Coping with Power Dispersion?


Book Description

The last decades have witnessed a significant shift in policy competencies away from central governments in Europe. The reallocation of competencies spans over three dimensions: upwards, sideways, and downwards. This collection takes the dispersion of powers as a starting point and seeks to assess how the actors involved cope with the new configurations. Chapters discuss the conceptualization of power dispersion and highlight the ways in which we add to this research agenda. Some general conclusions are also outlined, indicating future avenues of research. Taken together, the collection contributes answers to the challenge of defining and measuring – in a comparative way – the control and co-ordination mechanisms which power dispersion generates. In sum, the collection explores the tension between political actors' quest for autonomy and the acknowledgement of their interdependence whilst revealing how, as power dispersion deepens, central governments have sought to both manage and limit it. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.




Managing Interdependencies in Federal Systems


Book Description

Intergovernmental councils have emerged as the main structures through which the governments of a federation coordinate public policy making. In a globalized and complex world, federal actors are increasingly interdependent. This mutual dependence in the delivery of public services has important implications for the stability of a federal system: policy problems concerning more than one government can destabilize a federation, unless governments coordinate their policies. This book argues that intergovernmental councils enhance federal stability by incentivizing governments to coordinate, which makes them a federal safeguard. By comparing reforms of fiscal and education policy in Australia, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, this book shows that councils’ effectiveness as one of federalism’s safeguards depends on their institutional design and the interplay with other political institutions and mechanisms. Federal stability is maintained if councils process contentious policy problems, are highly institutionalized, are not dominated by the federal government, and are embedded in a political system that facilitates intergovernmental compromising and consensus-building.




Speaking With a Single Voice


Book Description

Under what conditions does the internal cohesiveness of the European Union determine its external effectiveness on the world stage? This book asks this question, investigating the frequent political assumption that the more cohesive the EU presents itself to the world, the more effective it is in achieving its goals. Contributions to this book explore this theory from a range of perspectives, from trade to foreign policy, and highlight complex patterns between internal cohesiveness and external effectiveness. These are simplified into three possible configurations: internal cohesiveness has a positive impact on external effectiveness; internal cohesiveness has no impact on external effectiveness; and internal cohesiveness has a negative impact on external effectiveness. The international context in which the EU operates, which includes the bargaining configuration and the policy arena, functions as an intervening variable that helps us to explain variation in these causal links. The book also launches a research agenda aimed at explaining these patterns more systematically and determining the marginal impact of cohesiveness on effectiveness. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.




With, Without, Or Against the State?


Book Description

This volume analyses and identifies the pattern of interaction between state and sub-state EU interest representation in Brussels and reveals the determinants of those patterns.




Fiascos in Public Policy and Foreign Policy


Book Description

The collection brings together scholars from Public Policy and Foreign Policy to address the theme of policy fiascos. So far research on failure and fiascos in both Public Policy and Foreign Policy has existed independent of each other with very little communication between the two sub-disciplines. The contributions aims to bridge this divide and bring the two sides into a dialogue on some of the central issues in the study of fiascos including how to define, identify and measure policy failure (and success); the social and political contestation about what counts as policy fiascos; the causes of policy fiascos and their consequences; the attribution of blame; as well as processes of learning from fiascos. A common theme of the collection will be to explore different epistemological and methodological approaches to studying policy fiascos. The volume appeals to scholars and practitioners interested in policy failures and fiascos both within and among states and other international actors. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.




Community, Scale, and Regional Governance


Book Description

This is the second of five ambitious volumes theorizing the structure of governance above and below the central state. This book is written for those interested in the character, causes, and consequences of governance within the state. The book argues that jurisdictional design is shaped by the functional pressures that arise from the logic of scale in providing public goods and by the preferences that people have regarding self-government. The first has to do with the character of the public goods provided by government: their scale economies, externalities, and informational asymmetries. The second has to do with how people conceive and construct the groups to which they feel themselves belonging. In this book, the authors demonstrate that scale and community are principles that can help explain some basic features of governance, including the growth of multiple tiers over the past six decades, how jurisdictions are designed, why governance within the state has become differentiated, and the extent to which regions exert authority. The authors propose a postfunctionalist theory which rejects the notion that form follows function, and argue that whilst functional pressures are enduring, one must engage human passions regarding self-rule to explain variation in the structures of rule over time and around the world. Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.




Differentiated Integration in the European Union


Book Description

The notion of Differentiated Integration is increasingly used in the literature on European integration. Often employed interchangeably with the notion of "flexible integration, diverging views on its nature have led to the emergence of various definitions and, to some extent, a semantic confusion. A lack of consensus characterizes the academic literature; some authors even avoid putting an explicit definition on the term. The main objective of this book is to seek answers for the following questions: How can one define Differentiated Integration in the European Union? Should Differentiated Integration be considered as a process, a concept, a system or a theory? Should it be seen as a temporary or a well-established phenomenon? How is this field of study likely to develop in the future? In order to do so, all chapters, written by leading experts in the field, offer a state-of-the-art analysis of the study of differentiated integration, from theoretical and practical perspectives. In addition, this book is not a collection of isolated papers: all chapters are interconnected and gravitate towards the aforementioned central questions, but approach these from different perspectives. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.




Federal Challenges and Challenges to Federalism


Book Description

Discussing what we may learn from thinking about the EU in federal terms represents a two-fold challenge. It is on the one hand a matter of establishing ‘how federal’ the EU is (the EU’s federal challenge). On the other, the EU has federal features but is not a state, thus raising the question of whether federal theory and practice may have to be adapted to take proper account of the EU (the EU’s challenge to federalism). The contributions to this collection supplement and extend existing scholarship through focusing on two important lines of inquiry. The first focuses on the relationship between federalism and democracy, with particular emphasis on how federal systems respond to and deal with citizens’ interests and concerns, within and outside the political system. Representation is explored both in the process of federalization, and as a feature of established systems. The second line of inquiry places the emphasis on the relationship among the governments of federal systems. The focus is on intergovernmental relations, and the particular merits that emanate from studying these from a federal perspective. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy.




European Integration in Times of Crisis


Book Description

Few events over the past few decades have given rise to an amount of debate and speculation concerning the state of the European Union (EU) and the future of European integration as the economic and financial crisis that began in 2007. In spite of substantial media, policy-making and academic attention, the fundamental questions of why and how the euro area (EA) has remained not only intact but also expanded and integrated further during the crisis require deeper theoretical investigation. One needs to understand not only the economics but also the politics and institutions of the crisis. A lack of such an understanding is the reason why a number of observers, at least initially, had a hard time making sense of policy-makers’ decisions (and pace thereof), including why the EA did not implode as some predicted. Economic theories provide a certain perspective for why the crisis occurred and what economic policies were and are needed to resolve it; however, they fail to capture the deeper roots and management of the crisis. In order to improve our understanding of a discussion that has oscillated between fears of EA disintegration on the one hand and the concrete advancement of integration during the crisis on the other, this special collection brings together leading scholars of European integration who apply key theoretical approaches – from liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism to other prominent theoretical accounts that have been applied to European integration such as historical institutionalism, critical political economy, normative theory, and a public opinion approach – to the economic and financial crisis. The contributions seek to analyse, understand and/or explain the events that occurred and the (re)actions to them in order to draw conclusions concerning the applicability and usefulness of their respective theoretical perspectives. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.




The European Union as a Global Regulator?


Book Description

The European Union is often depicted as a dominant global regulator. The purpose of this volume is to move beyond establishing that the EU influences global regulation to being to identify under what conditions it exerts that influence. Toward that end, it focuses on the EU's active efforts, both bilateral and multilateral, to shape regulations beyond its borders. The empirical chapters in this volume are explicitly comparative, among foreign partners, across international contexts, over time, and across issues. The more conceptual contributions posit an explanation for the EU’s choice of regulatory cooperation strategy and take stock of Market Power Europe as a dynamic conceptual framework for understanding and researching the EU as a power. Collectively, this volume advances three arguments: the utility of the EU’s regulatory power resources is context specific; debates about what kind of power the EU is, at least as currently conceived, are unproductive; and that the EU’s engagement in the world is better explained through general theories of international political economy. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.




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