Far-right forces emerged strengthened following the 2024 European Parliament elec­tions. Nonetheless, they still remain divided within the legislative body. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) made moderate gains and is now joined by the Patriots for Europe (PfE) and Europe of...

This paper aims at contributing to the empirical turn in deliberative theory, by analysing the presence of arguing and bargaining in the working groups of the Council of the EU. To what extent is arguing an important mode of decision-making in the Council, what circumstances make arguing more...

This study offers an organisation theory approach arguing that the differentiated organisatational constellation of the European Union contributes to a differentiated penetration of domestic government decision-making processes. It is argued that the European Commission mainly activates the...

This paper proposes to assess the representative quality of European Union decision-making by way of a micro-approach which traces the effectiveness of the mechanisms of representation that connect the European peoples to the decision-making process. In particular, it proposes to distinguish...

A comparison of the results of the six most recent Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs) in the European Union (EU) indicates that member governments' success in achieving substantial compromises based on issue linkages differs across cases. An examination of supranational and intergovernmental...

The paper makes an attempt to map the Copenhagen criterion of democracy and the rule of law, one of the main instruments governing the biggest enlargement in the Union history. The meaning of it, however, is still as vague today as it was more than ten years ago, at the time of introduction of...

In the second half of the nineties, a number of EU Member States went through intense public controversies over agro-food biotechnology. These controversies occurred almost synchronously, brought about parallel issue-framings and actor-constellations, led national governments to adopt...

The core argument of this article is that pre-negotiation matters. Policy problems are not just out there, but socially constructed. In order to comprehend the outcome of any negotiation it is therefore not sufficient just to look at the give and take at the actual bargaining table, but also at...

Traditionally clustered around one leading "hegemonic" world currency, with the introduction of the euro the international monetary regime might become a "symmetric" dipolar system. This fundamental change would come at a time of already considerable uncertainty when, after the Asian, Russian...

Starting from the assumption that the European Union’s (EU) common foreign and security policy (CFSP) will rely on a pre-dominantly intergovernmental governance setting for the foreseeable future, this paper focuses on alternative institutional options for conducting policy dialogue in such a...