This article extends United States-European Union (EU) comparative research to the area of grants-in-aid by comparing the evolution of federally funded ‘‘city welfare'' in the two political systems in light of an original institutionalist theory. I show that while the United States and the...

The 2007 mainstreaming of URBAN raised important questions about the sustainability of its regeneration approach under the new regulatory regime, and particularly about the policy legacy left by this Community Initiative in its participating cities. Taking advantage of the recent conclusion of...

Europe's woes mark a new chapter in the longstanding theory/history nexus in European studies. The euro crisis has brought integration theory back onto the scholarly agenda and highlighted the value of neo-functionalism – and more precisely its key ‘spillover' mechanism – as a framework...

It is widely acknowledged that a key cause of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)'s longevity is its feedback effect on federal policy making via the creation of a large coalition of beneficiaries. Much less is known about the ‘‘microfoundations'' of this self-perpetuating logic,...

EU-US comparisons have proliferated in the past two decades or so. Yet by and large this scholarship so far has proceeded without a serious reflection on its own nature, raison d’être, and key characteristics — a lack of ‘self-awareness’ which in turn hampers mutual communication and...

Transnational networks of local authorities are an established and growing phenomenon in Europe, where they perform a number of (soft) governance functions for their membership, often in direct connection with EU institions. This paper examines networks from the angle of institutional...