On the basis of a brief reconstruction of the causes and impacts of the Euro crisis, this paper explores, counterfactually and hypothetically, whether the new Euro regime, insisting on fiscal austerity and supply-side reforms, could have prevented the rise of the crisis or is able to deal with...

During the 1990s, a consensus consolidated among policy makers and economists worldwide regarding the desirability of very low inflation targeting. So far, this process has been explained on the basis of a domestic-functional thesis, according to which commitment to very low inflation provides...

Research on Europeanization and domestic change has moved south-eastwards and was provided with another real-world experiment when it has meet with Turkey. This paper explores to what extent Europeanization approaches travel to Turkey, which does have a membership perspective that looks,...

This paper suggests that the basic distinction between federal and unitary government has limited as well as served our understanding of government. The notion that variation in the structure of government is a difference of kind rather than degree has straight-jacketed attempts to estimate the...

What lives in the European Commission at the beginning of the 21st Century? This paper charts Commission officials’ views on the governance, ideological direction, and policy scope of the European Union, employing data from a large survey conducted in Autumn 2008. First, the Commission is not...

The EU seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Western Balkan countries in order to foster peace, stability and prosperity in the region ridden by war and ethnic conflict. Unlike in case of the Mediterranean and Newly Independent States, the EU has even offered its South Eastern...

Environmental policy has become an important area of European Union (EU) policy making, even though it had not originally been foreseen in the Treaty of Rome. Its emergence in the early 1970s can be understood as a result of a transfer of the novel policy idea of the environment to the European...

The EU’s Eastern Enlargement is considered to be one of the (few) successful experiments of promoting good – both effective and legitimate – governance. By contrast, the EU’s transformative power appears to be weak or non-existent vis-à-vis its (old) neighbors in the South and its (new)...

Why is regulatory convergence towards EU rules more successful in some policy fields than in others within one EU neighboring country? By comparing Ukraine’s convergence towards EU rules in the field of shareholders’ rights and technical standards, I challenge prominent explanations for...

Despite theoretical and methodological progress in what is now coined as the third generation of diffusion studies, explicitly dealing with the causal mechanisms underlying diffusion processes and comparatively analyzing them is only of recent date. As a matter of fact, diffusion research has...