Altneuland: The European Constitutional Terrain It is in many respects a New Land - for the first time the Union is openly, officially using the word Constitution in its formal self-understanding. But this, in turn, places it, at least lexically, in the age old terrain of constitutionalism which...

How can students of the European Union get from describing recent advances, to speculating about what are possible new directions and research agendas? How promising are terms such as “governance” and “the new governance” for improving the understanding how the Union is overned and...

This article investigates how the European Social Fund (ESF) is being employed to translate Lisbon/Europe 2020 goals on employment into domestic agendas. The emphasis is not only on how European priorities are taken into account by ESF national programming documents (talking the EU talk), but...

The most recent enlargement of the European Union, which incorporated post-communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), placed relatively little emphasis on the equal opportunities of men and women. However, acceding countries were required to implement Chapter 13 (‘Employment...

The aim of this paper is not only to assess whether the European Employment Strategy (EES) has had an impact on national labour market reforms, but to also evaluate the effects of partisan politics on the EES and vice versa. After establishing three causal mechanisms through which the EES may...

The paper presents a new approach to EU governance by stressing the interdependence of governance and integration. It suggests that EU governance is not just shaped by the emerging properties of the EU polity but has a strong impact both on system formation at national and European level. It is...

The European Commission (Commission) occupies a pivotal role as the key executive institution of the European Union (EU). Yet, the factual autonomy of the Commission remains largely unexplored, contributing to contradictory assessments of it. The ambition of this study is to reassess the...

The paper starts by discussing what I think most students of government hold to be the most characteristic features of development over the last couple of decades; namely ‘agencification’ and fragmentation of national governments. Interestingly, when dealing with the problems such a...

The subject of this paper is the institutional dynamics of the European University. How is this key institution affected by ongoing processes of European integration? What attempts are undertaken at the European level to build up institutional capacity in the areas of higher education and...

During the 1990s, Italian public administration laid the foundation of a new genre of independent agencies and authorities. Whether it represented a "revolution" for the Italian administrative system or just a formal change with few implications for administrative course of action is still not...