This article extends United States-European Union (EU) comparative research to the area of grants-in-aid by comparing the evolution of federally funded ‘‘city welfare'' in the two political systems in light of an original institutionalist theory. I show that while the United States and the...

Europe's woes mark a new chapter in the longstanding theory/history nexus in European studies. The euro crisis has brought integration theory back onto the scholarly agenda and highlighted the value of neo-functionalism – and more precisely its key ‘spillover' mechanism – as a framework...

It is widely acknowledged that a key cause of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)'s longevity is its feedback effect on federal policy making via the creation of a large coalition of beneficiaries. Much less is known about the ‘‘microfoundations'' of this self-perpetuating logic,...

This article contributes to the research on the normalization of European Union (EU) studies by presenting an analysis and assessment of the EU-US comparative literature. Using an original and comprehensive data set of 104 publications, it shows not only that these comparisons have grown...

EU-US comparisons have proliferated in the past two decades or so. Yet by and large this scholarship so far has proceeded without a serious reflection on its own nature, raison d’être, and key characteristics — a lack of ‘self-awareness’ which in turn hampers mutual communication and...

Transnational networks of local authorities are an established and growing phenomenon in Europe, where they perform a number of (soft) governance functions for their membership, often in direct connection with EU institions. This paper examines networks from the angle of institutional...