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This book analyzes the development of the European Parliament's (EP) committees and their relationship with national political parties in the light of the EP's increased legislative role over the last three decades. The book argues that national parties have a greater incentive to care about what goes on in the EP given the growth in its legislative power. Because most of the EP's detailed legislative work takes place in its committees, national parties should be concerned about their involvement with the EP's committee system. Based on extensive original research, this book shows how the EP's committees have changed over time in response to legislative empowerment and analyzes how national parties and individual MEPs use the committee system to further their policy goals. The book makes a theoretical contribution by providing an explanation for the variation in powers of committees between separated and fused systems of government and by adapting theories of legislative organization developed in the context of the US Congress, to the EP. The European Parliament's Committees will be of interest to students and scholars studying the European Parliament, EU institutions, policy-making, and the development of legislatures and political parties.

Over the past half-century, Europe has experienced the most radical reallocation of authority that has ever taken place in peace-time, yet the ideological conflicts that will emerge from this are only now becoming apparent. The editors of this 2004 volume, Gary Marks and Marco Steenbergen, have brought together a formidable group of scholars of European and comparative politics to investigate patterns of conflict that are arising in the European Union. Using diverse sources of data, and examining a range of actors, including citizens, political parties, members of the European Parliament, social movements, and interest groups, the authors of this volume conclude that political contestation concerning European integration is indeed rooted in the basic conflicts that have shaped political life in Western Europe for many years. This comprehensive volume provides an analysis of political conflict in the European Union.

What is the optimum size of government? And how does it relate to economic growth? Indeed, how do we measure it? This book explores the growing economic power of government across the EU and offers an insightful analysis of public sector dynamics and the shortcomings of official statistics.

This book was first published in 2004. Under what conditions, in what ways, and with what effects do actors engage in politics with respect to, rather than merely within, political institutions? Using multiple methods and original data, Procedural Politics develops a theory of everyday politics with respect to rules - procedural politics - and applies it to European Union integration and politics. Assuming that actors influence maximizers, it argues and demonstrates that the jurisdiction ambiguity of issues provides opportunities for procedural politics and that influence-differences among institutional alternatives provide the incentives. It also argues and demonstrates that procedural politics occurs by predictable means (most notably, involving procedural coalition formation and strategic issue-definition) and exerts predictable effects on policymaking efficiency and outcomes and long-run institutional change. Beyond illuminating previously under-appreciated aspects of EU rule governance, these findings generalize to all rule-governed political systems and form the basis of fuller accounts of the role of institutions in political life.

This book poses two pertinent questions: First, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we empirically see it? Second, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we explain everyday decision‐making processes within it? The goal of this book is twofold: First, it identifies key institutional components of an emergent European Executive Order. The nucleus of this Order is the European Commission. The Commission, however, is increasingly supplemented by a mushrooming parallel administration of EU‐level agencies and EU committees. This book provides fresh empirical survey and interview data on the everyday decision‐making behaviour, role perceptions, and identities among European civil servants who participate within these institutions. In addition, this book reveals how an emergent European Executive Order profoundly penetrates the domestic branch of executive government. Secondly, this book claims and empirically substantiates that an emergent European Executive Order is a compound executive order balancing a limited set of key decision‐making dynamics. One message of this book is that an emergent European Executive Order consists of a compound set of supranational, departmental, epistemic, and intergovernmental decision‐making dynamics. Arguably, a compound European Executive Order transforms the inherent Westphalian order to the extent that intergovernmentalism is transcended and supplemented by a multidimensional mix of supranational, departmental, and/or epistemic dynamics. This book also theoretically explores conditions under which these decision‐making dynamics gain prevalence. It is argued that the decision‐making dynamics evolving within an emergent European Executive Order is conditioned by the formal organization of its composite parts and by the social interaction patterns that emerge among the civil servants. Political processes and political systems can neither be adequately understood nor explained without including the organization dimension(s) of executive orders.

A study of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's failed attempt to sell the European ideal to the British people. Based on an exhaustive survey of New Labour's foreign policy speeches after 1997 and interviews with policy-makers involved in the formulation of New Labour's foreign policy.

This book examines the present crisis of Greece’s political economy as a crisis of stateness, tackling the domestic as well as the international dimensions. It represents the first attempt by Greek academics to put forward a theoretically-informed, interdisciplinary analysis of Greece’s fiscal, economic, and political crisis. The approach aims to fill a major gap, combining insights from comparative politics, political economy, international relations theory, and legal-institutional analysis, in a theoretically informed account of the Greek case in comparative and theoretical perspective. The book tackles the issue of the possible next steps for the EU under the influence of the crisis of the eurozone, including a thorough analysis of national sovereignty seen from a domestic and an international point of view, focusing on critical processes in the international arena such as interdependency and dependency, while a legal-institutional chapter demonstrates the erratic way in which Greek government dealt with sovereign debt. The project comes at the right time in order to address a highly contentious chapter in the political development of the Greek state and of the European South. As the crisis in the eurozone’s weaker periphery unfolds, Lavdas, Litsas, and Skiadas use the Greek crisis in order to address a much larger and critical issue: the role and predicament of stateness in the developing EU.

This book traces the positions of national partisan actors towards the development of the European polity in an in-depth comparative analysis covering all member states of the European Union over a period of 60 years. The author examines the approach of the social democratic, radical left, liberal, Christian democratic and radical right party families, eliciting a comprehensive analysis of partisan positions on European integration. Demonstrating that attitudes and programmatic changes towards European integration must be understood both as the product of long-term ideological traditions and domestic opposition or incumbency-seeking strategies, this book examines how far common ideological traditions lead to the emergence of convergent European policies. Based on an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses political science, history and area studies, this book provides background and analysis, and develops theory in an open and accessible style that expands the understanding of party behaviour. Using party programmes and quantitative data, the book reveals considerable cross-family variations regarding the extent to which parties' genetic origins shape partisan responses to Europe. The Impact of European Integration on Political Parties will be of interest to students and scholars of European politics, European integration, comparative politics and political parties.

Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Utilising a principal-agent framework, it investigates who within the parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists. Drawing on original interviews with EU experts from Labour, the PS, the SPD and the Party of European Socialists (PES), as well as an e-mail questionnaire, this book reveals that European policy has remained in the hands of the party leadership. The study also suggests that the party grassroots are interested in the EU, but that interest rarely translates into influence. As regards the selection of EU specialists, this book highlights that the parties' processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.

Over recent years it has become increasingly clear that the European Union is falling short of its promise to enhance social cohesion across the continent. Welfare state modernization has been at the centre of divisive debates over the redistribution of wealth and imbalances between a wealthy European core and its peripheries. Some see the policies and governance of the EU as part of the problem, others rather as the solution. This book examines the key issues facing the EU’s social policy-making. Each chapter focuses on a single challenge and explores the arguments and considerations that coalesce around it. The book helps students and researchers alike to understand how the EU operates and shapes social policy on multiple levels, and to better assess the EU’s role in supporting social cohesion.