With more than 400,000 trust evaluations, we examine inter-population trust in the European Union. We focus on social capital theory explanations in a context where European inhabitants from 20 countries rate trust in the populations of 27 other European countries and in their own national...

European Union scholars have used a variety of data sources to assess the contours of the EU interest community, including directories maintained by the European Commission and commercial directories of interest organizations active in Brussels. Scholars have typically relied on only one of...

Since the publication of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), scholarly interest in analysing the effectiveness and performance of education policy has risen again. The present article follows this path and presents the first empirical evaluation of the...

Forecasting plays an increasingly important role in the scientific study of European Union politics and in political science in general. This is because forecasts are not only indispensable for (political) actors who need to form expectations about future events, but can also be used to judge...

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...

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....

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...

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...

What effects do interest groups have on the democratization and legitimacy of the European Union (EU)? Interest groups can democratize the EU only to the extent that they do not replicate inequalities. We use a newly constructed database to look for inequalities: Are the big organizations in...

This paper studies the democratic deficit in the European Union (EU). It examines what constitutes a democratic deficit, analyzes whether there is one in the EU, and offers suggestions for a solution. I focus on the output of the legislative process and study whether policies deviate from those...