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A novelty in the new generation of European Union free trade agreements is the chapter on trade and sustainable development. This includes references to labour and environmental provisions that should be respected in the frame- work of the agreement as a whole. Civil society organisations have, appar- ently, been granted an important role in the follow-up and monitoring of these chapters. Civil society meetings have become a standard and quite prominent feature of EU free trade agreements, specifically with a view to promoting labour and environmental principles. In this CLEER Paper, we address three basic questions about these meetings: (1) how do they look like (features), (2) what are they for (purposes), and (3) how can we evaluate them (assessment)? In doing so, we take stock of current developments (empirical contribution) and propose frameworks for further examination (analytical contribution). Our em- pirical data are mainly based on interviews and participant observation in rela- tion to the EU-Peru-Colombia, EU-Central America and EU-Korea agreements. Our analytical frameworks are developed in order to study the features of the civil society meetings on the one hand, and in order to make normative evalu- ations on the other hand. When it comes to evaluating the success of the civil society meetings, we argue that this ultimately hinges on one’s perspective on civil society, democracy and development in the context of international trade. In conclusion, we express some critical concerns on the (so far) limited role of the civil society meetings, while also indicating that it would be too early to dismiss their potential relevance in the future.
Until a few years ago, EU external trade initiatives attracted little attention. But matters have been different with TTIP with the United States and CETA with Canada. What can explain their politicization? Existing research emphasizing institutional changes occasioned by the 2007 Lisbon Treaty and broader postfunctionalist theories offer valuable but limited insights. Recent work on the regulatory content of trade deals offers an alternative perspective. This paper builds on that work by proposing an account rooted in economic sociology highlighting the possibility that agreements assert fundamental values and identities. Agreements can thus be symbolically, even existentially, charged, especially when they involve major countries or other trading blocs in the world. Politicization follows. The case of food with TTIP and CETA, two agreements that opponents considered connected and thus even more significant, illustrates this.
Two recent developments have the potential to fundamentally alter the conventional view of EU trade policy-making: the emergence of global value chains (GVCs) and the recent backlash against globalization. In this paper we summarize the conventional wisdom after which we delineate the main expectations derived from the GVC and the globalization-backlash perspectives. In so doing, we focus on the EU's trade and non-trade preferences, and the EU's ability to achieve its preferences in international trade negotiations. We then discuss the research agenda that would allow testing the expectations derived from these different perspectives. A key point that emerges from this discussion is that the conventional perspective, the GVC perspective, and the globalization-backlash perspective may all be needed to fully understand EU trade policy. The challenge is to know under which conditions which of these perspectives best explains the process and outcomes of EU trade policy-making.
The 2009 Lisbon Treaty transferred the competence over Foreign Direct Investment policy from the national to the supranational level. This article analyses the impact of this transfer on the content of international investment agreements and, more broadly, the shape of the investment regime complex. Is the competence shift expected to have an independent impact or simply reproduce and continue existing trends? Exploring these two conjectures through a combination of text analysis, primary materials, and interviews, we are making a Historical Institutionalist argument focusing on the timing and sequencing of international investment negotiations. While the competence shift has allowed the EU to innovate in developing its own approach to negotiating international investment agreements, notably with the proposal to create an Investment Court System, the novelty may be only at the surface as the constraints of past, current, and future negotiations restrict the options available to EU actors – we call this the space-time continuum. The result of this learning-and-reacting process is a new European approach which simultaneously duplicates and innovates and could eventually favour greater centralisation within the investment regime complex.
This article analyses the EU's Common Commercial Policy (CCP) at the level of Treaty revision and particularly focuses on the last Treaty negotiations that led to the Treaty of Lisbon. The analysis is based on a revised neofunctionalist framework that the author developed in previous work. It draws on the following concepts: (i) functional spillover; (ii) cultivated spillover; (iii) social spillover; and (iv) countervailing forces. Insights into the dynamics and countervailing forces driving Treaty revisions considerably deepen our understanding of the Common Commercial Policy, as EU external trade policy-making is substantially affected by the parameters set by the Treaty. The analysis indicates that the revised neofunctionalist framework can broadly account for the changes of the Common Commercial Policy during the last Treaty revision. It is further suggested that integration in the area of trade policy cannot be explained exclusively by rational choice dynamics, such as utility maximizing actors with fixed preferences, but that socialization through deliberation also needs to be taken into account.
This article examines how the substantive changes brought by the Lisbon Treaty with regard to the scope and nature of Commu-nity competence and to decision-making rules in the fi eld of the Com-mon Commercial Policy fulfi l the need for balancing internal and exter-nal action and stand up to the requirements of international economic regulation. It is argued that the Lisbon Treaty, building upon the prem-ises of the current regime, constitutes a benchmark in the evolution of the Common Commercial Policy. The expansion of the scope of the Common Commercial Policy to trade in services, commercial aspects of intellectual property and, most importantly, foreign direct invest-ment indicates that a common policy in the fi elds of goods, services, establishment and capital with regard to third countries is necessary in order to serve the goals of internal integration and to increase the competitiveness of Europe in the world. Furthermore, by "merging" the different aspects of the Common Commercial Policy and simplifying the provisions concerning the exercise of EU competence, the Lisbon Treaty ensures its effective application. However, the "merger" of the different aspects of the Common Commercial Policy does not affect the balance of powers that exists in the internal market with regard to the same areas of law. The only derogations from parallelism between internal and external powers concern the exclusive nature of EU competence and the role of the European Parliament. However, these are both nec-essary for preserving the effectiveness of Union policy and introducing legitimacy in the most important fi eld of EU external relations.
This article uses a principal-agent framework of analysis to discuss the European External Action Service’s (EEAS) institutional design and policy mandates. Can the EEAS act autonomously with regard to the Commission and Member States? Are there policy areas in which the EEAS has greater decision-making autonomy than others? These discussions are central to understanding the post-Lisbon Treaty EU’s external policymaking system and its potential strengths as an international actor.
All social research is based on pattern matching ideas. A pattern match involves a correspondence between a theoretical or conceptual expectation pattern and an observed or measured pattern. Two quasi-experimental designs-the nonequivalent dependent variable design and the reversed treatment design—illustrate pattern matching logic well. In program evaluation three pattern matches are important: the program pattern match that assesses program implementation; the measurement pattern match that assesses the validity of the measures; and the effect pattern match that assesses the causal hypothesis Conceptualization methods are needed to facilitate the articulation of rich theoretical patterns. An example of a conceptualization study is presented and the utility of conceptualization methods for pattern-matching research is discussed.
The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy mines all the traditions of public policy. Public policy is the business end of political science. It is where theory meets practice in the pursuit of the public good. Political scientists approach public policy in myriad ways. Some approach the policy process descriptively, asking how the need for public intervention comes to be perceived, a policy response formulated, enacted, implemented, and, all too often, subverted, perverted, altered, or abandoned. Others approach public policy more prescriptively, offering politically-informed suggestions for how normatively valued goals can and should be pursued, either through particular policies or through alternative processes for making policy. Some offer their advice from the Olympian heights of detached academic observers, others as ‘engaged scholars’ cum advocates, while still others seek to instil more reflective attitudes among policy practitioners themselves toward their own practices. This Handbook's articles touch upon institutional and historical sources and analytical methods, how policy is made, how it is evaluated and how it is constrained. In these ways, the Handbook shows how the combined wisdom of political science as a whole can be brought to bear on political attempts to improve the human condition. The Handbook is one of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science — a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science.
This book offers a one-volume introduction to social science methodology, relevant to the disciplines of anthropology, economics, history, political science, psychology, and sociology. It is written for beginning students, long-time practitioners and methodologists, and applies to work conducted in qualitative and quantitative styles. It synthesizes the vast and diverse field of methodology in a way that is clear, concise, and comprehensive. While offering a handy overview of the subject, the book is also an argument about how we should conceptualize methodological problems. Tasks and criteria, the author argues - not fixed rules of procedure - best describe the search for methodological adequacy. Thinking about methodology through this lens provides a new framework for understanding work in the social sciences.
All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing students with a stand-alone resource. The seventh edition of EU Law: Text, Cases, and Materials provides clear analysis of all aspects of European law in the post Lisbon era. This edition looks in detail at the way in which the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty have worked since the Treaty became operational, especially innovations such as the hierarchy of norms, the different types of competence, and the legally binding Charter of Rights. The coming into effect of the new Treaty was overshadowed by the financial crisis, which has occupied a considerable part of the EU’s time since 2009. The EU has also had to cope with the refugee crisis, the pandemic crisis, the rule of law crisis and the Brexit crisis. There has nonetheless been considerable legislative activity in other areas, and the EU courts have given important decisions across the spectrum of EU law. The seventh edition has incorporated the changes in all these areas. The book covers all topics relating to the institutional and constitutional dimensions of the EU. In relation to EU substantive law there is detailed treatment of the four freedoms, the single market, competition, equal treatment, citizenship, state aid, and the area of freedom, security and justice. Brexit is the rationale for the decision to have a separate UK version of the book. There is no difference in the chapters between the two versions, insofar as the explication of the EU law is concerned. The difference resides in the fact that in the UK version there is an extra short section at the end of each chapter explaining how, for example, direct effect, supremacy or free movement are relevant in post-Brexit UK. Law students in the UK need to know this, law students in the EU and elsewhere do not.
This research note presents an innovative dataset of Swiss MPs’ interest ties between 2000‐2011. The longitudinal analysis shows that the average number of interest ties per MP has more than doubled: from 3.5 in 2000 to 7.6 in 2011. Since the mid‐2000s, public interest groups have accounted for approximately one out of two ties between MPs and interest groups, showing the strongest increase during the period. However, when looking at the most present individual groups, important business groups dominate and appear well connected with the governmental parties of the political right. Finally, interest groups are also able to forge themselves a strategic presence within the parliamentary committees that are the most relevant for their policy issues. Next research steps include the assessment of the (un)biased access of interest groups to the parliamentary venue and their policy influence.
After the negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) triggered massive public mobilization in the European Union (EU), literature emerged on the novel ‘politicization’ of trade in Europe. To be sure, public salience was high around the TTIP negotiations. However, public salience over EU trade and investment negotiations has varied considerably over the past two decades. The objective of this paper is to stimulate a research agenda explaining such variation. After presenting evidence of variation (over time, across contemporaneous negotiations, and across Member States), we review a diverse set of literature to lay out six complementary explanations for why some trade deals provoke public salience, while others do not: changing nature of trade and investment negotiations; growing discontent with globalization; transformation of the media landscape; institutional changes brought about by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty; the role of the United States; and foreign interference.
Cambridge Core - Research Methods In Politics - Case Study Research - by John Gerring
EU trade policy is in flux. This reflects various developments, chief among them: the deepening of the global trade liberalisation agenda, the EU’s own constitutional recasting of the Common Commercial Policy, and the politicization of trade. The purpose of this special issue is to analyse the changing politics of trade in the EU, focusing on the EU FTAs with Korea, the US, Canada, and Japan. We propose to view the negotiations of these agreements through the lens of contentious market regulation. This approach takes the regulatory turn in trade seriously, and sheds light on its ramifications for the mobilisation of new actors and the involvement of parliaments in the politics of trade. After tracing the development of the new EU FTAs and discussing the specificity of the EU’s approach to deepened liberalisation, the article presents the framework of contentious market regulation and the individual contributions to the special issue.
Rather than becoming obsolete, national parliaments have come back obstinately in the politics of trade. This article develops this proposition and explores its contribution to the idea of twenty first-century trade as contentious market regulation. Contra the Lisbon Treaty, national parliaments’ assertion entrenches the role of domestic actors in the EU trade liberalisation policy, and fleshes out its multi-level parliamentary bases. We discuss the role, drivers, and patterns of parliamentary assertion and explore parliamentary assertion using preliminary survey and case study material. We find that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations represented the tipping-point of parliamentary assertion. Through interpretation and political engagement, national parliaments have forged a role for themselves that was unforeseen in the Lisbon Treaty: weighing in on the policy-making and the ratification processes. In Europe, parliamentary assertion reflected the twin impact of a changing global trade agenda and the centralisation of the EU trade policy regime.
Recent Free Trade Area (FTA) agreements of the EU are ‘deep and comprehensive’. This can be explained by the various and complex ‘trading costs’ that business encounters when accessing a foreign market and which business is keen to reduce as much as possible. The paper examines what ‘deep and comprehensive’ means more precisely in four EU FTAs: CETA and EU/Korea, and two FTAs that have not yet been completed (TTIP and EU/Japan). It provides a tentative explanation of the nature of these four modern EU FTAs by taking a closer look at the business dimension, in particular transnational value chains in some prominent sectors, the growing importance of services and inter-sectoral linkages.
The concept of domestic veto players has become a popular explanation for foreign policy rigidity. We argue that veto players can be amenable to new policy initiatives – in our case preferential trade agreements (PTAs) – but then choose to exert a strong influence on their contents. Drawing upon more than a dozen PTA-design variables for an expanded collection of postwar trade agreements, our quantitative tests reveal that veto players systematically shape what is included in, and excluded from, PTAs. Most notably, agreements concluded under greater veto-player constraints contain fewer liberalization commitments, weaker dispute settlement, and more opt-outs in the form of trade remedies. Our findings highlight domestic political actors as important determinants of international institutional design and show that veto players exert additional, and perhaps stronger, influence on what is proscribed in agreements, not just whether they are enacted in the first place.
Does democracy control business, or does business control democracy? This study of how companies are bought and sold in four countries – France, Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands – explores this fundamental question. It does so by examining variation in the rules of corporate control – specifically, whether hostile takeovers are allowed. Takeovers have high political stakes: they result in corporate reorganizations, layoffs, and the unraveling of compromises between workers and managers. But the public rarely pays attention to issues of corporate control. As a result, political parties and legislatures are largely absent from this domain. Instead, organized managers get to make the rules, quietly drawing on their superior lobbying capacity and the deference of legislators. These tools, not campaign donations, are the true founts of managerial political influence.
How are policy competences allocated between different actors? This article contributes to the literature on institutional development through an in-depth case-study of the conditions under which the competence over the negotiation of agreements on foreign direct investment (FDI) was transferred from the national level to the European Union (EU) in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. Most analysts assume that this competence shift was a rationally designed delegation, intended to maximize European bargaining power in international investment negotiations and conceived as an important element of a teleological drive to make the EU a meaningful external actor. This article tells a different story - one where the competence shift happened by stealth as a result of a combination of neo-functionalist Commission entrepreneurship and historical accident, against the preferences of the Member States. The article also assesses whether the conditions under which the competence was transferred have implications for the implementation of the new policy. © 2017 University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
The heated scholarly and public debate on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has centred predominantly on two questions. Firstly, is there something particularly special about TTIP, other than the fact that it involves the world’s largest trading partners? And, secondly, is the concern about TTIP’s deleterious effects justified? The starting point for our argument is that understanding an agreement like TTIP requires an emphasis on the socially constructed nature of reality. TTIP is ultimately novel in terms of the regulatory scope of its provisions, and it is problematic because it subtly promotes the (socially constructed) interests of those who merely see regulation as inefficient ‘red tape’.
This paper analyses Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations in order to assess how the move towards tighter economic integration within the EU‒US strategic partnership impacts on legislative‒executive relations in EU trade policy. The analysis examines the institutional, substantive and party political dimensions of national parliaments’ scrutiny of the Common Commercial Policy. Based on insights into both domestic and EU channels of parliamentary monitoring of TTIP negotiations, the paper argues that, although the government remains the central object of democratic control, the involvement of national parliaments in transatlantic trade extends to encompass the EU’s own transatlantic and trade policies. This is rooted in the legislatures’ legal capacity to constrain the executive in the negotiation, conclusion and, where applicable, ratification phases of EU trade agreements. It is argued that national parliamentary influence takes the shape of politicisation of the legitimacy of the expected policy outcomes of these agreements.
This article examines whether the two-level game can theoretically explain negotiation breakdowns without referring to uncertainty alone. For this purpose, social conflicts are integrated in the two-level game. In this light, the classical hypothesis that smaller win-sets increase the risk of a negotiation breakdown can no longer be maintained. Instead, conflict intensity-and thereby the risk of breakdown-correlates with the intersection of the win-sets in the form of an inverted U-curve. It follows that negotiations are most likely to break down when the intersection of the win-sets is perceived as medium-sized, because the bargaining space and thereby the potential of conflict intensity is largest/highest. Furthermore, the insertion of social conflicts into the equation runs counter to the hypothesis that issue linkages facilitate international cooperation. On the contrary, issue linkages increase the risk that goal conflicts, in particular, intensify each other by spreading from one issue to another.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations aspire to create the world's most ambitious trade agreement between the world's two largest economies. The politics associated with TTIP are different from those associated with previous trade negotiations. Moreover, they diverge from the prevailing International Political Economy (IPE) account of trade policy. The politics of TTIP diverge from the conventional IPE account of trade politics in two particularly noteworthy ways. First, rather than being rivals, American and European business interests are allies, adopting common positions on what they want the agreement to look like. Second, opposition within both the USA and the EU comes not primarily from firms and workers fearing increased economic competition, but from less traditional trade actors – consumer and environmental groups and citizens – concerned about the erosion of valued regulations. I argue that the unusual politics is the product of two distinct, but related factors. The first is the extraordinary level of cross-investment between the two economies. The second concerns the unique emphasis on addressing non-tariff barriers, particularly regulatory differences, and the significance of the negotiating partner. I test the plausibility of these arguments through within-case variation and by preliminary comparison to other contemporary negotiations of ‘deep’ preferential trade agreements.
Investment treaty arbitration is fast becoming one of the most common methods of dispute settlement in international law. Despite having ancient roots, tensions remain between the private interests in international investment relations and the public international law features of the arbitral procedure. This book, which presents an account of investment treaty arbitration as a part of public international law - as opposed to commercial law - provides an important contribution to the literature on this subject. Eric De Brabandere examines the procedural implications of conceiving of investment treaty arbitration in such a way, with regard to issues such as the principles of confidentiality and privacy, and remedies. The author demonstrates how the public international law character of investment treaty arbitration derives from, and has impacted upon, the dispute settlement procedure.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has the potential to remake political and legal relationships between the European Union (EU) and the USA and pave the way to a new form of global economic governance based on international regulatory cooperation. In particular, TTIP presents an historic opportunity for the EU and the USA to remove regulatory divergence—today’s most prominent obstacle to trade exchanges—thereby increasing economic growth for the citizens of both polities. Yet, the EU and the USA have been attempting to reduce trade barriers since the 1970s. Despite decades of cooperation, EU and US policymakers too often fail to mutually understand each other’s positions, giving rise to regulatory differences. As an international agreement predicted to contain a Horizontal Chapter—an innovative approach to international trade treaty-making containing a framework for future bilateral regulatory cooperation—TTIP has the potential to transform this impasse, if approached correctly. The envisaged chapter would provide a ‘gateway’ for handling sectoral regulatory issues between the EU and the USA, including by addressing both legislation and non-legislative acts, regardless of the level at which they are adopted and by whom. Yet with great promises come challenges too.
This article focusses on the structure, scope, discipline, institutional design, enforcement, and implementation of the envisaged horizontal chapter, often defined Regulatory Cooperation Chapter. In so doing, it addresses some of the concerns currently raised by civil society, in particular the fear of a ‘race to the bottom’ that may stem from the operation of this chapter and provides some recommendations.
The 2008 bailout is often taken as evidence of the domination of the US political system by large financial institutions. In fact, the bailout demonstrated the vulnerability of US banks to government pressure. Large banks in the United States could not defy regulators, because their future income depended on the US market. In Britain, by contrast, one bank succeeded in scuttling the preferred governmental solution of an industry-wide recapitalization, because most of its revenue came from outside the United Kingdom. This was an exercise of structural power, but one that most contemporary scholarship on business power ignores or misclassifies, since it limits structural power to the automatic adjustment of policy to the possibility of disinvestment. We show that structural power can be exercised strategically, that it is distinct from instrumental power based on lobbying, and that it explains consequential variations in bailout design in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Germany.
Institutions are central to economic life. They have a major impact on consumer preferences, the actions and processes of firms, levels of wealth and poverty in countries, the growth of international trade, and much more. Indeed, none of the preconditions for economic activity – such as the existence of buyers and sellers, recognizable goods and services, and the information we need to make choices – would be in place without institutions. Institutions, then, do more than support economic life: they enable and shape it. These insights challenge some of the most basic postulates on modern economic theory and are at the heart of many of the most exciting works in economic sociology. This book examines the role of institutions – defined as the formal and informal rules and practices that surround us as we go about our daily lives – in the economy. Illuminating complex ideas with carefully selected, vivid examples, the investigation focuses on economic activity as it unfolds at the individual, organizational, national, and international levels. This accessible and engaging book will be essential reading for students of economic sociology, and all those interested in the intimate relationship between institutions and the economy.
The aim of this study is to apply and compare different explanations of legislative decision-making in the European Union (EU). Two features of the research design are particularly important with respect to achieving this aim. First, the selection of cases must cover a sufficient number and variety of cases to count as a test of the explanations. Second, a way of thinking about very different decision situations has to be devised, such that they can be compared, in terms of the applicability of different explanations in any given situation, and in terms of the performance of explanations in different situations. Stating explanations in the form of models is part of the endeavour to facilitate comparison. Another part is the conceptualisation of decision situations spatially. Political controversies are conceptualised as issue continua or scales, with actors placed at different positions on these issues. The Commission proposal on tobacco products will be used to illustrate the data collection process. One of the issues raised by this proposal was the size of the health warning on tobacco products: see the second issue described in Figure 2.1. At one end of this issue continuum, we find the status quo position at that time, consisting of relatively small warnings. At the other end of the continuum, we find the alternative of very large health warnings using very strong language. Intermediate alternatives are placed on positions between these two alternatives. This way of defining issues is essential to the comparison of different explanatory models' performance.
Arguments about Europe’s democratic deficit are really arguments about the nature and ultimate goals of the integration process. Those who assume that economic integration must lead to political integration tend to apply to European institutions standards of legitimacy derived from the theory and practice of parliamentary democracies. We argue that such standards are largely irrelevant at present. As long as the majority of voters and their elected representatives oppose the idea of a European federation, while supporting far-reaching economic integration, we cannot expect parliamentary democracy to flourish in the Union. Economic integration without political integration is possible only if politics and economics are kept as separate as possible. The depoliticisation of European policy-making is the price we pay in order to preserve national sovereignty largely intact. These being the preferences of the voters, we conclude that Europe’s ‘democratic deficit’ is democratically justified.
The expression ‘democratic deficit,’ however, is also used to refer to the legitimacy problems of non-majoritarian institutions, and this second meaning is much more relevant to a system of limited competences such as the EC. Now the key issues for democratic theory are about the tasks which may be legitimately delegated to institutions insulated from the political process, and how to design such institutions so as to make independence and accountability complementary and mutually supporting, rather than antithetical. If one accepts the ‘regulatory model’ of the EC, then, as long as the tasks delegated to the European level are precisely and narrowly defined, non-majoritarian standards of legitimacy should be sufficient to justify the delegation of the necessary powers.
The aim of this contribution is to critically evaluate one of the theoretical approaches used to study the European Union (EU) political system and interest groups activity: the advocacy coalition framework (ACF). ACF considers that the outcome of legislative procedures is influenced by the alignment and role played by advocacy coalitions. This contribution assesses the impact of ACF on our understanding of the influences on the EU policy processes, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. The main argument is that the ACF, although very useful in studying the EU political system, shows shortcomings when applied to the study of EU interest groups' performance. The contribution ends with a consideration of future directions for theoretical and empirical ACF research, alone and as part of wider integrated theoretical approaches to understanding the dynamics of influence in the EU.
Recently there have been calls for a politicisation of European Union (EU) decision-making. This study discusses how politicisation can be achieved and how it affects the way national parliaments fulfil their citizen- and government-related functions in EU decision-making. First, it is argued that politicisation requires legislative Commission proposals that polarise between centre-left and centre-right actors. By changing the incentive structure of national parties, such proposals help to overcome parties' reluctance to discuss European issues publicly and hence provide citizens with electoral alternatives in EU decision-making. Second, it is argued that the higher salience of polarising proposals also increases national parliaments' attention for, and hence control over, the processes on the European level. The plausibility of the arguments is evaluated empirically through a comparative case study of the discussions in Germany and Austria on probably one of the most politicised examples of day-to-day EU decision-making in recent years – the Services directive.
The European Parliament (EP) has become an increasingly important lobbying venue for business due to the recent enhancement of its regulatory powers. Existing research, however, disagrees on the extent to which the intensified business lobbying has resulted in increased business influence on EP policy outcomes. Some studies find a ‘business bias’ in the EP, while others still perceive it to be a forceful promoter of diffuse interests (such as consumer and environmental groups). This article examines the conditions under which business groups shape policy outcomes in the EP. The article uses a comparative qualitative case study design of four recent legislative dossiers, and draws on process-tracing of EU documents and lobbying letters, and 145 interviews. It finds that the ability of business to leave its fingerprints on EP reports depends on a number of factors – most notably business unity, low issue salience and dossiers being dealt with by mainstream committees.
Political scientists have long classified systems of government as parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multiparty, and so on. But such distinctions often fail to provide useful insights. For example, how are we to compare the United States, a presidential bicameral regime with two weak parties, to Denmark, a parliamentary unicameral regime with many strong parties? Veto Players advances an important, new understanding of how governments are structured. The real distinctions between political systems, contends George Tsebelis, are to be found in the extent to which they afford political actors veto power over policy choices. Drawing richly on game theory, he develops a scheme by which governments can thus be classified. He shows why an increase in the number of "veto players," or an increase in their ideological distance from each other, increases policy stability, impeding significant departures from the status quo. Policy stability affects a series of other key characteristics of polities, argues the author. For example, it leads to high judicial and bureaucratic independence, as well as high government instability (in parliamentary systems). The propositions derived from the theoretical framework Tsebelis develops in the first part of the book are tested in the second part with various data sets from advanced industrialized countries, as well as analysis of legislation in the European Union. Representing the first consistent and consequential theory of comparative politics, Veto Players will be welcomed by students and scholars as a defining text of the discipline.
There has been a great deal of research in recent years concerning the use of substantive policy analysis in public policy-making. This paper seeks to integrate those findings - e.g., the enlightenment function of policy research - into a more general model of policy-making over periods of a decade or more. The conceptual framework focuses on the belief systems of advocacy coalitions within policy subsystems as the critical vehicle for understanding the role of policy analysis in policy-oriented learning and the effect, in turn, of such learning on changes in governmental programs.
Although intercoder reliability has been considered crucial to the validity of a content study, the choice among them has been controversial. This study analyzed all the content studies published in the two major communication journals that reported intercoder reliability, aiming to find how scholars conduct intercoder reliability test. The results revealed that some intercoder reliability indices were misused persistently concerning the levels of measurement, the number of coders, and the means of reporting reliability over the past 30 years. Implications of misuse, disuse, and abuse were discussed, and suggestions regarding proper choice of indices in various situations were made at last.
This authoritative text gives a comprehensive account of the European Union’s foreign policy. Moving beyond the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy, the authors demonstrate the scope and diversity of the EU’s foreign policy and show how areas such as trade, development, environment and energy are inextricable elements of it. The book examines the EU’s key foreign relations – with its neighbourhood, with the US, China and Russia, and with the emerging powers – and argues that the EU’s foreign policy needs to be understood not only as a response to crises and conflicts, but also as a means of shaping international structures and influencing long-term processes. Setting its analysis in historical context, this second edition has been updated throughout to take account of contemporary developments following the Lisbon Treaty, and will continue to be an invaluable guide to understanding EU foreign policy.
Contents:
Introduction
1. The Nature of EU Foreign Policy
2. European Integration and Foreign Policy: Historical Overview
3. The EU's Foreign Policy System: Actors
4. The EU's Foreign Policy System: Policy-making
5. EU Foreign Policy and National Foreign Policy
6. Key Issues in EU Foreign Policy
7. The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)
8. The Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)
9. Trade, Development and Other External Action
10. The External Dimension of Internal Policies
11. EU Foreign Policy towards its Neighbourhood
12. Competition with Major Powers: The US, Russia, China, Emerging Powers and Islamism
13. The EU and Multilateral Organizations
Conclusions: Theorizing EU Foreign Policy
This paper presents a game-theoretical analysis of European Union (EU) trade policy and the Lisbon Treaty’s impact on it. Specifically, it develops spatial models of the EU’s international trade negotiations process, and analyzes the European Parliament’s increased involvement in it as a result of the introduction of the Parliamentary consent requirement for international trade agreements. We find that the Council’s right to set a negotiating mandate in trade negotiations is equivalent to an amendment right, and that the Commission’s right to propose a negotiating mandate to the Council is comparable to a monopoly proposal right in the negotiation process with the trade partner. We further conclude that the Parliament’s enhanced role limits the Commission’s ability to set policy and conclude negotiations. Even though it represents a domestic constraint for the Commission, the Parliament’s involvement does not reinforce the Commission’s bargaining position in international negotiations. The Commission can use the negotiating mandate to improve its bargaining position instead.
Privatization and deregulation have created the conditions for the rise of the regulatory state to replace the dirigiste state of the past. Reliance on regulation ‐ rather than public ownership, planning or centralised administration — characterises the methods of the regulatory state. This study examines the growth of regulation in Europe, at the national and Community levels. It stresses the advantages of this mode of policy making, but also recognises its problems. It is suggested that political accountability can be ensured by a variety of substantive and procedural controls, among which judicial review is especially important. Executive oversight and co‐ordination may be improved by using new tools of public management like the regulatory budget or the regulatory clearing house.
The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) has generated considerable interest among European policy scholars. This article summarizes some of the more important findings concerning, and changes to, the ACF since the last major revision in 1993. These include: (1) a much clearer model of the individual; (2) a clearer, more integrated concept of ‘policy subsystem;’ (3) much greater attention to the problematic nature of collective behavior among people who share policy beliefs; and (4) some suggestions concerning methods of ascertaining the existence and membership of advocacy coalitions. The article also briefly addresses the ACF's applicability to parliamentary systems, to the countries of Eastern Europe, and to the dynamic politics of the European Union.
I focus on the role of case studies in developing causal explanations. I distinguish between the theoretical purposes of case studies and the case selection strategies or research designs used to advance those objectives. I construct a typology of case studies based on their purposes: idiographic (inductive and theory-guided), hypothesis-generating, hypothesis-testing, and plausibility probe case studies. I then examine different case study research designs, including comparable cases, most and least likely cases, deviant cases, and process tracing, with attention to their different purposes and logics of inference. I address the issue of selection bias and the “single logic” debate, and I emphasize the utility of multi-method research.
Statistical studies often show public opinion strongly affecting public policy. But the studies may overestimate the effect
because they focus on issues — those especially important to the public — on which governments are most likely to be responsive.
This article considers what the opinion-policy linkage would be if less-important issues were also considered, by examining
a random sample of proposals addressed by the U.S. Congress. Opinion has considerably less impact in the random sample than
in the statistical studies. But this does not mean that the public is being defeated by special interests. On many issues,
the public has no meaningful opinions; organized interests, therefore, can win without the public losing.