This paper is looking at European environmental policy from the "second image reversed" perspective. Specifically, it investigates the conditions under which we see administrative change in the EU member states as a consequence of the implementation of EU environmental policies. We adopt a...

AbstractThis paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about the scope for autonomous action of supranational organizations in the European Union, focussing on the European Commission. In the literature, the independence of the Commission is frequently questioned, while the relative autonomy...

This article aims to provide a better understanding as to why different institutional arrangements have the particular structural properties which they are found to have. Drawing on the system theoretical tradition in sociology and on ‘complexity theory’, this paper presents an analytical...

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...

Uneven implementation of Community law across the European Union is common practice. Differences in implementation of EU directives differences in degree of domestic adjustment are, according to variables identified in the Europeanization literature, to be explained by variations in the degree...

Theory: The adoption of EC secondary legislation can be analyzed from the perspective of agency theory whereby Member States and the Parliament delegate policy authority to the Commission and design ex-post control procedures (i.e. Comitology). Rational choice and sociological institutionalisms...

This paper sets up two competing frameworks to assess the evidence of the CAP reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. The two frameworks differ in the degree of prominence given to interest groups in affecting CAP decisions. The paper concludes that the most important mechanism behind CAP reforms is the...

The article explores the effects of non-regulatory EC policies on policy development at member state level. Taking EC regional policy and a recent reform of German regional policy as examples, it is suggested that the EC context may matter for policy development (1) through changing preferences...

Utilising the theoretical framework of discursive institutionalism, this article investigates the problem of policy incoherence. We suggest focusing on the micro-level of policy-shaping processes through the lenses of discursive institutionalism as it is the most suitable approach to study the...