Scholarly debate on party-based Euroscepticism centers on the questions of how to define, measure and explain Euroscepticism. As a starting point, this paper observes that studies on Euroscepticism either focus on the positions of individual parties on issues of European integration or on the...

Establishing separate executive bodies of a confederation or of a nascent federation of states seems in many respects to be the ‘hard case’ of institution-building. This article argues that ‘agencification’ at the EU level is basically about increasing the potential for more uniform...

Against the backdrop of decades of public sector reforms in Europe, this essay aims to make sense of the processes through which institutions, democratic government included, achieve and lose autonomy or primacy and why it is difficult to find a state of equilibrium between democratic government...

The role of national legislatures in European integration first received serious attention in the mid-1990s in connection with debates on the EU’s democratic deficit. After that, both academics and politicians have entered a lively debate on how to best involve national parliaments in EU...

Previous studies have shown that agencification tends to undermine political control within a government portfolio. However, doubts have been raised as regards the robustness of these findings. In this paper we document that agency officials pay significantly less attention to signals from...

Abstract: In Europe the public role of the religions appears to be directly proportional to the fall in trust in the procedural mechanisms at the basis of the liberal democracies. Compared to the strong identities attributed to the United States and to the Islamic world Europe is accused of...

Abstract: This paper develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of hard and soft law that is drawn in part from recent work in the field of international relations. We examine the literature on the role of soft law, noting that scholars have approached this phenomenon in very different...

Abstract: The paper looks into the slow and at times controversial process of ‘Europeanising’ the Italian legal system, in order to exemplify how adaptation to changes takes place within entire branches of the state administration. Three examples are selected, all within the domain of labour...

Abstract: The European Union’s quest for democratic and legitimate governance, together with an appropriately defined collective identity and boundaries did not start with the current enlargement process. The Union’s search for its finalité politique and collective identity, however, will...

Abstract: The creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994 with its streamlined and highly automatic system of dispute settlement has left open the question of whether we can identify a theory of its legal system. This article posits the idea that such a theory can be discerned if we...