Sara Hagemann

• University of Copenhagen

Governments in liberal democracies pursue social welfare, but in many different ways. The wellbeing approach instead asks: Why not focus directly on increasing measured human happiness? Why not try to improve people’s overall quality of life, as it is subjectively seen by citizens themselves? The radical implications of this stance include shifting...

Data from leading scholarly journals and publishing houses show that the gender gap in academic publishing is deep and persistent. This has considerable consequences for individual careers and for academic knowledge across disciplines. As European political science journals have started to publish their gender data for submissions and publication p...

The 2020 COVID pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge to Europe’s economies, societies and political institutions. Finding solutions for the immediate and longer-term impact of the pandemic requires collaboration between the European Union’s (EU) member states and leadership from their governments at both national and European levels. The Pr...

Does parliamentary oversight of governments’ decisions in the international arena matter? This article finds that it does: governments with strong parliamentary oversight behave differently when negotiating policies at the EU level compared with governments with less powerful parliaments. Where parliaments have formal powers to oversee and restrict...

Recent studies suggest there is a direct trade-off between transparency and efficiency in legislative politics. We challenge this conclusion and present a bargaining model where one particular kind of transparency – the publication of legislative records – works to overcome problems of incomplete information. We also present empirical findings from...

Are governments responsive to public preferences when legislating in international organizations? This paper demonstrates that governments respond to domestic public opinion even when acting at the international level. Specifically, we examine conflict in the European Union’s primary legislative body, the Council of the European Union (EU). We argu...

A constructions as complex and diverse as the EU requires an advanced and equally diverse set of analytical tools to analyse the actors, their behaviour and political processes. This chapter will seek to contribute a few thoughts on how to address bargaining within and between EU institutions. It will do so by reflecting on recent advancements in b...

This special report analyses legislative activity in the European Union and coalition formation in the European Parliament (EP) during the first half of the 7th legislative term, 2009-14. Co-decision is now the ordinary legislative procedure, not by name only: it was deployed on 90% of new proposals in 2010 and 86% in 2011, which suggests that the...

The EU governments are faced with significant difficulties in tackling the consequences of the economic and financial crises, both in own domestic arenas and collectively at the EU level. While the EU budget is rather inconsequential in size and impact in this context, the 2014–20 multiannual budget negotiations will be of significance: a reformed...

European Parliament elections have failed to produce an 'electoral connection' between European citizens and politics at the European level. Could changing the electoral system fix this problem? We believe that it could, at least partially. Changing the electoral rules would not resolve all the challenges facing the European Parliament. However, ev...

[From the Introduction]. Many experts and practitioners expected the 2004 enlargement to affect both the efficiency and content of policymaking in the EU. Contrary to these expectations, most accounts of decision-making in the Council of Ministers have concluded that the EU’s most important legislative body has functioned relatively smoothly follow...

Ideology is widely seen as a powerful explanatory force of behaviour in collective decision-making. Yet, research on the Council of the European Union, the chief legislative body in the European Union, has only recently started to pay attention to ideology. We investigate to what extent formal position-taking can be explained by the ideological par...

The increasing accessibility of Council documents has resulted in a rapidly growing literature on EU members’ behaviour, preferences and incentives when negotiating and adopting new legislation. Existing quantitative studies concerned with these topics draw on either interview-based datasets or on records of roll-call voting. This chapter presents...

This research note addresses an increasingly popular topic in the EU literature, namely the measurement of policy preferences in the Council of Ministers. It aims to provide conclusions on three issues: (1) what data are in fact available from the Council, (2) how preferences are measured in other legislatures, and (3) whether these methods would b...

BLDSC reference no.: DX239961. Thesis (doctoral)--London School of Economics and Political Science, 2006.

Drawing on an extensive data set and a large number of interviews with senior officials, diplomats and other practitioners, this report investigates the 32 months leading up to and following the enlargement of the EU in May 2004, i.e. from September 2001 through December 2006. The material collected for the analysis covers each piece of legislation...

Quantitative research in the field of European Union (EU) politics has focused on the internal dynamics of either the Council of Ministers (the Council) or the European Parliament (the Parliament). Theoretical accounts of bicameralism in the EU have understood the Parliament as a unitary actor. As a result, little attention has been paid to the eff...

Abstract will be provided by author.

The fact is that, over that two year period, much less attention has been given to the practical implementation of new institutional proposals included in the proposed treaty. Even a cursory examination indicates that the implementation of some of these proposals is likely to be uneasy, and in some cases could be a source of future problems or diff...

The recent formation of a far-right party group in the European Parliament has raised a series of important questions with regard to the internal organisation and representation of interests in the EU’s only directly elected institution. In this commentary, Sara Hagemann looks into what powers the far-right politicians actually achieve by joining f...

After a long period of internal introspection and deadlock over the Constitutional Treaty, the EU can now see some light at the end of the tunnel. If successfully ratified, the new European Treaty agreed by the Head of States and Government in Lisbon may provide the appropriate institutional tools for the EU to function with 27 member states. Howev...