The purpose of this collection is to discuss what we may learn from thinking about the EU in federal terms. Our point of departure is that this represents a two-fold challenge. It is on the one hand a matter of establishing ...

This paper attempts to define the EU system of government through an innovative approach that, taking into account both the legal framework and the political practice, focuses on the confidence relationship between the ...

The renewed emphasis on national political boundaries across Europe would seem to go hand-in-hand with a weaker external personality for the EU. However, there are several prominent examples of EU leadership that challenge ...

The study challenges the widespread assumption that the decision rule of ‘consensus’, whereby decisions are made by “tacit consent”, i.e. without voting and through the absence of open dissent, attributes veto power to ...

Individuals' role perceptions are central guides to their behavior and choices as members of an organization. Understanding organizational dynamics thus requires knowledge about the determinants of such role perceptions, ...

Acknowledging that both analysts and practitioners face problems of meaningful categorization of social order in general, and the European political-administrative system in particular, this article suggests a conceptual ...

This paper discusses the conditions for legitimate expert arrangements within a democratic order and from a deliberative systems approach. It is argued that standard objections against the political role of experts are ...

This paper discusses the role of state sovereignty in a just global order. The point of departure is two competing conceptions of global political justice: justice as non-domination and justice as impartiality. The former ...

Justifications for extending the Union’s boundaries to include new Member States have been much discussed. Only since the Brexit referendum have justifications for shrinking the Union’s boundaries through withdrawals of ...

This review article, with a clear political science and public administration bias, takes stock of the existing literature on EU agencies and suggests a future research agenda. The article reviews studies on EU agencies' ...

Can a directly elected European Parliament help deliver standards by which the European Union can be indirectly legitimated through its component national democracies? This article argues that the Union can be indirectly ...

The European Union (EU) is the world’s biggest donor of aid to developing countries. The provision of EU aid is conditional on respect for human rights and democratic principles in the recipient countries. This article ...

Commissions appointed to examine and propose solutions to major policy problems play a vital role in policy formulation in the Nordic countries. Whereas existing accounts emphasize the corporatist and statist features of ...

Europe has been badly hit by several overlapping crises. This article explores how they were triggered by and, in turn, aggravated a structural crisis of European law. It spells out the concrete implications of ‘austerity’ ...

This study deals with the German Federal Government’s approach of ensuring public support for its ‘Energiewende’, the swift and complete transition to an energy system based on renewable sources. First, the government’s ...

A curious interconnectedness/consent conundrum marks today's world. Whereas states and societies are becoming more closely interconnected, increased proximity need not increase popular acceptance of federal democracy. ...

Studies show that public administrations that practise merit-based recruitment of their personnel are significantly less marked by corruption than administrations that do not recruit in this manner. While we know a lot ...

Since its inception, the European Union has proclaimed an ambition to promote values and justice at the global level. In this paper, I discuss how we can assess a foreign policy that has such an ambition. There is no common ...

The Eurocrisis has generated a deep and ongoing politicization of the EU within and across national public spheres, fuelling age-old and new political and social conflicts, which in turn shape public perceptions of crisis ...

A resilient actor is one with the capacity to recover from setbacks and obstacles, whether stemming from endogenous or exogenous factors. Beyond actual recovery, this article argues that there is also an important perceptional ...

The Defence and Security Procurement Directive (DSDP) is the first supranational policy in the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and represents a departure from the standard understanding of the CSDP as intergovernmental. ...

This study focuses on the epistemic quality of the policy expertise that is generated by stakeholder advisory bodies. Bringing together science and technology studies, deliberative democratic theory and social epistemology, ...

This study shows how the EU’s new Common Foreign and Security policy (CFSP) administration – the European External Action Service (EEAS) – experienced early organisational settlement. We find that the EEAS acts relatively ...

As an area of research, specifying crucial conditions under which international public administration (IPA) may enjoy independence from member-state governments has become an increasingly vibrant research area. This ...

One of the key motives behind recent reforms of the EU's legislative process has been to increase efficiency. This study examines whether the Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon treaties have successfully increased the speed with ...

The concept of global justice implies that there are principles of justice with a global reach – that is, that the conditions of justice have been globalised in one way or another. Reconsidering European Contributions to ...

The bureaucratic arms of modern international organizations increasingly consist of staff with ambiguous organizational affiliations. This article analyses the implications of this trend from the perspective of representative ...

Expert advice in political processes is supposed to improve decisions. If expertise fails in this function, a legitimacy problem occurs: granting political power to experts may be defensible, but only on the grounds that ...

The vast majority of existing studies on bureaucratic representation focus on bureaucracies’ permanent and internal staff. Yet, the rising sophistication of modern democracies and the technocratization of political life ...

This article examines the cases of the European Defence Agency (EDA) and EU Intelligence Analysis Centre (IntCen) to argue that although they are comprised of high-level security experts, they do not constitute epistemic ...

The elaborate system of expert groups that the European Commission organises is a key feature of EU everyday governance and also a potential channel of societal involvement in EU policy making. This article examines the ...

Expertise has played a pivotal role in EU executives since the European Union (EU) was established, but its significance is arguably increasing and takes on new shapes. This issue explores the role and use of expert knowledge ...

The European Commission has faced increasing criticism that its use of expertise in policy-making is undemocratic and politicized. In response to critics, the Commission has produced a number of publicly available documents ...

Few attempts have been made to develop a systematic normative analysis of where differentiated integration may need justification, and by what standards. This contribution argues that differentiated integration should be ...

The participation of the public in framing and debating the news has added a new layer in the making of European Union contestation and the European public sphere, traditionally driven by journalists and political elites. ...

How, if at all, does the Commission’s expertise inform intergovernmental decision-making within the EU? In this article, we aim to capture the relationship between the Commission’s expertise and its influence within ...

What could be the legitimation basis of the European Union (EU)? This article questions the idea of two constitution-making subjects in the EU and claim there is and can only be one constituting subject even in a multilevel ...

In this article, we confront some commonly held assumptions and objections with regard to the feasibility of deliberation in a transnational and pluri-lingual setting. To illustrate our argument, we rely on an analysis of ...