Abstract Lobbying by economic actors constitutes a central element of a large part of the literature on trade policy-making. However, it is mainly considered as input into the political system, which then aggregates the demand of different societal interests. As such inputs, the preferences of...

Abstract AbstractThis paper reflects on the literature on courts and politics in Europe and the United States. US-American Political Science has dealt for over fifty years with the role of courts and judges as political actors, whereas this perspective has only recently emerged in Europe. The...

Abstract Treaty changes at the Amsterdam summit (1997) established employment policy as an official part of EU policy. European institutions not only gained influence in a policy area that formerly had been a national prerogative but, furthermore, the "open method of coordination" was introduced...

Attempts to explain the "rise of East Asia" often neglect transnational and regional aspects. After analyzing transnational political and economic processes in and beyond the region, the paper concludes that East Asia, in comparison with other conceptualizations of regions (Southeast Asia,...

Abstract Analyses of European integration processes are still dominated by the dichotomous debate between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism. Sides are often taken in this debate based on very case-specific empirical findings. An analysis of two cases, European telecommunications and...

AbstractThe complexity of the multi-level European polity is not adequately represented by the single-level theoretical concepts of competing intergovernmentalist and supranationalist approaches. By contrast, empirical research focusing on mul-tilevel interactions tends either to emphasize the...