Abstract Europe’s ‘political space,’ its dimensionality and its impact on European policies have received increased academic attention lately. Yet, one very basic element of this political space, the party composition of EU member states’ governments, has never been studied in a...

AbstractThe paper begins with a welfare-theoretic proposition: Systems competition is likely to weaken the territorially limited power of the state vis-à-vis internationally mobile capital, firms and consumers. Even if these changes should unambiguously benefit consumer interests, interests...

AbstractThe quiet evolution of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) into a de facto decision-making body has received surprisingly little attention by integration researchers. Even less attention has been paid to the novel institutional form and underlying rationality of this...

Abstract Recent scholarship on the process of European integration emphasizes the struc-tural limits of positive integration. Against this background, the analysis of international environmental regimes promises to be illuminating. A closer look at three environmental regimes reveals that these...

Abstract Is communication conducive to cooperation? German students of international relations generally agree that the former is a crucial prerequisite of the latter. The aim of this paper is to show that this assumption is not universally valid. The effects of communication are more ambiguous...

Abstract AbstractThis paper reflects on the literature on courts and politics in Europe and the United States. US-American Political Science has dealt for over fifty years with the role of courts and judges as political actors, whereas this perspective has only recently emerged in Europe. The...

Attempts to explain the "rise of East Asia" often neglect transnational and regional aspects. After analyzing transnational political and economic processes in and beyond the region, the paper concludes that East Asia, in comparison with other conceptualizations of regions (Southeast Asia,...

AbstractTax competition poses two problems for international cooperation: defection and distributive conflict. Multilateral cooperation to stop tax competition may fail because states face incentives to renege on their promises or because they face adverse distributional consequences, either of...