The aim of this paper is to understand how decision making processes within the EU comes to affect the structures for national policy making within the employment field. The paper addresses the question of how the process of writing new employment guidelines for the EES – European employment...

Analysing the distribution of power among political actors is at the heart of political science. I propose a way of analysing changes to the institutional equilibrium of the EU institutions as well as changes in the relationship between the supranational level and the member states from a...

This contribution tries both to assess the impact of the European Union on France and to discuss the rich literature on that topic originating both from EU studies, opinion studies, public policy analysis and institutional analysis. France’s relationship with the EU appears paradoxical given...

Although they have formerly constituted distinct traditions in the European integration process, EU regulatory activities in environmental and energy policy have now become highly interwoven. Environmental concerns increasingly influence the formulation of the EU’s energy policy, especially...

Environmental concerns have played a key role for institutionalizing energy policy at the level of the European Union. There is thus a tendency in research literature to assume that the objectives of these cognate policy areas are compatible and mutually reinforcing. There have been only few...

Most studies of the EU and its member-states are concerned with how processes of European integration hit the member-states. This article shifts emphasis from this top-down towards a bottom-up approach and asks whether and how differences in domestic institutional constellations shape the...

Transposition research provides an excellent opportunity to bring new data to bear on two of the most dominant theoretical approaches to European Union studies: rational choice institutionalism and sociological institutionalism. Yet the goal of comparable testing is hampered by the...

The reallocation of authority upwards, downwards, and sideways from central states has drawn attention from a growing number of scholars in the social sciences. Yet beyond the bedrock agreement that governance has become (and should be) multi-level, there is no convergence about how it should be...

The creation of an EU-level regulatory regimes for telecommunications and electricity was a highly successful political initiative of the European Commission. In promoting market liberalization for telecommunications (a key sector in the creation of the information economy) and electricity (one...

The national parliaments in Austria, Finland, and Sweden faced similar challenges as regards to parliamentary participation in EU affairs when their countries became EU members in 1995. They chose different institutional frameworks, where in Austria the respective legal provisions were...