How do Commission officials conceive the Commission’s role in the European Union? Should the Commission be the government of Europe or the servant of member states? Is there a third possibility, the Community method, whereby Commission and member states share authority? This article lays out...

This section (1) presents three landmark articles that are part of a research agenda launched more than twenty years ago. Then, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life” invited a reappraisal of how political institutions could be conceptualized, to what degree...

Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years and is possibly experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and...

Who provides the European Union with information? Are these sources of information biased? Who are excluded and who are included? What can the informational bias tell us about decision making in the European Union? The paper examines patterns of participation in the large and organized expert...

This conceptual paper provides a working definition of politicisation of European integration, based on a literature review. Politicisation has often been used by political scientists interested in European integration. We observe that research using the concept is rarely interested in the...

The unequal access of interest organizations to the EU institutions is often associated with biased European politics. Nonetheless, systematic accounts of interest group access are rare. Rooted in the organizational theory of resource dependencies and drawing on a survey of 800 EU and national...

One key indicator of profound change in a Westphalian state order might be the extent to which cleavages are cross-cutting national borders. The kind of conflict structure found at the European level is supposed to be highly dependent upon the institutional architecture at that same level....

This paper examines evolutionary theories developed in the life sciences and explores the ways in which specific concepts and/or insights from these theories can be profitably applied to social and political institutions. First, we highlight Darwin’s fundamental insight that evolutionary...

Constructivist approaches to the study of Europe are trendy. Deliberation, discourses, norms, persuasion, socialization, identity, arguing – such concepts and terms are now frequently invoked in debates over the past and future of the European project. As I argue in this essay, however,...