Based upon existing fiscal federal arrangements, this article considers the options facing the European Union to reform its own framework. There are two plausible ways the EU can stabilize the finances of its member states over the longer term. The first is to take steps that complement the...

Against democratic deficits of European Union (EU) governance, recent literature emphasizes the communicative function of national parliaments. Yet, arguments from the broader EU politicization literature have been only rarely applied to public parliamentary debates. This article integrates...

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...

Making interventions during negotiations within the Council of Ministers is the primary way in which member states make their policy positions known to one another and attempt to influence negotiations. In spite of this, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the factors that...

This article introduces the ‘Positions and Salience in European Union Politics’ dataset. The dataset comprises positional and salience estimates of more than 250 parties and governments in the European Union (EU). These estimates, which all come with measures of uncertainty, pertain to 10...

This article analyses the dimensionality and nature of political conflict in the European Union Council of Ministers between 1998 and 2007. By comparing policy platforms of member state governments, multidimensional scaling techniques are employed to make inferences about the dimensionality of...

In the US context, research on ambivalence has established that individuals often simultaneously possess positive and negative considerations on a political object. Yet little is known about ambivalence in support for European integration. This article proposes a measure that distinguishes...

Underlying several theories of European integration is the idea that countries' willingness to sign up to supranational rules is dependent on the expectation and/or realization of various benefits. In this paper, we explore whether such benefits also affect member states' implementation of these...

This article summarizes and extends the main lines of theorizing on public opinion on European integration. We test theories of economic calculus and communal identity in a multi-level analysis of Eurobarometer data. Both economic calculus and communal identity are influential, but the latter is...

Our model suggests that national political, economic and cultural dimensions have to be taken into account when explaining support for European Union (EU) membership among the Swiss electorate. Using data from the first Eurobarometer survey in Switzerland (1999), we empirically test our model...