This paper attempts to explain why it was that the countries of the European Community came together to form a political union in the early 1990s. The explanations most often invoked to explain this process - those drawn from competing schools in international relations and federalism theory -...

This article examines neorealist and neofunctionalist theoretical approaches to the issue of defence and European integration, and specifically the prospects of adding a defence component to the European Union. It sets out the difference between the core assumptions on these issues and argues...

The Latin American, South European and, later, the Central and East European democratic transitions have led to a `revolution' in comparative politics. Instead of the polar notions of democracy and dictatorship, different types of `transitions' have emerged and democracy has appeared also as a...

Jan-Erik Lane and Sven Berg, and Manfred Holler and Mika Widgrén, agree that power index analysis of the EU cannot take into account its institutional structure. For us, this is a sufficient condition for its failure as a research program. Nonetheless, they go on to argue that power indices are...

The temptation to apply power indices to decision-making in the European Union should be resisted for two reasons. First, power index approaches either ignore the policy preferences of relevant actors in the EU or incorporate them in ways that generate unstable and misleading results. Second, no...

Laruelle and Widgrén (1998) have raised the question of whether the allocation of voting power in the EU is fair. This paper extends some of their results insofar as (1) it deals with the consequences if the square root rule - which is the basis for calculating fair shares of voting power - is...

The evaluation of formal models generates questions about the unit of analysis, the nature of the policy space and the kind of criteria to be applied for comparative testing. Do we study decision-making at the proposal level or do we explore the policy space of a set of proposals across multiple...

This article derives theoretical expectations about the importance of nonseparable preferences at EU treaty negotiations. It argues that member states’ positions on the degree of integration depend on the expected reform of the decision rule and vice versa. This nonseparability effect...