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...

This article contributes to the debate on technocratic governance in the European Union. It examines the relationship between scientific expertise and policy-making in the foodstuffs sector and scrutinises the hypothesis that the European Commission follows a technocratic model in the food...

The salience of European issues to the general public is a major determinant of the domestic legitimacy demands that governments face when they devise their European policies. The higher the salience of these issues, the more restrictive will be the legitimacy demands that governments have to...

The paper addresses the issue of the commercial reuse of public sector information (PSI) and analyzes from a comparative perspective various reuse regimes to be considered by national legislators. Directive 2003/98/EC provides at the EU level the policy context in which the Member States operate...

Comitology committees are often accused of not being accountable. This paper aims to provide building blocks to analyze the validity of this claim. After briefly discussing the meaning and aims of accountability, it is discussed where the actual accountability problems can be expected....

The European Council occupies a central role in European politics. Yet it is not officially accountable to any public or parliamentary body for the decisions it makes on behalf of European citizens. National parliaments are only entitled to exert control over their own Heads of Government or...