In democratic societies, legal procedures are to ensure legally correct and rationally acceptable decisions, i.e. decisions that can be defended both in relation to legal statutes and in relation to public criticism. But can the legal system via the discretion of the judges itself really...

Case studies indicate that national governments may be partly split so that national (regulatory) agencies operate in a ‘double-hatted’ manner, serving both ministerial departments and the European Commission. Applying large-N questionnaire data this paper follows up these studies by...

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....

Laeken has ushered in the first continent-wide debate, on the issue of a European constitution. An important question is whether this amounts to Europe’s constitutional moment in a critical normative sense. To address this we first distil out five core lessons from the Laeken experience. This...

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...

Is the European Research University going to be a historical parenthesis? The question has been raised, yet there is no agreed-upon answer, and this article aims at providing a framework for making sense of the current dynamics of the University. The key issue is: What kind of university and...

This study examines party contestation over Europe in mediated public discourses across seven countries: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and non-EU Switzerland. It uses an original and new type of data on party claims-making, drawn from media sources, to test leading...

The EU is frequently understood as a special kind of governance system characterized by its strong degree of interpenetration of different levels of government and a plethora of interactions between EU institutions, administrations from national and subnational levels, as well as organized...

The debate about the legitimacy of the EU and the possibilities of its democratisa-tion has so far only rarely addressed the question of the role of the media. An in-strumental approach pre-vails towards the media acknowledging that the so-called gap between the EU and its citizens is grounded...