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This book challenges the common image of the European Commission as an insulated technocracy immune to political pressures. Based on an innovative combination of public opinion, protest and media data, it first demonstrates that European integration has become increasingly politicised since the 1990s. Against this background, the Commission is now much more concerned about the public appeal of its policies. That, however, challenges and contradicts the well-worn patterns of supranational regulation in Europe. Rauh systematically compares 17 legislative drafting processes in consumer policy between 1999 and 2009. Based on first-hand insider accounts of involved officials, his analysis indicates that the Commission's policy choices indeed become more consumer friendly under higher levels of public awareness. While this improves the democratic quality of European decision-making, the book also reveals an enhanced conflict potential within the Commission and beyond which threatens to undermine the efficiency of legislative decision-making in the EU.
This book makes the most comprehensive study of legislative debates thus far, looking at the politics of legislative debates in 33 liberal democracies in Europe, North America and Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. -- Résumé de l'éditeur.
A fully updated edition of this classic study, now covering movements including the Arab Spring and the 2021 Capitol attack.
The European Commission is at the center of the European Union's political system. Within its five-year terms each Commission proposes up to 2000 binding legal acts and therefore crucially shapes EU policy, which in turn impacts on the daily lives of more than 500 million European citizens. However, despite the Commissions key role in setting the agenda for European decision making, little is known about its internal dynamics when preparing legislation. This book provides a problem-driven, theoretically-founded, and empirically rich treatment of the so far still understudied process of position-formation inside the European Commission. It reveals that various internal political positions pre...
Emotions suffuse our lives: a symphony of feeling - usually whispering and murmuring in pianissimo but occasionally screaming and shouting in fortissimo crescendo - filling every waking moment and even invading our dreams. We can always be conscious of how happy, sad, annoyed, or anxious we feel, and also of the feelings we have relative to other persons: pride, envy, guilt, jealousy, trust, respect, or resentment. Developments in brain imaging and in capturing nuances of nonverbal display now enable the objective study of emotion and how biologically-based primary emotions relate to higher-level social, cognitive, and moral emotions. This book presents an integrated developmental-interactionist theory of emotion, viewing subjective feelings as voices of the genes: an affective symphony composed of dissociable albeit interactive neurochemical modules. These primordial voices do not control, but rather cajole our behavior with built-in flexibility, enabling the mindful application of learning, reason, and language.
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The EU's perceived lack of responsiveness to ordinary citizens has created a serious crisis of democratic legitimacy that threatens its very survival. In this timely book, Schneider presents a comprehensive account of how EU governments signal responsiveness to the interests of their citizens over European policies.
Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politicisation in a comparative perspective over more than forty years. Focusing on six European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) from the 1970s to the current euro crisis, the book examines conflicts over Europe in election campaigns, street protests, and public debates on every major step in the integration process. It shows that European integration has indeed become politicised. However, the patterns and developments differ markedly across countries and arenas, and many of the key hypotheses on the driving forces of change need to be revisited in view of new findings.
Weber provides an economic analysis of current, post-crash monetary reform proposals, including Bitcoin, sovereign money, regional money and modern monetary theory. The book critically examines these reform concepts, exposing their flaws and fallacies, guiding the reader towards a contemporary understanding of what money is and how it works today.