Recent decades have seen a wave of institutional changes of the core democratic rules in advanced democracies. These changes include reforms of electoral systems, decentralization of power to sub-national governments, the creation or enhancement of direct-democratic institutions, a rise in...

VDSL Vectoring is a transmission technology over copper access line pairs enabling the transmission of higher bandwidth to the end customers, but harms the infrastructure based competition using physical unbundled copper lines. Thus regulators have to decide between infrastructure based...

On 25 March 2014 the European Court of Human Rights delivered a controversial judgment in a case on family reunion in Denmark, the Biao case. The applicants were a Danish national, Mr Ousmane Ghanian Biao, and his wife, a Ghanaian national, Mrs Asia Adamo Biao. They alleged that a refusal by the...

This paper explores the origins and the impact of political leadership: Why and how do political leaders emerge? And, once in charge, how do these leaders influence outcomes? What determines their success or failure? In order to answer these questions, the paper presents a theory of political...

The core right of EU citizenship is freedom of movement within the territory of the Union. But EU citizens who live in a member state other than their homeland cannot vote in the national elections of that country unless they first acquire its citizenship through naturalisation. In several...

Ethno-religious diversity is a fact of Western European cities and will grow and spread. Living in these locations today requires a respect for ‘difference’ as well as a sense of commonalities, these are required at the level of the local and the city but also at the level of the national. A...

The human right to freedom of religion (HRFR) at the international level is a deeply contested concept and is interpreted in radically different ways in the respective historical constitutional instruments of the US and Europe. It is, for example, embedded in the First Amendment of the American...

Proportional representation is often thought a democratic ideal. But whatever proportional representation's virtues in ordinary politics, it is poorly suited to sustaining democratic legitimacy in what might, speaking loosely, be called constitutional politics. Proportional representation may...

Building on MEP Andrew Duff’s proposal to create a limited pan-European constituency for electing representatives to the European Parliament, this paper argues that there are good reasons for believing that such an institution would better be built around national parties rather than...

Should South-Mediterranean economies continue their financial integration in the world economy, considering their current stance and in view of the experiences of developed economies with the global financial crisis? The economies of the North-African rim, that is Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia,...