This article is about democratic accountability and a Europe struggling to find viable answers to the questions of who and what shall constitute “Europe” and how to develop legitimate political institutions for governing ...

How can we understand the role of secrecy in the making of the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)? This article analyses the nature of secrecy and questions some of the main assumptions surrounding ...

At first glance, one might view the political differentiation in the European Union as a reflection of the autonomy of its member states, signifying flexibility and the dispersion of democratic control. However, under ...

The European Union’s foreign and security policy is commonly described as an intergovernmental affair. Despite limited formal powers, several studies suggest that the European Parliament has increased its influence on the ...

The question posed in this article is how to explain that the governance of secrecy in EU external relations varies. While the Common Foreign and Security Policy appears to retain its secretive character, the EU’s external ...

What is the role of secrecy in crafting EU foreign policy? This paper analyzes the concept of secrecy in governance, and argues that to some degree secrecy is of functional necessity for policy-makers. Despite common ...

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 article sets out three ambitions: First, it argues in favor of adopting “turbulence” as a conceptual device for understanding governance in times of dynamic interactive change. Second, the article distinguishes three ...

Preserving the trust of bond markets is crucial for the world's many indebted countries, but it is still unclear when and how national or international actors can contribute to this goal. We present a set of arguments ...

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 ...

Contemporary governance relies extensively and increasingly on academic expertise. This expertise dependency is intimately related to the technological and regulatory complexity and level of specialization of modern society. ...

This article develops a standard for evaluating how parliaments can contribute to the legitimacy of the European semester. It then uses that standard to identify where national parliaments may be able to oversee the semester ...

Recent work on digital political engagement has extensively shown that social media platforms enhance political participation and collective action. However, the idea that citizen voice through social media can give rise, ...

In the first part of the chapter, I discuss the role of digital media in crisis communication and identify the conditions under which social media can spearhead a shift in public communication dynamics. In the second part ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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’ ...

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 ...

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 ...

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' ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

ABSTRACT. This article shows how the substantive bias at the core of the present socio-economic constitution of the European Union is directly related to the characterization of economic freedoms (crucially, the right to ...

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 ...

Abstract In this article, we discuss the democratic conditions for parliamentary oversight in EU foreign affairs. Our point of departure is two Interinstitutional Agreements (IIAs) between the Council and the European ...

I denne oppgaven studeres den politiske prosessen knyttet til et direktivforslag for å forbedre kjønnsbalansen i europeiske bedriftsstyrer. Direktivforslaget ble fremmet av EU-kommisjonen høsten 2012 og har blitt vedtatt ...

In this chapter, we critically scrutinize two interrelated responses to the challenges of representative democracy: the new ideology of professionalism and the ideology of de-professionalised participation. Both variants ...

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 ...

From the opinion-swinging British tabloids which have become synonymous with anti-EU sentiment, especially during the ‘Brexit year’ of 2016, to the Commission’s Euromyths-busting service, dedicated to counteract Eurosceptic ...

Popular notions of democracy assume that citizens have policy preferences that can and should be reflected in public policy. Elections provide citizens with the opportunity to select representatives with whom they agree, ...

It is widely held that the EU suffers from a democratic deficit, but there is no agreement on the specific nature of the deficit. In this paper, I start by specifying the nature of the democratic-legitimacy problem facing ...

The purpose of this article is to show that federalism provides a better understanding of what the EU is, the nature of the challenges facing it, and the realm of possible solutions than do alternative conceptions such as ...

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 paper explores the shifting significance of accountability processes and why they sometimes attract considerable public attention and citizens’ involvement, whereas at other times they escape public notice. Accountability ...

Moral experts — people who presumably know more about moral issues than others — play an important role in giving advice to governments on how to deal with ethical questions through ethics committees. The existence of these ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

The Lisbon Treaty gave the European Parliament (EP) considerable new powers in the field of external trade policy. This is puzzling, as there is little to support dominant explanations such as bargaining on the part of the ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

Do European Union (EU) administrative networks help to preserve executive power at the member state level, or centralize executive power at the EU level? This article examines how resource pooling takes place in the European ...

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 ...