This paper shows how the framing of complex policy issues on the EU legislative agenda influences the processing of political interests and ideas and their expression in policy choices. By tracing the policy-making process in the field of EU biotechnology over a twenty-year period, the analysis...

What is the explanatory potential of deliberative democracy? This paper analyses collective decision-making in a political context with reference to warrants , which explain the conversion from premises to conclusion and with reference to the deontological powers of status functions . The first...

The Treaty of Lisbon introduced the rise of common action capacities in EU’s external relations administration, notably the European External Action Service (EEAS). One essential capacity is staff resources. This paper analyses to what extent and under what conditions the recruitment practice...

The Treaty of Lisbon introduces an early warning mechanism (EWM) which empowers national parliaments to intervene directly at the EU-level; they may now raise objections to – and even play a role in blocking – EU legislation. The EWM represents a new model of parliamentary involvement in...

This article contributes to a growing international bureaucracy literature by exploring the relationship between bureaucratic structure and administrative behaviour. The ambition of this study is twofold: First, it explores the extent to which international bureaucracies combine two inherent...

The paper questions the fashionable ideas, that bureaucratic organization is an obsolescent, undesirable and non-viable form of administration, and that there is an inevitable and irreversible paradigmatic shift towards market- or network organization. In contrast, the paper argues that...

The fracture in the European Union during the Iraq war of 2003 threw into relief the fragile nature of the integration process, certainly so far as foreign and defence questions are concerned, and exposed once again the complexity of the EU as a communicative space. Although cultural-linguistic...

The EU’s administrative systems relies to a considerable extend on the delegation of executive tasks to the European Commission, which is in turn controlled in this task through a plethora of implementing committees – the so-called ‘comitology’ system. Considering the centrality of...

The EU’s foreign and security policy is often criticised for being undemocratic. The article addresses this contention from the perspective of deliberative democracy. The focus is on the procedural qualities of the second pillar decision-making processes as it is not only the quality of the...