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The European Union's "democratic deficit" and ways that might be found to resolve it are hot issues in both academic debate and practical politics. Democratizing the European Union offers a fresh approach to this subject by bringing together a diverse range of authors who have been actively involved either in analyzing the activities of the European Union or participating in them.The contributors go beyond a primarily institutional approach by highlighting issues having to do with values, participation, and exclusion. Collectively this volume also transcends the limitations of abstract theory. Embracing a range of perspectives, and including discussions of major contemporary challenges, such...
This book offers a cross-national analysis of contemporary issues and challenges for the governing of urban regions. The case studies on Germany, Spain, France, Greece, The Netherlands, Finland, the UK, Switzerland, Australia, the US and Canada, place particular emphasis on the tensions building on metropolitan governing capacity and democratic legitimacy. The authors develop and use an analytical framework focused on the dynamics of place and make an original contribution to the debates on the nature of metropolitan governance.
In this book Kauppi develops a structural constructivist theory of the European Union and critically analyses, through French and Finnish empirical cases, the political practices that maintain the Union's 'democratic deficit'. Kauppi conceptualises the European Union as both an arena for political contention and a nascent political order. In this evolving, multi-levelled European political field, individuals and groups construct material and symbolic structures of political power, grounded in a variety of social resources such as nationality, culture, and gender. The author shows how the dominance of both executive political resources and domestic political cultures has prevented the development of European democracy. Supranational executive networks have become more autonomous, reinforcing the dominance of the resources they control. At the same time, national political cultures condition the political status of elected institutions such as the European parliament. The book is particularly suited for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of European Politics, European Union Studies and International Relations.
This volume sets out explicitly and systematically to bring together the two strands of political science– the study of the EU’s international activities, and IR theory – and thus to make a significant original contribution to a developing literature. It provides both a conceptual and empirical argument, the volume provides an innovative perspective on the analysis of the European Union as an international actor, and on the ways in which EU actions are formed and have impact. The volume deals with a number of topical issues in such areas as human rights, global governance and the roles of international organizations. It offers a research agenda based on rigorous development of the framework for role analysis, and demonstrates the ways in which this agenda might be furthered.
This is the first major European political science book to discuss the growing interdisciplinary field of 'cultural theory', proposing a coherent and viable alternative to mainstream political science. The authors argue that three elements - social relations, cultural bias and behavioural strategy - illuminate political questions at a level of analysis on any scale: from the household to the state; the international regime to the political party.
This is a major contribution to our understanding of European integration. It analyzes for the first time, in a highly systematic fashion, European integration as transnational political society formation in a common political space. Four conceptual chapters discuss different approaches to studying European ‘transnationalization’ including networks and socialization. Six empirical chapters provide in-depth studies of different aspects of this process and policy fields ranging from European party networks and university collaboration to informal economic governance in the Eurozone and police collaboration across borders. This book redresses the excessive concentration in EU research on supranational policy-making and inter-state bargaining. It will be of great interest to political scientists as well as contemporary historians, sociologists and lawyers.
The National Assembly for Wales was established in 1999, granting the people of Wales a parliament for the first time in nearly six centuries. The Assembly was intended to create a parliamentary culture of open, inclusive, and modern democracy that stood apart from the Houses of Parliament in London. Based on anthropological fieldwork, this informative book analyzes how power in Wales is legitimated and justified. William Schumann s intriguing argument makes the case that contradictory political practices exist which affirm elected officials as public representatives while also reproducing the subordinate status of Wales within the institutional hierarchies of the United Kingdom and European Union.
This book gives an up to date reference on the state of the art in this highly important methodological area, which is central both to theoretical models of party competition and to empirical accounts, whether these are case studies or comparative analyses. It looks at subjects including tracking estimates of public opinion and party policy intentions in Britain and the USA; the policy space of party manifestos; and party platforms and voters' perceptions. Its panel of respected contributors reviews the refinements which have been made to established techniques as well as considering the potential and early successes of computer coding.
Setting the agenda for parliament is the most significant institutional weapon for governments to shape policy outcomes, because governments with significant agenda setting powers, like France or the UK, are able to produce the outcomes they prefer, while governments that lack agenda setting powers, such as the Netherlands and Italy in the beginning of the period examined, see their projects significantly altered by their Parliaments. With a strong comparative framework, this coherent volume examines fourteen countries and provides a detailed investigation into the mechanisms by which governments in different countries determine the agendas of their corresponding parliaments. It explores the three different ways that governments can shape legislative outcomes: institutional, partisan and positional, to make an important contribution to legislative politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, legislative studies/parliamentary research, governments/coalition politics, political economy, and policy studies.