Individuals self-categorize within an international context, and this supranational identity shapes expectations for their own political system. Those individuals in post-Communist countries who believe that their country's primary international orientation should be towards the European Union...

The European Union’s ambitious Mediterranean policy has the declared goal of bringing about economic and political transformation by explicitly linking reform with rewards. Drawing on mechanism design theory, we argue that the EU’s Mediterranean policy has the potential to reveal...

Since the end of the Cold War, multilateral treaties have again become a central vehicle for international cooperation. In this article, we study states’ commitment to 76 multilateral treaties concluded between 1990 and 2005. The article offers a systematic account of present-day...

A framing experiment on the Europeanization of health care supports two assumptions derived from the ‘blame avoidance’ literature. The constrained perceptions assumption states that performance evaluations at different political levels have ‘zero-sum’ implications for...

To describe and explain legislative politics in the European Union and to assess its democratic quality we need to measure the political importance (salience) of legislative proposals. The existing literature uses several indicators to measure salience. This article compares measures of salience...

Why are some interest groups able to lobby political decisions successfully whereas others are not? This article suggests that the issue context is an important source of variation because it can facilitate or hamper the ability of interest groups to lobby decision-makers successfully. In order...

The article analyses how enlargements affect the speed of European Union (EU) decision-making. In line with rationalist theories of group choice, we argue that enlargements increase the costs of organizing decisions, i.e. transaction costs. Increasing transaction costs, in turn, slow down EU...

This article analyses the role of the Commission in the European Union (EU). We present a game-theoretical model of two EU processes - Commission appointment and the adoption of legislation - and apply this model to the appointment of recent Commissions and their legislative programmes....

This article aims to evaluate the emerging patterns of decision-making in the European Union after the first Eastern enlargement through an analysis of voting positions in the Council of Ministers. By applying three methods (cluster analysis, factor analysis and Bayesian item-response...

Does income inequality increase political backlash against European and global integration? This paper reports research suggesting that it can. The article analyses party opposition to and support for trade openness, European Union integration and general internationalism of political party...