo...
