In contrast to parliamentary systems, the Council of Ministers, the main legislative body of the European Union, consists of different formations in which national ministers with similar sectoral portfolios participate. This decision-making structure has led to a loss of coherence . In this...

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...

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...

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...

We study the impact of political knowledge on the attitudes of European citizens towards the possible distribution of responsibilities between European level institutions and national governments in three policy areas: foreign policy, defence and immigration policy. The hypothesis tested is that...

Employing a wide range of individual-level surveys, we study the extent of cultural and institutional heterogeneity within the EU and how this changed between 1980 and 2008. We present several novel empirical regularities that paint a complex picture. While Europe has experienced both systematic...

Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period (1848 - 2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held on the same day, constituents are more likely to refer...