Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic...

The Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) treaty signed at Maastricht does not guarantee the recreation of German-style economic policies and outcomes at the European Community (EC) level. Membership was not limited to countries that mimic the German commitment to price stability. National...

Many analysts associate internationalization of markets with wide-ranging changes in domestic politics. An “open polity” approach shows how extant domestic institutions mediate in this relationship between internationally induced changes in domestic actors' policy preferences, on the one...

Most intergovernmentalist analyses of European integration focus on treaty bargaining among European Union member governments. Recent articles also have examined everyday decision making through power index analysis, an approach that asserts that a government's ability to influence policy is a...

Heightened economic interdependence in recent years is commonly argued to have generated great pressures for convergence in economic policies across the advanced industrial democracies. Interdependence has clearly had a great impact on the types of economic policies that governments can pursue:...