In the presence of competing interest groups, this paper examines how the form of votebuying contracts affects policy outcomes. We study contracts contingent upon individual votes, policy outcomes, and/or vote shares. Voters either care about their individual votes, or about the policy outcome....

While most economists agree that seigniorage is one way governments finance deficits, there is less agreement about the political, institutional, and economic reasons for relying on it. This paper investigates the main determinants of seigniorage using panel data on about 100 countries, for the...

The aim of this paper is to understand how decision making processes within the EU comes to affect the structures for national policy making within the employment field. The paper addresses the question of how the process of writing new employment guidelines for the EES – European employment...

The European Commission plays a major role as regulator in the process of implementation of European legislation. Just looking at the figures of implementing measures one will find that the Commission adopts more than 2.500 such legal acts per year. As is well known the Commission is not alone...

A striking feature of the discourses surrounding the negotiations of Economic Partnership Agreements between the EU and developing states is the starkly contrasting pictures given of the role and nature of the EU. The Union is either portrayed as an angel, an actor with altruistic objectives,...

It is well known that EU citizenship is parasitic upon national citizenship. To become an EU citizen it is necessary to be a citizen of one of the Member States, and the states have exclusive competence to decide who their own citizens are. They therefore function as gatekeepers, and jealously...

The aim of this article is to analyse the development of the concepts of equal opportunities between men and women and gender mainstreaming with regard to a new policy approach taken outside the traditional community method and to raise the question to what extent these policy instruments can be...