Current approaches to the understanding of institutional change in the European Union have difficulty in understanding how intergovernmental bargaining and day-to-day institutional change interact. This article develops a theoretical framework to understand this interaction, and applies it to...

Current approaches examining the effect of institutions on policy processes have difficulty in explaining the results of the legislative process of codecision between European Parliament and Council within the European Union. The formal Treaty changes which gave rise to codecision have in turn...

Current research on the main bodies of the European Union (Council, Commission, Parliament) tends to concentrate either on relations within these bodies, or on relations between them. The result is that little attention is paid to how these two intersect; that is, to how changes in relations...

With increasing fragmentation of worldwide production chains and the corresponding contracting relations between companies, the firm as an inspector" has become a frequent phenomenon. Buyer firms deploy supervising activities over their suppliers' products and production processes in order to...

With regulation seeking to foster competition at the same time as also having to protect essential services, the authors investigate regulatory styles, costs of new regulatory functions and how firms in the new regulatory landscape access and influence regulatory authorities. The authors...

Although the goal of market integration has not actually been challenged in recent years, it has nevertheless increasingly come to be considered incomplete and in need of complementary goals which serve the general interest by promoting social cohesion and equality. The debate has been conducted...