Ten Central European countries became members of the European Union in the years 2004 - 2007. They constitute 20% of the EU's total population; and even though their economic output is much lower, it rises dynamically. New members' impact on the EU policies has nevertheless been limited. This is...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...

The research agenda of Europeanization is currently highly focused on issued related to what accounts for the 'horizontal' interaction between domestic actors and how these actors make use of stimuli originating from the EU. This paper aims to contribute to this line of inquiry through the case...

This paper employs the methodology of constitutional political economy to examine the definition of citizenship, and the delineation of the rights that accompany citizenship. The concepts developed are then applied to the question of how rights and citizenship should be defined in the European...

This paper examines how neutral the current EU decision-making procedures are to membership and how well they obey certain transparent general constitutional principles. The paper evaluates the performance of the procedures by strategic and classical power indices. The main emphasis in the...

Most of the EU budget is spent on redistribution. Large sums of money are transferred from the member state governments to Brussels and back to these governments. Some member states end up as net receivers and some as net payers. Most economists agree that the resources of the budget should be...

The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful codecision makers , understanding of the final stage of the procedure...

In this paper, the introduction of direct-democratic decision-making in all EU decisions is considered when it is feasible without prohibitively increasing decision-making costs. We start with the contractarian argument that each constitution is a contract joining the citizens of a state and...

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act...

This article focuses on the role of labour market institutions in explaining different labour market developments in European countries, with a special attention to the new European Union member countries. This may allow us to analyse effects of various institutional setups and of their changes...