This essay is a renewed effort to overcome the schisms between lawyers and political scientists in their conceptualisations of the European integration project. The first effort was my contribution Das Recht im Prozeá der Europischen Integration to Markus Jachtenfuchs/Beate Kohler-Koch (eds.),...

Would an observer from an outside world look on the European Union the picture would be one of a obscure rag rug, an organisation monstrum simile, as Samuel Pufendorf put it with regard to the 17th-century Holy Roman Empire. Nevertheless to the great surprise of this obeserver (and not only to...

European legislation is an often studied topic of research into decision rules, since it provides for a large number of different rules and the interaction of different voting bodies. However, research on European Integration concentrates on the choice rather within than of rules. Relative...

A country’s form of government has important economic and political consequences, but the determinants that lead societies to choose either parliamentary or presidential systems are largely unexplored. This paper studies this choice by analyzing the factors that make countries switch from...

A country’s form of government has important economic and political consequences, but the determinants that lead countries to choose either parliamentary or presidential systems are largely unexplored. This paper studies this choice by analyzing the factors that make countries switch from...

Altneuland: The European Constitutional Terrain It is in many respects a New Land - for the first time the Union is openly, officially using the word Constitution in its formal self-understanding. But this, in turn, places it, at least lexically, in the age old terrain of constitutionalism which...

The latest series of European summits leaves us with a puzzle: on the one hand, they hint at a development of the EU towards an "ever closer Union", on the other hand, they reveal a "piecemeal culture", provoking critique and the demand for an encompassing institutional reform proposal. Among...

Based on an interpretation of the European Union (EU) as a compound democracy, thisarticle argues that the constitutionalisation of the European Union is necessarily acontested process.. A compound democracy is defined as a union of states constituted byunits of different demographic size,...

The Convention appears to many as both a confirmation of the thesis of the new institutionalism on the value of institutions for shaping the outcome of constitutional politics (the politics of creating EU fundamental rules) and a new model for democratic deliberative politics. From this second...