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Introduction
Christian Adam is Professor at Zeppelin University where he holds the Chair of Comparative Politics with a focus on European Institutions. His work mostly analyzes on the role of legislators, bureaucrats, and judges and their contribution to institutional (mis-)behavior, policy change, and the accumulating complexity of policy output. Empirically, he focuses on the areas of morality policy, public health regulation, and social policy.
Publications
Publications (80)
One of the greatest achievements of the EU is the freedom of movement between member states offering citizens equal rights in EU member states. EU enlargement and the COVID-19 pandemic allow for a critical test of whether EU citizens are indeed treated equally in practice. We test preferential treatment of EU citizens in two hypothetical choice exp...
EU citizens have rights when living in a member state other than their own. Bureaucratic discrimination undermines the operation of these rights. We go beyond extant research on bureaucratic discrimination in two ways. First, we move beyond considering mobile EU citizens as homogenous immigrant minority to assess whether EU citizens from certain co...
The vice and virtue of incrementalism have been the subject of a long-standing academic debate. This debate, however, lacks a dynamic perspective that analyzes how the transformation of politics-mainly in the form of increasing levels of political fragmentation within decision-making arenas and increasing complexity of policy-mixes-affects the role...
We argue in this chapter that the overall empirical patterns of policy change are neither one of far-reaching policy change nor one of substantial policy dismantling and replacement. Rather, the most dominant development in policy outputs across policy sectors in advanced democracies is the constant, mostly irreversible accumulation of public polic...
Public officials have been shown to discriminate against citizens based on race and gender. We suggest that bureaucrats also discriminate based on political beliefs that citizens reveal to them. We support this argument with evidence from the application of freedom of assembly rights in the context of gay marriage. We confront German city administr...
Research on judicial politics typically treats litigant configurations as exogenous factors, which might or might not have an impact on judicial behaviour. Their emergence is, however, rarely subject to theorization. This chapter shows that there is a great variety of different litigant configurations that appear before the Court in annulment actio...
This chapter presents the empirical strategy to study annulment actions. It relies on a combination of statistical methods and case study research. An original data set is compiled including all actions for annulment that the Court dealt with until 2015. The chapter investigates member state governments’ participation in annulment litigation—and al...
The political role of annulment litigation has long evaded scholars’ interest. To better understand this role, we need to know why different actors decide to initiate and join annulment actions. Moreover, we have to understand the structure of annulment litigation by assessing the actors that consider and engage in annulment litigation and kinds of...
While actions for annulment are technical legal instruments, their use is more often than not motivated by political considerations. Annulments are thus a crucial part of the struggle over money, policy, competences, and votes within the European system of multilevel governance. Future research should therefore compare the role and use of annulment...
Actions for annulment are the only legal instrument with which member states, other European Union institutions, and even citizens, companies, and interest groups can directly invoke the Court of Justice of the EU. The rules that define the access to the Court and the reviewability of supranational legal acts have evolved considerably since the ear...
Annulment litigation has become an increasingly relevant judicial tool in the struggle over policy content and decision competences in the European Union. With the expansion of EU competences has come an increasing need for judicial review of actions taken by supranational institutions. Accordingly, the list of EU institutions that find themselves...
Annulment actions with different litigant configurations are associated with different legal outcomes. Chances of legal defeat for the defending EU institution are higher whenever litigant configurations are complex rather than simple. This is because success rates in cases with simple litigant configurations are substantially lower than 50%. In ca...
Different actors and different types of actors initiate annulment actions for different reasons. Four motivations are identified that seem to drive the decision to litigate. These motivations result from the specifics of the political context of the underlying conflict situation. Sometimes, private and public actors are mainly motivated by the wish...
This open access book provides an exhaustive picture of the role that annulment conflicts play in the EU multilevel system. Based on a rich dataset of annulment actions since the 1960s and a number of in-depth case studies, it explores the political dimension of annulment litigation, which has become an increasingly relevant judicial tool in the st...
Public Policy and the CJEU’s Power offers an overarching analytical framework for thinking about the impact of policy contexts on the CJEU’s influence on European public policy and the course of European integration. Thereby, it lays out a research agenda that is best described as public policy approach to studying judicial power in the European Un...
The debate about the power of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has mainly focussed on the preferences, perceptions and strategic considerations of the High Judges in Luxemburg. This Special Issue turns the analytical spotlight to another important determinant: the behaviour of actors with a stake in the policy conflicts resolved by...
Results on whether party ideology influences the regulation of morally sensitive issues remain inconclusive. This is partly due to insufficient theoretical specifications of the link between party ideology and morality policy output that do not consider that different directions of policy reform give rise to distinct politics, although this insight...
The lack of effective vertical policy coordination between the policy makers at the “top” and the implementers at the “bottom” is an important source of deficits in both policy design and policy implementation. Yet while the link between policy production and implementation seems vital to explain and prevent policy failure, so far the conceptual to...
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam
The responsiveness to societal demands is both the key virtue and the key problem of modern democracies. On the one hand, responsiveness is a central cornerstone of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, responsiveness inevitably entails policy accumulation. While policy accumulation often positively reflects modernisation and human progress, it...
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap - by Christian Adam April 2019
In the perspective of a rational policy cycle, termination is the logical end of unsuccessful policy choices. As the deliberate conclusion or cessation of specific government functions, programs, policies, or organizations the termination concept comprises consists of the ending of public policies, as well as public institutions. Its potential as a...
This paper presents actions for annulment as indicator for conflict over policy application in the EU and argues that it is a valuable complement to the indicator of infringement proceedings. This is because annulment actions shed light on conflicts in areas that remain undetected by infringement proceedings and because annulment actions are able t...
The debate about the power of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has mainly focussed on the preferences, perceptions and strategic considerations of the High Judges in Luxemburg. This Special Issue turns the analytical spotlight to another important determinant: the behaviour of actors with a stake in the policy conflicts resolved by...
Claims for evidence-based policy-making are motivated by the assumption that if practitioners and scholars want to learn about effective policy design, they also can. This paper argues that this is becoming more and more challenging with the conventional approaches due to the accumulation of national policy portfolios, characterized by (a) a growin...
We analyze morality policy change from the perspective of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to test whether reform dynamics in this policy sector follow a distinct pattern. First, we propose a new measurement scheme capturing changes in the intensity of morality policy output. Second, we demonstrate that morality policy change is strongly punctua...
This paper asks whether strong bureaucracies can effectively constrain the continuously growing stock of rules in modern democracies through organizational coordination and learning. To answer this question, the paper analyzes the growth of rule stocks in the areas of environmental policy and social policy in 23 OECD countries over the period betwe...
Comparative research crucially depends on the availability of meaningful descriptive concepts capturing the essence of empirical phenomena. In policy analysis, the portfolio of classical concepts describing policy contents and procedures remains unmatched by a similar pool of concepts available for describing patterns of regulatory outputs. Startin...
Das Feld der Europäisierungsforschung beschäftigt sich mit Veränderungen unterschiedlicher Aspekte nationaler Politik, welche ursächlich auf die Europäische Union bzw. den europäischen Integrationsprozess zurückgehen. Konkret wird analysiert wie sich politische Inhalte, institutionelle Arrangements oder auch die politische Auseinandersetzung durch...
This chapter presents legal activism as a second important motivation for governments to subject supranational acts to judicial review. Legal activism is understood as governments’ attempt to strategically use litigation as an instrument to provoke judicial law-making and thereby get the Court to develop the set of EU rules according to the litigan...
This chapter presents the general development of the rules, compliance, and governmental litigation in the context of the EU’s state aid policy. It highlights that supranational administrative acts have come to play an increasingly important role in this sector. On the one hand, member states thus had to rely more on actions for annulment as a way...
This chapter presents policy misfit as a first important motivation for governments to subject supranational acts to judicial review. To support this argument, it presents a case study on the French government under Prime Minister Édouard Balladur initiating an action for annulment against a Communication published by the Commission on private pens...
This chapter uses statistical analysis to assess the relationship between governments’ tendency to judicialize compliance conflict with actions for annulment and the degree of policy misfit and their degree of legal activism. To do so, the chapter focuses on compliance conflict in the EU’s state aid regime and develops quantitative indicators captu...
Introduction and aims:
We examine public health effects of steps towards more permissive cannabis policies introduced in Belgium, Finland, France and Portugal between 1999 and 2004. Public health effects are captured in terms of cannabis-induced treatment uptake as reported by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.
Design an...
This book unites scholarship on law and politics with compliance research in the EU to shed light on the political role of a neglected dimension of litigation in the EU: the political role of governmental actions for annulment. The book does not portray national governments as passive actors within the EU’s judicial arena. Instead it focuses on cas...
The equal treatment of all citizens is one of the fundamental principles of good administrative practice. Nevertheless, there are growing numbers of media and scientific reports on unequal treatment by public administrations. This article examines the unequal treatment of citizens by gender and ethnic origin by means of a survey-based field experim...
Das Feld der Europäisierungsforschung beschäftigt sich mit Veränderungen unterschiedlicher Aspekte nationaler Politik, welche ursächlich auf die Europäische Union bzw. den europäischen Integrationsprozess zurückgehen. Konkret wird analysiert wie sich politische Inhalte, institutionelle Arrangements oder auch die politische Auseinandersetzung durch...
This article uses agent-based computer simulation to investigate the dynamics of policy diffusion through learning. It compares these dynamics across state systems in which policy-makers possess different capabilities to learn about policy effectiveness: independent decision-makers focusing on own experiences vs. interdependent social learners rely...
Dieser Beitrag führt in die Analyse moralpolitischer Entwicklungen aus Sicht der Policy-Analyse ein. Zunächst werden unterschiedliche definitorische Zugänge zum Feld der Moralpolitik kontrastiert sowie häufig untersuchte abhängige Variablen vorgestellt. Im Anschluss folgt eine vergleichende Deskription ausgewählter moralpolitischer Entwicklungen. K...
On the Road to Permissiveness? seeks to describe and explain how European countries have been resolving political issues that involve conflicts of fundamental values. Specifically, these political issues include the regulation of abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, prostitution, pornography, cannabis, sports betting, and handguns.
The book addres...
Lange Zeit wurde Glücksspiel in weiten Teilen Europas als moralisch verwerflich und gefährlich eingestuft und dementsprechend komplett verboten. Spätestens nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg ging die Mehrheit europäischer Staaten jedoch dazu über, Glücksspiel im Allgemeinen und Sportwetten im Besonderen in beschränktem Rahmen über staatliche Monopolisten a...
Why do EU Member State governments have such varying degrees of success when they initiate annulment actions against the European Commission? Usually litigant success is associated with arguments about judicial constraint or litigants' capacity. This article sheds light on domestic politics as an additional factor that can affect governments' succe...
This article analyses addictive behaviour policy regimes - focusing on illegal drugs and gambling - in 19 countries over a period of 50 years. It compares how these countries have combined rules on the consumption and possession of cannabis and on the participation in sports betting with sanctions for violations of these rules. While theories of po...
We examine the regional variance of the votes on the railway station project “Stuttgart 21”. In addition to party partisanship, prospective regional advantages and their regionally specific relevance explain the voting behaviour in local districts. Thus, our findings contest previous journalistic and political interpretations of the voting behaviou...
While many studies deal with comparative public sector reform, the fundamental question of whether and to what extent states
are actually able to abolish parts of their administrative structure remains untackled. Despite some efforts to solve this
puzzle, the topic remains underestimated. This article identifies the main conceptual and theoretical...