Most recent papers:

• Assessing the Effects of European Union Funding of Civil Society Organizations: Money for Nothing?
  Thomas Persson, Kajsa Edholm.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 16, 2017
  This study investigates whether the European Union's funding of civil society organizations (CSOs) can foster equal access to existing channels of participation. This is analyzed by using data from 7,889 CSOs that are registered in the EU Transparency Register. Two criteria should be met for funding to combat inequalities among CSOs: the funding must support underrepresented interests, and it must increase their participation in the policy process. The results of a logistic regression analysis show that the Commission's funding scheme does support underrepresented interests but makes participation more unequal by also supporting already overrepresented groups. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the probability of a CSO having access to formal channels of participation significantly increases if it has received funding. The conclusion is that funding could be used more efficiently if the Commission were to consistently support underrepresented interests.

  October 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12636   open full text
• Euro Area Membership and the Probability of a Sudden Stop: An Empirical Assessment.
  Miguel Lebre De Freitas, Luis Catela Nunes, Madalena Sampaio Rodrigues.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 15, 2017
  Using quarterly data from 1995 until 2014, we investigate whether Euro Area (EA) membership influences the probability of a European Union Member State going through an episode of sudden stop or through an episode of bonanza, after controlling for a number of push and pull factors. Overall, our results do not support the claim that EA membership constituted a weakness during the recent financial crisis. On the contrary, we find that EA membership decreases the probability of a sudden stop, all else equal. We find no evidence that being part of the EA has a direct effect on the probability of bonanza. When allowing for interaction effects, our results suggest that EA membership might have mitigated the risk perception arising from higher government debt in the case of bonanzas.

  October 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12641   open full text
• How do Member States Return Unwanted Migrants? The Strategic (non‐)use of ‘Europe’ during the Migration Crisis.
  Peter Slominski, Florian Trauner.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 10, 2017
  This article analyzes how Member States have used the opportunities and avoided the constraints of the EU's multilevel governance architecture to return unwanted migrants. Drawing on sociological approaches to the EU and a broad understanding of return policies, we investigate the ways in which the northern Member States, notably Germany and Austria, have increasingly relied upon the EU's operational and financial resources to achieve their goal of pursuing a bold return policy. A key ‘usage’ of Europe has been the pooling of political and financial power to externalize and informalize its return policy. At the same time, the northern Member States' deliberate – yet widely under‐researched – ‘non‐use’ of Europe, such as using and maximizing national leeway, has been an equally important strategy to reduce migratory pressure and achieve higher return rates.

  October 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12621   open full text
• Refugee Protection and Burden‐Sharing in the European Union.
  Rainer Bauböck.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 10, 2017
  This article starts with discussing principles for a globally just system of refugee protection to which states contribute either by admitting refugees for resettlement or by supporting refugee integration in other states. Such a system requires relatively strong assurances of compliance by the states involved, which are absent in the international arena. In the European Union, however, the Member States form a predetermined set with prior commitments and supranational institutions that facilitate effective burden sharing. The article traces the failure of the EU's relocation scheme to meet this expectation to misconceptions how to determine fair shares, to incomplete prior harmonization of normative standards, and to contradictions between the Dublin Regulation's principle of assigning responsibility to first countries of entry, on the one hand, and the Schengen principle of open internal borders, on the other hand.

  October 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12638   open full text
• From Outsiders to Insiders: A Civil Society Perspective on EU Financial Reforms.
  Lisa Kastner.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 09, 2017
  This article examines the role of non‐financial interest groups in EU financial regulatory decision‐making. While regulatory capture theories clearly helped identify the causes for the incrementality in spite of the major shock the 2008 crisis had caused, this article will consider a range of regulatory policy initiatives that do not neatly conform with this theory. I examine the extent to which non‐financial groups are able to have their preferences met in the making of three different consumer policies: the Mortgage Credit Directive (MCD), stricter regulations of retail investment products (PRIPs/KID) and the reform of EU level supervisory structures. By employing a process‐tracing approach based on qualitative interviews to analyze political responses to the 2008 financial crisis, the article demonstrates that newly mobilized groups could translate key advocacy goals into policy by deploying counter‐expertise and co‐operating with policy‐makers in some cases but not in others.

  October 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12644   open full text
• Fall and Rise: Normativity in Political Science Writing on the EU.
  Richard Mcmahon.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 06, 2017
  Sociologists of science emphasize the crucial role of the day‐to‐day practices of scholars in defining academic disciplines and epistemological schools. Taking the case of EU Studies (EUS), this article examines the key practice of normative writing. I analyze the degree to which 70 highly‐cited journal articles of political science writing in EUS explicitly or implicitly suggest that European integration or its institutions or policies are bad or good, flourishing or declining. I use this discourse analysis, plus biographical data on the authors of texts, to explain a major temporal pattern. Degrees of normativity in EUS articles progressively declined from the 1970s until the millennium, but then subsequently recovered. Factors ‘external’ to scholarship, such as the progressive intensification of European integration and crises faced by the EU help explain this pattern. However they interacted in complex ways with ‘internal’ academic factors, such as generational replacement, ‘mainstreaming’ and rivalries between sub‐disciplinary and theoretical camps.

  October 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12632   open full text
• When Practice Goes beyond Legislators' Expectations: Analysis of Practical Implementation Exceeding Legal Compliance with EU Directives.
  Asya Zhelyazkova, Cansarp Kaya, Reini Schrama.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 06, 2017
  Whereas most research focuses on non‐compliant implementation, we lack understanding of implementers' incentives and abilities to outperform national legislation. This study investigates a largely under‐researched question: to what extent practical implementation exceeds levels of legislative compliance with EU requirements? To explain this phenomenon, we focus on the responsiveness of implementing actors to external (participation in transnational networks) and domestic pressures (national societal attitudes) for compliance with EU requirements and the availability of additional expertise at the implementation stage (bottom‐up). Moreover, implementing actors are unlikely to respond in the same way to different types of national legislative problems (top‐down). The findings suggest that implementers often outperform the transposition of EU laws. Practical outperformance depends on the level of societal support for external policies and is a response to incomplete or ambiguous domestic formal rules.

  October 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12637   open full text
• Corruption and Trust in the European Union and National Institutions: Changes over the Great Recession across European States.
  Anastassia V. Obydenkova, Bruno Arpino.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 06, 2017
  Does corruption influence trust in national institutions in the same way as trust in international institutions? Did this influence change over the economic crisis 2008? Using data from the European Social Survey, we examined the association between corruption and trust in national and European parliaments before and after the start of the Great Recession 2008. We found that over the Crisis, the effect of corruption on trust in national parliament became more negative than it was before 2008. We also discovered a positive association between corruption and trust in the EU before the Crisis. That is, states with a higher level of national corruption seem to have more trust in international institutions, such as the EU. However, this relationship disappears after 2008. Our findings contribute to the debates on the impact of corruption on trust in national and international institutions, and on the consequences of the Great Recession.

  October 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12646   open full text
• Some Reflections on the Governance Framework of the Single Resolution Board.
  Marta Božina Beroš.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 06, 2017
  First embodied by the European Supervisory Authorities in 2010, agency governance in the financial sector has gained momentum with the creation of the Single Resolution Board (SRB) – an EU agency with considerable competencies in banking prudential policy. Within a short period, backed by the ‘ESMA‐Short Selling case’ judgment, agencies have progressed from supporting the European Commission with their quasi‐rule making, to a more prominent role in the decision‐making process, potentially influencing policy‐makers' agenda. By engaging in a qualitative analysis of legal documents, official texts and relevant scholarship, this research note examines the formal framework and practical aspects of SRB's governance, in order to substantiate whether its establishment presents a ‘qualitative increase’ in financial sector agencification. At the same time, the research note highlights problematic issues arising because of the limitations set by the Meroni doctrine arguing that the Board's wide powers ‘on paper’ may prove challenging to implement in practice.

  October 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12645   open full text
• The Trade Effects of Border Controls: Evidence from the European Schengen Agreement.
  Gabriel Felbermayr, Jasmin Gröschl, Thomas Steinwachs.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 02, 2017
  The Schengen Agreement is an important milestone in the European integration process. The purpose is to facilitate the flow of goods, services, and persons across intra‐European borders. How successful is it in achieving this goal? We apply an econometric gravity analysis to bilateral trade. Unlike earlier analysis, we acknowledge that Schengen treats different country pairs differently, depending on their relative geographical location. Moreover, we find it crucial to carefully control for other elements of European integration such as membership in the customs union, the single market or the currency union, and to factor in countries' trade with themselves. Schengen has boosted trade by about 2.81 per cent on average, on top of the EU's trade effects (equivalent to a drop in tariffs between 0.46 and 1.02 percentage points). Trade creation effects for services are stronger than for goods, but estimates feature larger parameter uncertainty. Peripheral countries benefit more than central ones. Other aspects of EU integration matter much more for trade than Schengen.

  October 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12603   open full text
• Legitimizing Europe in Contested Settings: Europe as a Normative Power in Turkey?
  Senem Aydin‐Düzgit.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 02, 2017
  This article aims to explore whether – and if so, how – the EU is perceived as a normative power (NPE) in Turkey in the context of deteriorating Turkey–EU relations. By adopting the Habermasian understanding that legitimacy is a prerequisite for NPE and through employing a focus group methodology novel to NPE research, the article finds that a certain segment of the Turkish public views the EU as a normative power, suggesting that claims for the existence of NPE need to be qualified both by the level of analysis and by the local context which comprises socio‐cultural factors as well as government/opposition dynamics. The article also shows that contestation of the EU's actorness takes place over moral and ethical‐political arguments rather than utility‐based debates, demonstrating that polarization is noticeably present as far as the EU's normativity is concerned, and not on the perceived costs and benefits of EU accession.

  October 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12647   open full text
• Concluding Early Agreements in the EU: A Double Principal‐Agent Analysis of Trilogue Negotiations.
  Tom Delreux, Thomas Laloux.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 24, 2017
  Applying a principal‐agent perspective on trilogue negotiations, this article examines how the rapporteur and the Presidency, as agents of respectively the European Parliament and the Council, are able to reach a deal with their fellow agent while avoiding an involuntary defection among their principals. Despite these intra‐ and inter‐institutional constraints, early agreements can be concluded because agents execute two parallel tasks on behalf of their principals: representing them inter‐institutionally and acting as the deal‐facilitator intra‐institutionally. We identify three ways in which the agents can combine these two acts of delegation and conclude an early agreement: (1) creating a tied‐hand situation for themselves; (2) affecting the intra‐institutional coalition formation by bringing in allies from the other institution; and (3) actively searching for signals from the principals and the fellow agent on the zone of possible agreement. We illustrate these dynamics through a case study of the policy‐making process on the 2015 Decision on the Market Stability Reserve.

  September 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12633   open full text
• The European Investment Bank: Development, Integration, Investment?
  Judith Clifton, Daniel Díaz‐Fuentes, Ana Lara Gómez.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 17, 2017
  The European Investment Bank (EIB) constitutes one of the main institutional pillars upon which the European Union (EU) was built. Despite this, the institution has attracted surprisingly little research. The EIB Statutes can be boiled down to three overarching objectives that its lending would prioritize – development, integration and investment – but little is known about the extent to which EIB loans fulfil each objective in practice. This article breaks new ground by providing the first comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of EIB loans from its origins to the end of the Cold War. To do so, lending patterns were reconstructed drawing on extensive archival work. Results show that the EIB was the first International Financial Institution to place integration and development above the alleviation of capital constraints.

  September 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12614   open full text
• Competence Creep Revisited.
  Sacha Garben.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 14, 2017
  How is it that regardless of the reforms introduced by the Lisbon Treaty to better contain European integration in areas of core state powers, ‘competence creep’ can continue? What is the underlying cause? And why is it problematic? This article proposes answers to these questions through a systematic (re‐)conceptualization of the problem of ‘competence creep’, arguing that it results from the cross‐cutting governance that is the legal Leitmotif of European integration as well as from ‘two‐level games’ of national governments, and that it is problematic from the viewpoint of democratic legitimacy. However, it argues that the one form of competence creep that is most commonly understood as the core problem, and on which most reforms have focused, namely indirect legislation in areas of Member State competence, is actually the least worrying type of covert integration; negative and parallel integration, soft law and co‐ordination are all far more problematic.

  September 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12643   open full text
• Intra‐ and Inter‐Institutional Leadership of the European Commission President: An Assessment of Juncker's Organizational Reforms.
  Alexander Bürgin.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 14, 2017
  By most accounts, the Commission President's potential for political leadership within the EU system has declined since the 1990s, due to the increasingly assertive role of the European Council, and a more autonomous European Parliament (EP). Furthermore, the incumbent's authority over the Commission is complicated by the Commission's internal fragmentation and specialization. Based on interviews with experienced policy‐makers from the Commission, the Council and the EP, this article argues that Juncker's leadership inside the Commission, as well as his leadership within the EU system have been strengthened by his organizational reforms, such as the introduction of project‐team leading Vice‐Presidents and a stronger role of the Secretariat General. These findings challenge the accounts emphasizing the declining leadership capacity of the Commission.

  September 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12648   open full text
• What Drives Political Parties' Commitment to the ‘Stability Culture’? An Empirical Analysis Based on the Electoral Manifestos Issued in EU Member States.
  Elina De Simone, Giuseppe Lucio Gaeta, Alessandro Sapio.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 10, 2017
  By using data extracted from the political manifestos released by national political parties from 27 European Union countries over the 1990–2012 period, we estimate non‐linear econometric models whose aim is to understand the determinants of cross‐country political concern for the ‘stability culture’. This expression describes an economic policy perspective based on the aims of providing price stability, fiscally disciplined budgets and rules and procedures that favour public expenditure ceilings. Our findings reveal that parties' commitment to the ‘stability culture’ is determined by their ideological background and by the national macroeconomic situation in the pre‐electoral year.

  September 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12640   open full text
• The Religious Foundations of the European Crisis.
  Josef Hien.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 10, 2017
  There has been much talk about ordoliberalism recently. Scholars and the press identify it as the dominant economic instruction sheet for Germany's European crisis politics. However, by analyzing ordoliberalism only as an economic theory, the debate downplays that ordoliberalism is also an ethical theory, with strong roots in Protestant social thought. It is this rooting in Protestant social thought that makes Ordoliberalism incompatible with the socioeconomic ethics of most of the European crisis countries, whose ethics originate in Catholic and Orthodox social thought. This divergence is the source of a crisis of understanding between European nations and hinders a collective response to the Euro crisis.

  September 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12635   open full text
• Cohesion Policies and the Creation of a European Identity: The Role of Territorial Identity.
  Roberta Capello.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 10, 2017
  Among the factors highlighted by the literature as crucial for the success of cohesion policies in generating satisfaction among citizens, and therefore in acting positively on the constitution of an European identity, this paper emphasizes a particular one, territorial identity. Elaborating on the definition of territorial identity as a local condition in which private interests coincide with public ones, the paper claims that territorial identity plays an important role in a European identity‐building process. In fact, by increasing the probability that local public expenditures match private interests, territorial identity generates a favourable context where the critical factors that hamper the successful programming, design and implementation of cohesion policies can be overcome.

  September 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12611   open full text
• The New Common Agricultural Policy: Ηow do Member States Respond to Flexibility?
  Roberto Henke, Theo Benos, Fabrizio De Filippis, Mara Giua, Fabio Pierangeli, Maria Rosaria Pupo D'Andrea.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 07, 2017
  The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a core policy of the European Union (EU), representing 40 per cent of the EU budget and a cornerstone of the integration process. Due to the path dependency that defined its evolution, it had always been a rather homogeneous and centralized policy. For the first time, the 2014–20 reform endowed Member States with the possibility to tailor the direct payments of the CAP along different fields of flexibility and thereby better address their national needs. This article examines these national choices in terms of the discontinuity they impose on the centralized policy model, showing that they reduced the policy inertia associated to the historical processes in place at the EU level, along a new national path dependency re‐shaping the CAP implementation. The flexibility introduced by the 2014–20 reform was particularly embraced by Member States that had been penalized by the ‘one‐size‐fits‐all’ historical archetype.

  September 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12607   open full text
• EU Independent Fiscal Institutions: An Assessment of Potential Effectiveness.
  Michal Horvath.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 06, 2017
  The article explores if EU independent fiscal institutions (IFIs) are in a position to exercise effective scrutiny of national fiscal policies. It identifies substantial heterogeneity across IFIs in resources which is not matched by a similar diversity in mandates. In addition to financial and human resources, better access to information, effective comply‐or‐explain mechanisms and closer links with legislatures could enhance fiscal surveillance and accountability in the EU. The paper provides rankings of individual IFIs constructed based on measures that aggregate these pre‐conditions for effective fiscal scrutiny.

  September 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12631   open full text
• Demoicracy, Transnational Partisanship and the EU.
  Fabio Wolkenstein.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 04, 2017
  Advocates of demoicracy dismiss the proposal to transform the EU into a supranational democracy on the grounds that there is no pan‐European demos. This article examines several arguments that have been advanced to that effect and, noting some problems left outstanding, goes on to suggest that demoicrats who endorse the no‐demos thesis fail to consider the possibility that citizens themselves may seek to europeanize the identities of Europeans. If we take this possibility seriously, it not only follows that the no‐demos thesis is not a knockdown objection to supranational democracy. We are also provided with an alternative normative vision for transforming the EU into a legitimate supranational democratic order, one that turns upon the transformative potential of citizens who associate across borders in pursuit of shared political goals. The article concludes by examining this vision under the heading of ‘transnational partisanship’.

  September 04, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12590   open full text
• Balancing National Security and Data Protection: The Role of EU and US Policy‐Makers and Courts before and after the NSA Affair.
  Anna Dimitrova, Maja Brkan.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 04, 2017
  Based on the unparalleled number of recent data protection reforms triggered by Snowden's revelations on both sides of the Atlantic, this article aims to examine the interplay between the two main transatlantic actors striking the balance between national security and privacy, namely EU and US policy‐makers and courts. We argue, on the one hand, that the NSA affair has opened a window to policy‐makers to pursue reforms in order to attain a level of adequacy of their respective data protection legal regimes. On the other hand, although some data protection reforms have been adopted by legislators in response to courts acting as reformers in the post‐Snowden context, the EU and US courts' approaches to balancing national security and data protection remain diametrically opposite. Drawing upon recent case law, we demonstrate that US courts continue to tilt the balance in favour of national security while EU courts retain their pro‐privacy stance.

  September 04, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12634   open full text
• De Novo Bodies and EU Integration: What is the Story behind EU Agencies' Expansion?
  Marco Scipioni.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 28, 2017
  The contributions of EU agencies are significant components of the EU policy response to migration issues. The extent to which this has come to be in the context of migration, and the successive waves of policy and institutional reforms concerning these agencies in the last decade, pose several questions that the existing literature is only partially equipped to answer. This paper addresses this gap by charting the evolution of EU agencies through documentary analysis, reflecting on the meaning of this evolution for current trends in European integration as captured by the recent theorization on de novo bodies. Findings demonstrate that, far from being static entities, these bodies have constantly deepened their reach into the formation and application of migration policy, while posing no substantial erosion of the authority of the Commission. This incremental empowerment has created accountability issues from the beginning, many of which are still far from being resolved.

  August 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12615   open full text
• Influence in the EU: Measuring Mutual Support.
  Marco Fantini, Klaas Staal.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 24, 2017
  We assess a country's influence on decision‐making in the Council not merely on the basis of the number of its votes, but based on a novel measure that also takes into account the voting behaviour of other countries. A country that is likely to receive support from other countries will be more influential than a country with more votes, but which tends to be isolated in its policy preferences. We apply the methodology to a novel dataset and use it to assess whether changes in voting weights in the Lisbon Treaty influence the odds of whether countries get what they want when decisions are taken in the Council. We show that large Member States are less successful in getting support from others for their positions, while the changes in voting weights increase large Member States' influence, but statistically significant decrease it only for a subgroup of small Member States.

  August 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12586   open full text
• From Neo‐Functional Peace to a Logic of Spillover in EU External Policy: A Response to Visoka and Doyle.
  Julian Bergmann, Arne Niemann.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 24, 2017
  In their recently published JCMS article, Gezim Visoka and John Doyle have proposed the concept of ‘neofunctional peace’ as a means to conceptualize the EU's peacemaking practices in the case of the EU‐facilitated Belgrade‐Pristina dialogue. This article challenges the ‘neo‐functional peace’ on conceptual and empirical grounds. We critically discuss Visoka and Doyle's () reading of neofunctionalism and question parts of their empirical evidence given for the existence of a ‘neo‐functional peace’. Going beyond a mere critique of the article by Visoka and Doyle and arguing that the authors may not have fully exploited neofunctionalism's potential for theorizing EU external policy, we stipulate a neofunctionalist logic for explaining integration in the area of EU external policy. Focusing on three spillover dynamics to explain the initiation of the Belgrade‐Pristina dialogue – functional discrepancies, supranational entrepreneurship and external spillover – we illustrate how neofunctionalism can be used to explain the extension of the scope of EU competences and action in the external policy realm.

  August 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12608   open full text
• Inside the EU Commission: Evidence on the Perceived Relevance of the Secretariat General in Climate Policy‐Making.
  Thurid Hustedt, Markus Seyfried.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 22, 2017
  This article studies the perception of the EU Commission's Secretariat General in policy‐making. Recently, research on EU institutions devotes increasing attention to analyzing structures and procedures of decision‐making in EU institutions, most notably the EU Commission. Conventionally, the EU Commission is portrayed as a fragmented organization, divided along the lines of staff nationality, sectoral responsibilities and cabinets and General Directorates (DGs). The Secretariat General has long been viewed a weak actor that is hardly able or motivated to steer internal decision‐making. However, recent research indicates a changing role of the Secretariat General as a pro‐active broker and last arbiter. This article studies how the Secretariat General is perceived by the DGs in policy coordination and argues that this perception depends on the pattern of political authority, bureaucratic roles and the relevance and the alternatives prevailing in the policy field. The article is based on data from a survey among Commission officials.

  August 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12605   open full text
• Human Rights on the Losing end of EU Enlargement: The Case of Serbia.
  Beáta Huszka.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 22, 2017
  By scrutinizing the effectiveness of EU human rights conditionality through the case of freedom of expression and media freedom in Serbia, the present study argues that Serbia has pursued the strategy of introducing some reforms that fall short of implementation. While the inconsistency of the EU's conditionality policy partially explains Serbia's under‐performance, Serbian authorities also lacked the incentives for compliance. As Serbia was willing to compromise on its perceived national interests concerning international war crimes prosecution and Kosovo, both highly significant issues for its national identity, the real threat now as perceived by the authorities is well functioning independent institutions and free media that can put constraints on their power. Considering that the EU assigned a key role to human rights in its conditionality policy, the Serbian case demonstrates how geopolitics can interfere to limit the EU's capacity to achieve compliance even from a candidate country.

  August 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12604   open full text
• Trickle‐Down Social Inclusion: The EU Minorities Agenda in Times of Crisis.
  Licia Cianetti.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 20, 2017
  This article investigates the minority dimension of EU social policy and how the conceptualization of ethnic minorities' socio‐economic inclusion has evolved over time. Three findings are drawn from the close analysis of overlapping EU agendas on social inclusion and minority inclusion. First, although there are no comprehensive data on European minorities' socio‐economic condition, significant evidence has been collected at EU‐level that minorities are consistently at a disadvantage. Second, the growing recognition that minorities suffer disproportionately from socio‐economic exclusion has not been accompanied by an increasing willingness to consider structural policy approaches. Rather, a policy paradigm has emerged that prioritizes job creation, growth and employability as the one‐size‐fits‐all solution to social exclusion. I call this the ‘trickle‐down’ approach to minority social inclusion. Third, the economic crisis crystallized this mismatch between problem and EU policy approach but did not cause it.

  August 20, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12618   open full text
• When Normative and Market Power Interact: The European Union and Global Biofuels Governance.
  Stefan Renckens, Grace Skogstad, Matthieu Mondou.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 16, 2017
  Drawing on the literature on the market and normative power of the EU, we document and explain the limited success of the EU in transferring its environmental standards with respect to sustainable biofuels governance to the world's two largest biofuels producers – the US and Brazil – and to two international standard setting organizations, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Global Bioenergy Partnership (GBEP). Our explanation highlights four factors: first, the extent to which EU strategies to strengthen its market power can undermine its normative power; second, the limits to EU policy influence posed by other actors' use of their own market and normative power resources; third, the diminished influence of a late policy‐mover; and fourth, the difficulty of establishing normative leadership in a policy field subject to epistemic contestation.

  August 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12584   open full text
• Responsiveness to Different National Interests: Voting Behaviour on Genetically Modified Organisms in the Council of the European Union.
  Monika Mühlböck, Jale Tosun.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 07, 2017
  Does voting behaviour in the Council of Ministers reflect different national interests? In this article, we explore this question by studying requests for authorization of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The fact that GMOs constitute a highly contentious issue in the European Union enables us to look underneath the ‘culture of consensus’ which usually characterizes voting behaviour in the Council. We argue that the focus on one issue area can help us to discover more specific voting patterns than those that have previously been found in EU legislative studies. Indeed, based on a dataset comprising all authorization requests voted on in the Council between 2004 and 2014, we find that ministers' voting behaviour is significantly influenced by important national factors such as public opinion, party politics, and structural as well as sectoral interests.

  August 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12609   open full text
• Shaping Discourse and Setting Examples: Normative Power Europe can Work in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.
  Anders Persson.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 07, 2017
  The conventional wisdom in the literature on EU–Israel/Palestine relations is that the EU has only displayed very limited, if any, normative power in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Previous studies have focused on the ability, or rather inability, of the EU to diffuse any of the core norms behind Ian Manners' concept of ‘Normative Power Europe’ (NPE) into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, while tending to ignore the ability of the EU to shape what is considered normal in many aspects of the conflict – either by making others adopt its policies, or by contributing to creating consensus around an issue. By using Tuomas Forsberg's framework of four different mechanisms of normative power: persuasion, invoking norms, shaping the discourse and the power of example on three important case studies from the conflict (EC/EU's declaratory diplomacy on the need for a just peace in the conflict, the Palestinians' bid for statehood at the UN in 2011 and the emerging ‘differentiation strategy’), this article concludes that the EU has much more normative power in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict than the literature has previously acknowledged.

  August 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12578   open full text
• Understanding European Union Science Diplomacy.
  Alea López de San Román, Simon Schunz.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 07, 2017
  Science diplomacy represents a relatively novel field of EU external action. This contribution provides a better understanding of the under‐researched development of this policy domain, asking how and why the EU has extended the scope of its external activities in the scientific area. To answer these questions, it conducts an analysis of EU policy‐makers' discourses on external science policies inspired by role theory. It finds that EU role conceptions in this domain take the forms of ‘science for diplomacy’ or ‘diplomacy for science’, and that they correspond either to an image of normative or market power Europe. These findings are confirmed by a study of the EU's recent external science policies. The article argues that the ambiguity of rationales invoked for introducing a genuine science diplomacy in the EU helps to appeal to different constituencies. This, in turn, enhances the Union's chances for successfully expanding the scope of its activities.

  August 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12582   open full text
• Mobilizing Citizens for Costly Policies: The Conditional Effect of Party Cues on Support for International Bailouts in the European Union.
  Florian Stoeckel, Theresa Kuhn.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 25, 2017
  Previous research finds citizens' attitudes towards international redistribution in the European sovereign debt crisis to be related to party preferences. This article further reveals the nature of this link. We show that citizens follow party cues on international bailouts, rather than having merely ideologically congruent positions. By employing an original survey experiment that exposes respondents to elite cues, we additionally uncover underlying dynamics. First, party cues mobilize support for bailouts even in the face of salient elite dissent and, second, even a strong elite consensus does not affect citizens without PID and low levels of political sophistication. The findings of the experiment are cross‐validated with data from the voter survey of European Election Study 2014. The results suggest that current debates about international bailout packages deepen a polarization between politicized and non‐politicized Europeans.

  July 25, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12610   open full text
• The EU as a Global Actor: United We Stand, Divided We Fall.
  Tereza Novotná.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 13, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12601   open full text
• Co‐ordinating Co‐ordination: The European Commission and the Culture Open Method of Co‐ordination.
  Kate Mattocks.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 09, 2017
  This article examines the role of the European Commission in non‐legislative policy co‐ordination in the European Union. Using the Open Method of Co‐ordination (OMC) in the oft‐neglected sector of cultural policy as a case study, it argues that rather than a neutral facilitator as it appears on paper, the Commission occupies both a political and administrative leadership role in the operation of the culture OMC. Through analysis of policy documentation, interviews and non‐participant observation material, the article demonstrates how the Commission has operated as a key driver and agenda‐setter in the field, exposing the inter‐institutional dynamics in a competence in which the EU has a supporting role. The findings thus have broader implications for the study of agenda‐setting and European integration in policy sectors where the EU holds a supporting competence.

  July 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12587   open full text
• Justice and Home Affairs.
  Jörg Monar.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 05, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12585   open full text
• Governance and Institutions: The Insidious Effect of Chronic Crisis.
  Desmond Dinan.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 05, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12606   open full text
• The Slovak EU Council Presidency: In Defence of Post‐Brexit EU.
  Vladimír Bilčík.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 03, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12619   open full text
• Independent Fiscal Councils: Neglected Siblings of Independent Central Banks? An EU Perspective.
  Martin Larch, Thomas Braendle.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 03, 2017
  Governance of monetary and fiscal policy have followed diverging paths. Since the late 1980s monetary policy has been delegated to independent central banks. By contrast, fiscal stabilization remained in political hands but has progressively been constrained by rules; the Stability and Growth Pact in the EU is a prominent case in point. While delegation and independence eliminated the inflation bias, fiscal policy still suffers from a deficit bias as enforcement of rules remains difficult. A logical extension of all attempts to progressively tie the hands of politics would be to carve out the stabilization function from the broader field of fiscal policy and to delegate it to national independent fiscal councils. Apart from addressing the political economy behind the deficit bias, such a step would facilitate a better co‐ordination of macroeconomic policies in Economic and Monetary Union.

  July 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12577   open full text
• How the Criteria for Joining the European Union Affect Public Opinion: The Case of Equal Pay between Women and Men in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  Douglas Page.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 03, 2017
  Existing studies suggest that normative commitments to the European Union's gender equality standards remain weak in states applying for EU membership, and that citizens are unresponsive to information the EU provides. However, these studies do not gauge public support for women's rights when they are addressed as an EU issue (an EU frame). In an original experimental survey of Bosnia and Herzegovina, I examine the effect of EU framing on support for equal pay between women and men, and the responsibility assigned to the government for unequal pay. I find that EU frames affect the responsibility assigned to the government. Supporters of independence from the EU assign less responsibility to their government for unequal pay, when equal pay is addressed as an EU issue.

  July 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12583   open full text
• Europe as a Regional Actor: Waning Influence in an Unstable and Authoritarian Neighbourhood.
  Karolina Pomorska, Gergana Noutcheva.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 26, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12612   open full text
• The JCMS Annual Review Lecture: In the Name of Europe.
  Helen Wallace.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 23, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 23, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12616   open full text
• Brexit and the Single European Financial Market.
  David Howarth, Lucia Quaglia.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 23, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 23, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12589   open full text
• Eurozone Governance in 2016: The Italian Banking Crisis, Fiscal Flexibility and Brexit (Plus Plus Plus).
  Dermot Hodson.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 23, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 23, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12602   open full text
• Chronology: The European Union in 2016.
  Charlotte Galpin.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 21, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12588   open full text
• The Dutch EU Presidency: The Continuing Relevance of the Rotating Presidency in a Political Union.
  Adriaan Schout.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 15, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12576   open full text
• Benchmarking Brexit: How the British Decision to Leave Shapes EU Public Opinion.
  Catherine E. De Vries.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 06, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12579   open full text
• ‘Keep Calm and Carry on’: EU Legal Developments in 2016.
  John Cotter.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 06, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12580   open full text
• The European Economy: The Recovery Continues, but for How Long?
  István Benczes, Balázs Szent‐Iványi.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 06, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12581   open full text
• Wage Divergence, Business Cycle Co‐Movement and the Currency Union Effect.
  Martin Gächter, Alexander Gruber, Aleksandra Riedl.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 26, 2017
  This paper studies the impact of wage growth divergence on business cycle co‐movement in the context of currency unions. While the theoretical literature on optimum currency areas highlights the equilibrating effect of divergent wage growth after asymmetric exogenous demand shocks via the external demand channel, recent literature on euro area imbalances emphasizes its dis‐equilibrating effect as a source of asymmetric domestic demand shocks, and therefore suggests a negative link to business cycle co‐movement. Our empirical results reveal that the latter effect has been clearly dominating in the euro area: Wage growth differentials across countries – while of minor importance for non‐euro area EU countries with sovereign currencies – significantly reduce business cycle co‐movement within the monetary union and thus increase the cost of the common monetary policy. The large magnitude of the effect calls for enhanced co‐ordination efforts of wage policies in the euro area.

  May 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12574   open full text
• The EU as a Coherent (Cyber)Security Actor?
  Helena Carrapico, André Barrinha.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 10, 2017
  The last three decades have seen the development of the European Union (EU) as a security actor. The transnational character of the security threats and the challenges identified by the EU have led to progressive integration between internal and external security concerns. These concerns have often led to calls for greater coherence within EU security policies. The literature, however, indicates that this need for coherence has, so far, not been systematically operationalized, leading to a fragmented security field. This article has two main aims: To devise a framework for the analysis of the EU's coherence as a security actor, and to apply it to the cybersecurity field. By focusing on EU cybersecurity policy, this article will explore whether the EU can be considered a coherent actor in this field or whether this policy is being implemented according to different and unco‐ordinated rationales.

  May 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12575   open full text
• Equilibrium Real Interest Rates and Secular Stagnation: An Empirical Analysis for Euro Area Member Countries.
  Ansgar Belke, Jens Klose.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 05, 2017
  Is secular stagnation – a period of persistently lower growth such as that seen following the financial crisis of 2008–09 – a valid concern for euro‐area countries? We tackle this question using the well‐established Laubach‐Williams model to estimate the unobservable equilibrium real interest rate and compare it to the actual real rate. In light of the considerable increase in heterogeneity among EU member countries since the beginning of the financial crisis, we apply our approach to 12 euro‐area countries to provide country‐level answers to the question of secular stagnation. The presence of secular stagnation in a number of euro‐area countries has important implications for ECB decision‐making (such as, voting power in the Governing Council) and EU governance. Our results indicate that secular stagnation is not a significant threat to most euro‐area countries, with one possible exception: Greece.

  May 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12552   open full text
• Liberal Power Europe.
  Wolfgang Wagner.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 03, 2017
  The European Union is best understood as a liberal power – as an actor that is composed of liberal democracies whose interests, identities and institutions motivate and constrain its policy. The conceptualization of the EU as a liberal power helps to overcome three shortcomings of alternative notions such as civilian power or Normative Power Europe: First, norms are not only understood as driving forces but also as constraints on foreign policy; second, liberal power Europe emphasizes the contested nature of norms and conflicts between norms and thus draws attention to the politics of EU external relations; third, it encourages an engagement with the vast literature on the distinctive policies of liberal democracies in international relations and foreign policy analysis. The EU's crisis management serves to illustrate the value‐added of the liberal power Europe concept.

  May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12572   open full text
• What about Ambivalence and Indifference? Rethinking the Effects of European Attitudes on Voter Turnout in European Parliament Elections.
  Cigdem Kentmen‐Cin.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 02, 2017
  Previous studies of turnout in European Parliament elections have focused on how positive and negative attitudes towards the EU affect voter turnout while ignoring other EU related attitudes. To fill this gap, this article compares the impact of ambivalence and indifference on turnout with that of positive and negative attitudes. Using multilevel logit regression, it demonstrates that ambivalence increased the odds of turnout in the 2004 and 2009 European Parliament elections compared to both negative and indifferent attitudes. However, ambivalence only increases the possibility of turnout if the number of positive thoughts about the EU is equal to or higher than the number of negative thoughts. Having a greater number of negative thoughts, in contrast, does not discourage turnout. The paper concludes that one‐dimensional measures of EU attitudes are over‐simplistic and fail to provide a complete description of European voting behaviour.

  May 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12573   open full text
• Specialization, Risk Sharing and the Euro.
  Fernando Ballabriga, Carolina Villegas‐Sánchez.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 02, 2017
  Under the prospect of productive specialization, the degree of potential success of the euro since its inception was seen as closely linked to the development of effective risk‐sharing mechanisms across EU members. Without shared fiscal resources, financial integration was expected to play a leading role in this respect. This paper documents the failure in fulfilling this expectation: Along with an analysis of the evolution of specialization and risk‐sharing, we present evidence supporting the claim that progress in financial integration has not been conducive to income risk‐sharing across euro area members, while it might have favoured a specialization split between countries with low‐medium and high technology productive structures. As a result, monetary union members face higher income fluctuation risk without enhanced insurance protection. Additionally, evidence suggests a differential impact of the specialization split on sector productivity, contributing to making the monetary union a club of non equals.

  May 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12571   open full text
• The EU's Peace and Security Narrative: Views from EU Strategic Partners in Asia.
  Natalia Chaban, Alister Miskimmon, Ben O'Loughlin.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 26, 2017
  The EU has consistently struggled to forge a foreign policy narrative which promotes internal cohesion and supports the EU's efforts to exert international influence. The 2016 EU Global Strategy is the latest iteration of collective efforts to tie strategy and purpose to the EU's coherent identity in the world. This study compares the EU's strategic partners of peace and security with narratives about the EU held in the EU's strategic partners in Asia. Whilst we find reasonable coherence in the EU's projection of the international system and its role in it, its identity as an actor, and its response to policy issues on the ground, views from Asia largely contest these claims. This article employs a strategic narrative approach to conceptualize and empirically trace how the formation, projection and reception of EU narratives are part of broader circuits of communication through which EU might be recognized, legitimized and achieve influence.

  April 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12569   open full text
• The Leadership Paradox in EU Foreign Policy.
  Lisbeth Aggestam, Markus Johansson.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 26, 2017
  This article examines a leadership paradox at the heart of EU foreign policy between the demand for effective European leadership, and leadership legitimacy embedded in state practices. This paradox is manifested in the Lisbon treaty that delegated significant formal leadership functions to the European level. We probe the question how and by whom leadership can and should be performed in EU foreign policy. To answer this question, we advance a new theoretical framework drawing on sociological institutionalism and role theory. We argue that leadership should be understood as a social role shaped in a process of interaction between leader and followers. We contribute with new empirical knowledge of leadership role relations based on an interview survey conducted in 2016. The empirical results point to role conflicts over the formal leadership functions in EU foreign policy and the emergence of new informal leadership practices by EU member states.

  April 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12558   open full text
• Who Cares? European Public Opinion on Foreign Aid and Political Conditionality.
  Thilo Bodenstein, Jörg Faust.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 26, 2017
  We provide evidence on the individual and country‐level determinants of citizens' support for political conditionality in foreign aid, using novel survey data for 27 European countries. Based on the welfare state literature and existing public opinion research in foreign aid, we expect citizens with more rightist political orientations as well as those who do not perceive their own state apparatus to function in a meritocratic way to be more likely to support political conditionality. Our multi‐level analysis supports these hypotheses in general, but also shows that the effect of political orientations on support for political conditionality in foreign aid is limited to traditional EU donor countries, where the left/right‐cleavage has been dominant in politics.

  April 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12556   open full text
• Stratified Social Rights Limiting EU Citizenship.
  Cecilia Bruzelius, Constantin Reinprecht, Martin Seeleib‐Kaiser.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 11, 2017
  Differences in Member States' economic development and national social protection systems can translate into significant differences in the substantive social rights of EU migrant citizens. The substantive rights of economically inactive EU migrant citizens are dependent on the ‘export’ of social rights from their country of origin to the Member State of destination, in particular during the initial phase of their residence in a new Member State as a jobseeker or a pensioner. This paper demonstrates that EU citizens' social rights are substantively stratified, not only by economic status, but also according to the Member State of origin and destination. Stratified social rights, it is argued, generate unequal opportunities to free movement and eo ipso challenge the very concept of EU citizenship. The paper concludes with a proposal for a European Minimum Income Scheme to at least partially overcome the shortcomings of existing EU citizenship.

  April 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12555   open full text
• The Impact of the Eurozone Crisis on National Foreign Policy: Enhancing Europeanization in the Case of Cyprus*.
  George Christou, George Kyris.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 02, 2017
  This article investigates the impact of the eurozone crisis on the foreign policy of an EU Member State, Cyprus. Drawing on the literature on Europeanization of national foreign policies, it is argued that Cypriot foreign policy, despite the general frustration caused by the financial crisis within broader society, has actually undergone further Europeanization. We show that leadership is a critical intervening variable in this enhanced Europeanization, as well as pointing to the salience of the explanatory mechanisms of social and instrumental learning. The contribution of the article is twofold. It offers an empirical account of contemporary Cypriot foreign policy and contributes to the discussion of the impact of the Eurozone crisis on national foreign policy. Both, we contend, remain relatively neglected topics in the literature.

  April 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12557   open full text
• Multidimensional Well‐being and Regional Disparities in Europe.
  Jörg Döpke, Andreas Knabe, Cornelia Lang, Philip Maschke.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 29, 2017
  Using data from the OECD Regional Well‐Being Index – a set of quality‐of‐life indicators measured at the sub‐national level – we construct a set of composite well‐being indices. We analyze the extent to which the choice of five alternative aggregation methods affects the well‐being ranking of regions. We find that regional inequality in these composite measures is lower than regional inequality in real GDP per capita. For most aggregation methods, the rank correlation across regions appears to be quite high. It is also shown that using alternative indices instead of GDP per capita would only have a small effect on the set of regions eligible for aid from EU Structural Funds. The exception appears to be an aggregation based on how individual dimensions relate to average life satisfaction across regions, which would substantially change both the ranking of regions and which regions would be eligible for EU funds.

  March 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12551   open full text
• A Multi‐Level Approach to European Identity: Does Integration Foster Identity?
  Sybille Luhmann.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 17, 2017
  Many integration theories predict that heightened integration in Europe will give rise to a European identity. As integration advances, so does the scholarly debate on identity. This article endeavours to contribute to the debate by investigating the relationship between European integration and European identity longitudinally in 14 countries over 21 years from 1992 to 2012. Using Eurobarometer and EU Index data, this relationship is found to be exponential with current integration levels predicting the imminent emergence of a European identity. In order to better understand whose identities are impacted or formed most by integration, the paper then turns to three intervening concepts: (1) cognitive mobilization, (2) optimism, and (3) support of the EU. All of these amplify the effect of integration on identity with the noteworthy exception of optimism. Finally, the article evaluates the implications of these findings for neofunctionalism and the literature on European identity more broadly.

  March 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12554   open full text
• Non‐State Actors and the New Intergovernmentalism.
  Theodore Baird.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 15, 2017
  This research note responds to recent debates about new intergovernmentalism and argues that the hypotheses of Bickerton, Hodson and Puetter overlook the roles non‐state actors play in the integration process. It intends to open up a debate about private power and the new intergovernmentalism, demonstrating that the concentration of powers of national governments has proceeded alongside the concentration of powers of transnational business interests in Europe. The note draws on the example of the civil security industry and Justice and Home Affairs policies in order to modify the six hypotheses of new intergovernmentalism.

  March 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12570   open full text
• The Redistributive Impact of Restrictive Measures on EU Members: Winners and Losers from Imposing Sanctions on Russia.
  Francesco Giumelli.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 15, 2017
  EU sanctions on Russia created concerns among its members. It is well known that sanctions impose a cost on their targets as well as on the senders, as lamented by European governments, but the costs of EU sanctions on its members have not been fully explored. This article intends to fill this gap by looking at the cost of EU sanctions on Russia. Who is bearing the cost among EU countries? This article argues that sanctions had a redistributive impact across the EU. Whereas exports fell for all countries, with Germany, Italy and Finland in the leading positions, the article shows that there are economic sectors that increased their exports to Russia after the imposition of sanctions, which occurred particularly in countries as Greece, Sweden, Luxembourg and Bulgaria. This conclusion is reached by looking at the export flows from individual EU member states divided by SITC sectors to Russia.

  March 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12548   open full text
• Why Implement without a Tangible Threat? The Effect of a Soft Instrument on National Migrant Integration Policies.
  Pierre Georges Van Wolleghem.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 27, 2017
  A significant amount of scholarly attention has focused on explaining variation in implementation of EU outputs. Most studies have concentrated either on the factors determining compliance with Directives or on the processes leading Member States to applying soft law provisions. Little attention has however been paid to the determinants of the implementation of soft law. Hence the focus of this paper: why do Member States implement EU outputs if they have no legal obligation to do so? The present study delves into the implementation of a soft instrument, the European fund for the integration of foreigners, and explains Member States' response to it through a policy‐specific mechanism. I show that when there is little possibility of oversight from above, government preferences are not constrained by Commission but by public opinion and organized civil society. Empirical evidence is drawn from the application of time‐series‐cross‐section methods to an original dataset.

  February 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12553   open full text
• EU Mediation as an Assemblage of Practices: Introducing a New Approach to the Study of EU Conflict Resolution.
  Natalie C. Brandenburg.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 22, 2017
  This article introduces a new approach to the study of EU mediation and conflict resolution. It argues that researchers have not fully accounted for the changes underway in the Union's take on mediation. By elucidating the differences between this approach and the already existing literature on EU mediation, the article advocates a practice turn and develops a framework for studying EU mediation as an assemblage of practices. It builds on Latourian assemblage thinking and complements it with the Foucauldian notion of political rationality and techne. This approach is then explored through examining the practices of EU mediation support in Myanmar, which draws attention to the contradictions and a specific set of knowledge claims on peace and conflict, and traces dissident voices and how they inform the use of mediation instruments. In so doing, it demonstrates how a practice‐oriented approach allows us to provide new insights into EU external action.

  February 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12532   open full text
• Bold and newly Independent, or Isolated and Cast Adrift? The Implications of Brexit for Intellectual Property Law and Policy.
  Benjamin Farrand.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 21, 2017
  What happens when a breakdown in relations results in mutually possessed objectives becoming harder to achieve? This article explores the consequences of the UK's withdrawal from the EU for intellectual property (IP) law and policy. Compared with other fields such as Economic and Monetary Union and the development of the EU's ‘social chapter’, the UK has been a supportive and proactive player in internal market integration, particularly pertaining to IP protection. As a result of ‘Brexit’, the EU may find that the impetus for further harmonization and integration in this field is lost, such as with the EU unitary patent. However, the consequences for the UK are likely to be more severe – a loss of influence, both over laws that govern it and in exporting IP norms internationally, as well as a loss of access to certain protections, agencies and market sectors that are within the UK's economic interests.

  February 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12550   open full text
• Rethinking Britain and the European Union: Politicians, the Media and Public Opinion Reconsidered.
  Paul Copeland, Nathaniel Copsey.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 21, 2017
  This article re‐examines the role of the media in the UK debate on EU membership. It argues that the embedding of euroscepticism in the UK stems neither from a single phase in the UK–EU relationship, nor from the agency of the UK press or its proprietors. Rather, it resulted from the long‐standing absence of any pro‐European faction within the British polity was able to argue for, or defend, the European Union within the UK national debate. In explaining this, we expand on the concept of ‘issue capture’ understood as the ability of a vocal minority to dominate the UK's political debate about the EU in the absence of genuine opposition to counteract negative claims and arguments. The findings are drawn from analysis of a dataset that codes more than 16,400 UK newspaper articles published between 1974–2013.

  February 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12527   open full text
• Patriotism, Preferences and Serendipity: Understanding the Adoption of the Defence Transfers Directive.
  Daniel Fiott.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 14, 2017
  The 2009 adoption of the EU directive on intra‐Community transfers of defence equipment (‘ICT directive’) (2009/43/EC) aims to harmonize defence transfer licencing in the EU. The directive is part of a ‘defence package’ – along with a directive on defence procurement (2009/81/EC) – that is geared to liberalizing and regulating the European Defence Equipment Market (EDEM). A major theoretical question is why the EU Member States would agree to the ICT directive when it did not ultimately make much difference to the functioning of the EDEM. A number of competing theories exist that help explain why the 2009 ‘defence package’ was adopted. In the hope of engaging with this theoretical debate, and expanding our empirical understanding of the ICT directive, this article contends that insights from judicial politics, economic patriotism and liberal intergovernmentalism are best placed to explain why the EU Member States eventually adopted the directive.

  February 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12534   open full text
• Designing an Institutional Network for Improving Farm Animal Welfare in the EU.
  Philip Jones, Joop Lensink, Maria Cecilia Mancini, Richard Tranter.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 14, 2017
  Improvements in the welfare of farmed animals in the EU have been achieved by legislation, increased welfare capacity in the food chain, greater public awareness, welfare measurement tools and dissemination of best practice. However, pressure for improvement grows. The EC recognizes that delivering improved welfare would best be achieved by increasing welfare capacity, including establishing a Network of Welfare Reference Centres to provide support for welfare research, knowledge transfer and policy design. Designing a structure for this Network presents a challenge, as it would have multiple functions, interact with diverse stakeholders and operate in a complex environment. Here, we describe the use of a novel strategic planning approach to design an optimal structure for this Network. Our evaluation found that no existing structure was ideal, but that by taking functional units from several existing models, an optimal model could be identified.

  February 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12547   open full text
• The ‘Oops!’ of EU Engagement Abroad: Analyzing Unintended Consequences of EU External Action.
  Olga Burlyuk.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 09, 2017
  The mainstream scholarship assessing EU external action frames the subject in terms of success or failure to achieve the intended effects, the latter generally defined against the EU's own stated objectives. Resting on a tacit assumption that EU engagement in third states is a good thing, these analyses are framed as ‘positive impact or no impact’ and tend to neglect the wider effects of EU policies. This article maintains that EU external action may and often does have unintended consequences, thus expanding the study of EU impact beyond the sheer study of EU effectiveness. Drawing on broader literature on unintended consequences, the article proposes a framework for analyzing unintended consequences of EU external action. It synthesizes and adapts to the EU context a classification of unintended consequences and, in order to illustrate its utility, applies the proposed framework to three empirical examples derived from EU neighbourhood, migration and trade policies.

  February 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12549   open full text
• Does Europe Matter? The Role of Europe in Chinese Narratives of ‘One Belt One Road’ and ‘New Type of Great Power Relations’.
  Jinghan Zeng.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 08, 2017
  The rise of China as a global power has significantly reshaped its global ambition. Under the leadership of Chinese president Xi Jinping, China has proposed a series of diplomatic initiatives – most notably ‘new type of great power relations’ and ‘one belt one road’ – in order to shift the international order in its favour. Does Europe matter in China's major initiatives under the leadership of Xi Jinping? How does Europe (and the EU) fit into China's strategic narratives? This article aims to address these questions by analyzing Chinese scholarly writings and conducting interviews in China. It also explores the evolution process of China's strategic narratives with a focus on the gradual appearances of Europe. This article argues that the EU/Europe is a second order concern for China, and Europe only plays a marginalized role in China's policy discussion. Appreciation of the internal dynamics of China is essential for Europe to develop a more accurate understanding of EU–China relations.

  February 08, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12535   open full text
• Divided Sovereignty, Nation and Legal Community.
  Klaus Günther.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 06, 2017
  With a view to EU democracy, Jürgen Habermas introduced the idea that the relationship between the roles of state citizens and European citizens should be understood as a form of ‘divided sovereignty’. This notion is a constructive solution to theoretical problems resulting from the goal of realizing national and European democracy at the same time, but one might suspect that one of the suggested roles comes more naturally to most citizens. While state citizenship can draw on national identities, EU citizenship appears artificial and constructed, and hence not very attractive. I argue that the contraposition of ‘natural’ vs. ‘artificial’ sovereigns is inadequate. Both parts of divided sovereignty need to be understood in a constructivist sense as they are attributed to legal associations. Much in the same way as the idea of national sovereignty had to be appropriated in learning processes, citizens could grow into the role of EU sovereigns.

  February 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12521   open full text
• The European Parliament as a Forum of National Interest? A Transnationalist Critique of Jürgen Habermas' Reconstruction of Degressive Proportionality.
  Jelena Achenbach.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 06, 2017
  Arguing from a transnationalist perspective, this contribution contests Jürgen Habermas' reconstruction of degressive proportionality according to which the principle is justified as a mechanism empowering national interest. The critique is developed on legal, empirical and normative grounds. In the first step, the article demonstrates that the European Parliament (EP) is legally designed to serve as a medium of transnational political alignments. Based on empirical studies, it then shows that the members of the EP exercise their representative role as advocates of political platforms of a cross‐border nature. Normatively, the contribution argues that it is possible to reconstruct degressive proportionality from a transnationalist, European perspective: The purpose of this complex legal construction is to establish the conditions of an open, fair and pluralistic transnational discourse in the EP. Degressive proportionality allows for heterogeneity and diversity within the Union citizenry, which remains – for the time being – divided in national constituencies, to be articulated politically.

  February 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12519   open full text
• The ‘Mixed’ Constituent Legitimacy of the European Federation.
  Peter Niesen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 06, 2017
  Constitutional lawyers and political scientists have described the European Union as a federation of states (fédération, Bund). They deny that federations generate a new union‐wide constituent authority besides the pouvoirs constituants of the member states. Habermas argues that federative constituent power lies with individuals in their dual roles as citizens of the several states and as citizens of the Union. I argue that from the perspective of democratic theory, this view is methodologically superior to other ‘dualist’ views of federative constituent power (J. Cohen), but go on to criticize it in two respects. It gives insufficient justification for the persistence of domestic pouvoirs constituants, and it reifies their defensive function.

  February 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12518   open full text
• The Conundrum of Solving ‘Too Big to Fail’ in the European Union: Supranationalization at Different Speeds.
  Lucia Quaglia, Aneta Spendzharova.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 03, 2017
  In the aftermath of the international financial crisis, the European Union (EU) adopted a series of regulatory reforms concerning capital adequacy, bank structures and resolution in order to tackle the risks created by financial institutions that were ‘too big to fail’. This article demonstrates different degrees of progress towards a supranational framework in two important areas of reform: Limited harmonization of the rules on bank structures, but robust progress toward the supranationalization of bank resolution, where the euro area dimension is also considered. What accounts for this variation? We draw on a synthesis of neofunctionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism to explain the diverging outcomes. We explain the low supranationalization in bank structural reforms with the absence of strong spillovers and availability of domestic options to unilaterally contain financial instability. In bank resolution, we examine the causal mechanisms through which significant spillovers modified the government preferences of key Member States.

  February 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12531   open full text
• Institutional Path‐Dependencies in Europe's Networked Modes of Governance.
  Nina Boeger, Joseph Corkin.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 03, 2017
  We consider whether transnational networks that softly discipline Member States (such as the OMC or regulatory networks that oversee national discretion in implementing broad EU frameworks) mark a significant turn in European integration or merely a transitional step towards centralization (agencification) and formalization (subjecting to law). We suggest this requires a closer reading of the institutional changes necessary to bring about centralization/formalization, and ask particularly whether change might be partially attributable to the very institutional‐agents operating inside Europe's networked modes of governance. Supplementing functional‐political explanations, we propose an endogenous model of institutional change that incorporates the independent role transnational networks play in shaping their own institutionalization, which may make this mode of governance more resilient and even self‐reinforcing. We test the plausibility of this model with a case‐study detailing the institutional entrepreneurship of transnational networks in the telecoms sector.

  February 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12546   open full text
• At the Source of European Solidarity: Assessing the Effects of Cross‐border Practices and Political Attitudes.
  Irina Ciornei, Ettore Recchi.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 26, 2017
  In this article we discuss the concept of European solidarity by distinguishing between transnational and international solidarity. The former refers to support for institutional arrangements aimed at sharing economic risks at the individual level, while the latter entails public agreement to share economic risks at the Member State level. We explore the joint role of cross‐border interactions and political attitudes in fostering solidarity ties among Europeans through multilevel modelling based on the 2012 Eurobarometer 77 survey. The article shows that transnational experiences do not have the same effect on different forms of European solidarity, limiting transnational and enhancing international solidarity. Egalitarian individuals are more prone to EU‐wide solidarity, with cross‐border practices affecting their level of solidarity, while not altering those of the rest of the population. In particular, we find that cross‐border practices make egalitarians more inclined to international and less to transnational solidarity.

  January 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12507   open full text
• How Does the European Commission Create a European Civil Society with Words? A Discourse Theoretical Inquiry.
  Acar Kutay.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 18, 2017
  The intent of this article is to make sense of European civil society from the point of view of post‐structural discourse theory. This theory suggests examining meaning‐making processes concerning European civil society by adopting a post‐foundational philosophy and an interpretive approach to studying social phenomena. Post‐foundational philosophy is anti‐essentialist, combines discursive and non‐discursive elements, and adopts a constructionist approach to language that recognizes agency as situated. Discourse theorists conduct empirical research by strictly following these philosophical presumptions. So conceived, discourse theory suggests that the conceptual link between NGOs and European civil society does not have any foundational ground or naturalistic explanation. Such a link is not a pre‐given fact, and can be best understood as linguistically constructed and articulated; that is, the EU institutions, the European Commission in particular, have defined and constituted NGOs as civil society subjects that would stand for and make Europe's imagined civil society present.

  January 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12526   open full text
• Flexicurity between Europeanization and Varieties of Capitalism? A Comparative Analysis of Employment Protection Reforms in Portugal and Greece.
  Sotirios Zartaloudis, Andreas Kornelakis.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 17, 2017
  The article examines the adoption of Flexicurity principles in Portugal and Greece during 2006–2009. Despite the similar conditions between the two cases and common EU stimulus, the process and final outcomes in the reform of their employment protection systems differed. In Portugal, the government persevered and implemented a reform in line with Flexicurity principles. By contrast, the Greek government initially favoured Flexicurity and initiated a reform process of the legal framework; however the reform was halted. The article explains this divergence by combining the insights of Europeanization and Varieties of Capitalism literatures. It is argued that in cases of Mixed Market Economies, ‘misfit’ with EU stimuli is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for institutional change. Instead, reforms depend on union structure and the existence of policy entrepreneurs favouring reform, which explains the divergent reform paths.

  January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12533   open full text
• Integration by Stealth: How the European Union Gained Competence over Foreign Direct Investment.
  Sophie Meunier.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 13, 2017
  How are policy competences allocated between different actors? This article contributes to the literature on institutional development through an in‐depth case‐study of the conditions under which the competence over the negotiation of agreements on foreign direct investment (FDI) was transferred from the national level to the European Union (EU) in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. Most analysts assume that this competence shift was a rationally designed delegation, intended to maximize European bargaining power in international investment negotiations and conceived as an important element of a teleological drive to make the EU a meaningful external actor. This article tells a different story – one where the competence shift happened by stealth as a result of a combination of neo‐functionalist Commission entrepreneurship and historical accident, against the preferences of the Member States. The article also assesses whether the conditions under which the competence was transferred have implications for the implementation of the new policy.

  January 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12528   open full text
• The United Kingdom Referendum on European Union Membership: The Voting of Conservative Parliamentarians.
  Timothy Heppell, Andrew Crines, David Jeffery.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 09, 2017
  This article considers the attitudes of members of the parliamentary Conservative Party (PCP) during the European Union (EU) membership referendum held in the United Kingdom (UK) on 23 June 2016. First, the article identifies the voting positions – remain or leave – of each Conservative parliamentarian in order to assess the strength of opinion within the PCP and place it within its historical context. Second, the article uses multivariate analysis to test a series of hypotheses about the voting of Conservative parliamentarians. Through this we will aim to identify whether any associations existed between advocates and opponents of Brexit and social variables such as age, schooling, university, occupation and gender; political variables such as constituency marginality, and whether they were a minister, an ex‐minister or a permanent backbencher; and the ideological variable of morality – such as support for or opposition to same sex marriage.

  January 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12529   open full text
• The European Union as an Inadvertent Great Power: EU Actorness and the Ukraine Crisis.
  Thomas Gehring, Kevin Urbanski, Sebastian Oberthür.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 09, 2017
  We examine how the EU can act as a great power in its own right even in the absence of military capability and how its institutional structure conditions this ability. We first theorize EU great power politics. Based on theories of corporate action, the EU constitutes a strong market power in its own right and a weak security power. While it is institutionally ill‐equipped to purposefully mobilize its market power to pursue high‐politics goals, its communitarized external relations may inadvertently challenge important security interests of other great powers. Second, we show that the EU acted as an inadvertent great power vis‐à‐vis Russia in its Ukraine policy which was primarily driven by the supranational decision‐making apparatus and low‐politics considerations, but engendered a bipolar power struggle with Russia over Ukraine. The risks inherent in EU inadvertent great power politics are deeply engrained in the EU's institutional structure and therefore difficult to mitigate.

  January 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12530   open full text
• Researching European Union Agencies: What Have We Learnt (and Where Do We Go from Here)?
  Morten Egeberg, Jarle Trondal.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 09, 2017
  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' organization, tasks, proliferation and location in the political‐administrative space. Whether the advent of EU agencies tends to underpin a basically intergovernmental, transnational or supranational order has potentially huge consequences for the distribution of power across levels of government, for the degree of policy uniformity and pooling of administrative resources across countries, for the role of genuinely European perspectives in the policy process, and for accountability relations. Although the jury is still partly out on most topics, we see the contours of a more direct multilevel administration in which EU agencies not only constitute nodes within transnational agency networks, but in addition, in governance terms, relate more closely to the European Commission than to any other institution.

  January 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12525   open full text
• State Aid in the New EU Member States.
  Jens Hölscher, Nicole Nulsch, Johannes Stephan.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 06, 2017
  In the early phase of transition, which began in the 1990s, Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) pursued economic restructuring that involved massive injections of state support. With reference to the history of state aid in centrally planned economies, we investigate state aid practices of CEECs since attaining full EU membership. We analyse whether their state aid policies during and after transition challenged European state aid legislation, and whether these fit into the EU strategy of ‘less but better targeted aid’. The data‐based analysis is complemented with some indicative insights from state aid in the steel industry as well as the financial service sector to suggest that there is today no significant difference in state aid law application between East and West any more – the new EU members have further caught up by better aligning to the objectives of the State Aid Action Plan.

  January 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12513   open full text
• Citizen and State Equality in a Supranational Political Community: Degressive Proportionality and the Pouvoir Constituant Mixte.
  Jürgen Habermas.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 06, 2017
  In the European Parliament seats are distributed according to a principle of degressive proportionality that privileges smaller member states. While serving the principle of state equality, this arrangement seems to violate the principle of citizen equality. In this article, I consider whether a deviation from the equal representation of citizens can be justified in the context of a supranational political community. The main thesis is that the conflict between citizen and state equality can be dissolved if we understand the European Union as based on a pouvoir constituant mixte. Today, each European finds herself in a dual role as an EU citizen and a state citizen. While the member state peoples strive for supranational democracy, they have an interest in preserving their domestic structures of self‐government. Thus, the rules of representation in the EP can be reconstructed as an expression of the legitimate will of a dual constituent subject.

  January 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12517   open full text
• Introduction: The EU's Pouvoir Constituant Mixte – Exploring the Systematic Potential of an Innovative Category.
  Markus Patberg.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 06, 2017
  According to Jürgen Habermas's notion of pouvoir constituant mixte, the EU needs to derive its democratic legitimacy from a dual subject, consisting of the community of European citizens on the one hand and the communities of state citizens on the other. In this introduction, I outline some of the basic ideas behind the pouvoir constituant mixte, situate the category within wider debates about democracy in the EU and the future of European integration, and provide a brief summary of the symposium contributions.

  January 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12516   open full text
• The Levelling Up of Constituent Power in the European Union.
  Markus Patberg.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 06, 2017
  In this article, I elaborate a conceptual innovation that underlies, if only in nascent form, Jürgen Habermas's notion of pouvoir constituant mixte and could significantly advance research on the democratic legitimacy of EU constitutional politics: the levelling up of constituent power. According to this idea, state‐level pouvoirs constituants may issue an authorization for constitutional decision‐making at the supra‐state level and thereby bring about a new constituent power whose composition can take a variety of forms. This conceptual framework paves the way for a systematic analysis of the EU's pouvoir constituant and its relation to the demoi of the member states. At the same time, it renders it an open normative question of who should be in charge of EU constitutional politics.

  January 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12520   open full text
• Tracing the evolution of EU images using a case‐study of Australia and New Zealand.
  Natalia Chaban, Serena Kelly.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 04, 2017
  Positioned within the multidisciplinary scholarly fields of political psychology, our analysis follows an interdisciplinary approach, linking the study of EU images (from international relations (IR), political science and EU Studies) to the notion of conceptual metaphors (cognitive linguistics). Our research uses a novel empirical tool – a four‐tiered model of conceptual metaphors (Zhabotynska, 2011) to assess how meanings are formed in the construction of EU images in third countries. Using a case‐study of Australian and New Zealand elites, the paper contributes to EU foreign policy scholarship through the description of a systematic algorithm for tracing the ‘mapping of emotions’ towards the EU from beyond its borders. Metaphors are understood as a cognitive device for translating emotions, but empirical analysis of emotions is nascent in IR studies. Assessing EU external images over time in an empirically‐informed and systematic way is a further novel contribution from this body of research.

  January 04, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12510   open full text
• Good Samaritans vs. Hardliners: the Role of Credible Signalling in Greek Bailout Negotiations.
  Alexandra Hennessy.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 26, 2016
  In this paper, we model the interactions between Greece and its creditors as a costly signalling game. The main argument is that a costly exchange of information can improve the recipient's incentives to comply with conditionality. If creditors can credibly signal that suspending financial assistance is a viable option, they will be able to extract concessions from the recipient. Conversely, if the feasibility of the outside option is in doubt, threats to withhold financial support will be toothless. Our contribution is to highlight the role of information exchanges during crisis bargaining. Such signalling mechanisms are central to understanding the outcomes of the Greek debt drama, but are absent from existing accounts.

  December 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12523   open full text
• From Regulation to Enforcement in the EU Policy Cycle: A New Type of Functional Spillover?
  Miroslava Scholten, Daniel Scholten.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 13, 2016
  The European Union has acquired enforcement competences in areas where it previously only had regulatory authority. This expansion of competences from one step in the policy cycle to another is a blind spot in the works on functional spillover. While the increasing enforcement powers of the EU are mentioned, it is in the context of more competences, not what type. This paper investigates the nature of this ‘policy cycle type of functional spillover’, argues that this is a new type of functional spillover and discusses the significance of this finding. The paper offers original data concerning the expansion of EU's competences in direct enforcement.

  December 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12508   open full text
• Human Rights Conditionality in European Union Trade Negotiations: the Case of the EU–Singapore FTA.
  Lachlan Mckenzie, Katharina L. Meissner.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 11, 2016
  Trade policy is among the EU's most significant capabilities in promoting values including human rights. Yet trade policy and the EU's values‐based foreign policy are often in tension. Scholarship on the social dimension of trade policy has emphasized the tension between values and the EU's commercial interests. Human rights and conditionality clauses have not been the focus of analysis, yet conditionality is one of the EU's most visible links between the trade agenda and its values‐based foreign policy. Analyzing the EU's decision‐making in negotiating human rights conditionality, this paper employs the EU–Singapore free trade agreement and its negotiation as an in‐depth single case study. The tension between commercial interests and values results in decision‐makers promoting incoherent interests. We argue that organizationally defined preferences and issue salience circumscribed the Parliament's impact on decision‐making, resulting in concessions on human rights conditionality with Singapore.

  December 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12522   open full text
• Where Does the Buck Stop? Explaining Public Responsibility Attributions in Complex International Institutions.
  Berthold Rittberger, Helena Schwarzenbeck, Bernhard Zangl.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 11, 2016
  Who is held publicly responsible for the policies of international institutions? Are member states or supranational bodies held responsible or are public responsibility attributions (PRA) untargeted? We argue that in complex policy‐making systems responsibility tends to be attributed to implementing actors. When, however, a policy does not require active implementation, we expect responsibility attributions to be untargeted. To test these expectations, we analyze PRA in the European public for three EU migration policies: (1) border control policies, (2) the distribution of refugees according to the ‘Dublin’‐system, and (3) so‐called welfare migration facilitated by the ‘freedom of movement’ principle. Our analysis corroborates that PRA reflect the structure of policy implementation: (1) PRA for EU border controls target the EU; (2) PRA for the distribution of refugees target member states; (3) PRA for welfare migration are untargeted. The paper thus highlights an accountability gap for policies that do not require implementation.

  December 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12524   open full text
• Weak Labour, Strong Interests: Polish Trade Unions and the Integration of EU Energy and Service Markets.
  Magdalena Bernaciak, Aleksandra Lis.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 08, 2016
  This paper examines the motives behind the EU‐level activism of CEE trade unions, which are commonly regarded as weak actors. To this end, it studies lobbying and protest actions staged by Polish labour organizations in relation to proposals for the EU Emission Trading Scheme Directive and the EU Services Directive. The analysis confirms the salience of interest‐based accounts of supranational union action, but it also shows that labour interests are context‐specific, influenced by economic conditions and regulatory changes in particular market segments. In this regard, priority given by the unions to job preservation or the improvement of social standards has important implications for their positions; it also determines the selection of their allies at national and transnational levels.

  December 08, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12506   open full text
• Harmonizing Internationally to Harmonize Internally: Accounting for a Global Exit from the EU's Decision Trap.
  Zdenek Kudrna, Patrick Müller.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 07, 2016
  The joint decision trap concept traditionally explains progress in EU policy‐making through dynamics located within the EU's multi‐level governance. Yet, with the expansion of global regulatory co‐ordination, the EU governance system increasingly interacts with policy‐making in international regimes, which influences the internal dynamics of the EU's decision‐making. This article seeks to refine the joint decision trap model by introducing global exit mechanisms and illustrating their empirical relevance for the case of accounting standards. The global exit builds on leveraging the outside benefits of global policy, the legitimacy of global standards, and new opportunities for locking in policy preferences through global commitments. Specifically, the accounting case demonstrates the Commission's strategy of ‘harmonizing globally to harmonize internally’ that produced an agreement after decades of stalemate. Moreover, it demonstrates how the global exit enables the Commission to protect internal harmonization despite the growing criticism and calls for the repatriation of regulatory sovereignty.

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12511   open full text
• Financial Compliance in the European Union: A Cross‐National Assessment of Financial Correction Patterns and Causes in Cohesion Policy.
  Carlos Mendez, John Bachtler.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 07, 2016
  EU compliance scholarship has expanded rapidly over the last decade but has neglected the financial dimension of compliance in terms of Member States' conformity with EU financial rules on the regularity and legality of EU spending. This article makes the case for a multi‐dimensional approach to compliance research and provides the first cross‐national assessment of financial compliance in EU Cohesion policy, employing quantitative and qualitative methods. To account for cross‐national variations in the application of financial corrections for non‐compliant spending, several factors are explored, focusing on regional autonomy, administrative capacity and goodness‐of‐fit. The quantitative analysis finds strong support for the impact of administrative capacity on cross‐national compliance patterns and some evidence for the role of goodness‐of‐fit. Contrary to expectations, regional autonomy is not associated with compliance in this critical case of EU multi‐level governance. Qualitative analysis reinforces these findings while revealing additional factors of relevance.

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12502   open full text
• Global Sport Power Europe? The Efficacy of the European Union in Global Sport Regulation.
  Borja García, Henk Erik Meier.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 29, 2016
  The effectiveness of the European Union (EU) as global regulator is controversial. Some scholars characterize the EU as one of the most important shapers of global regulations; others argue that the EU's effectiveness critically depends on its regulatory cohesion, the political opportunity structure and regulatory capacity of its interlocutors. Since global sport represents a regionally segmented industry and is governed by private actors of diverse regulatory capacity, global sport regulation represents an excellent domain to study these propositions systematically. Comparative case studies on global sport regulation support the idea that the EU can impose its regulatory ambitions on sport governing due to market size and regulatory capacity. However, the broader political opportunity structure is found to be relevant and the EU does not appear as a strong regulator of global sports.

  November 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12512   open full text
• EU Member States at the UN: A Case of Europeanization Arrested?
  Karen E. Smith.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 29, 2016
  This article addresses two questions about the EU's and EU Member States' diplomacy in the UN General Assembly's Third Committee and the Human Rights Council: have EU Member States been more, or less, active outside the framework of EU co‐ordination since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty? Has EU activity increased? The findings are that EU Member States have been increasingly active at the Human Rights Council and have increasingly worked with other states outside of the EU, while the level of EU activity has remained largely the same. In the Third Committee, Member States speak more than the EU but neither the EU nor Member States have been sponsoring more resolutions. Europeanization is ‘arrested’ in these cases, as Member States are reluctant to push for more EU activity because both the internal intergovernmental decision‐making system and external context discourage it.

  November 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12504   open full text
• The Role of Law in EU Foreign Policy‐making: Legal Integrity, Legal Spillover, and the EU Policy of Differentiation towards Israel.
  Patrick Müller, Peter Slominski.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 28, 2016
  Little systematic effort has been made to examine the role of law and its implications for EU foreign policy‐making. Addressing this research gap, we identify key legal dynamics that operate in supranational policies, but have increasingly led to legal ‘spillovers’, both institutionally and discursively, into the Common Foreign and Security Policy. We illustrate the relevance of these dynamics for the case of EU–Israeli relations. Since the late 1990s, legal inconsistencies in EU–Israeli co‐operation have been addressed by the Commission via soft law, by various MEPs via parliamentary questions, and by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Simultaneously, external actors like NGOs and corporations have used the EU's legal infrastructure to confront the EU with the fact that its de facto relations have not lived up its de jure position. Over time and also as a consequence of the Lisbon Treaty, even the Council found it difficult to ignore non‐compliance with its own legal position.

  November 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12509   open full text
• Decent Incomes for the Poor: Which Role for Europe?
  Bea Cantillon, Sarah Marchal, Chris Luigjes.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 16, 2016
  EU social policy has generally been limited to the definition of non‐binding social outcome targets, a governance model known as ‘second order output governance’. However, many EU Member States have failed to make progress in fighting poverty. This begs the question of whether a more performant EU‐level involvement in the field of social policy is conceivable. In this paper, we argue that European minimum standards are the place to start, including principles for minimum social security and minimum wages, as i) the European social objectives cannot be attained without guaranteeing adequate incomes to those in and out of work, and ii) social co‐ordination should thus go beyond broad outcome goals such as the reduction of the number of households at risk of poverty or social exclusion. We propose to include policy indicators regarding minimum income protection in the recently revised EU monitoring process of the European Semester.

  November 16, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12486   open full text
• Wider Europe, Greater Europe? David Mitrany on European Security Order.
  Kamil Zwolski.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 06, 2016
  How should the structure of European security be reorganized following the conflict in Ukraine? Some respond that the European Union should not bend to Russia's acts of aggression. Others blame the allegedly exclusionary and expansive nature of the Euro‐Atlantic organizations for the conflict. This paper embeds these competing narratives in the functional approach of David Mitrany, specifically in his two distinctive forms of regional integration, one exclusive and one inclusive. At the same time, however, the paper cautions against drawing simplified conclusions based on the parallels between Mitrany's ideal types of regional integration and contemporary arguments about the place of Russia in European security governance. Indeed, a more inclusive approach to Russia can potentially be beneficial for European security order, but there are more problems with this vision than simply the short‐sightedness of western institutions. Unfortunately, Mitrany's functional approach does not offer immediate solutions to these problems.

  November 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12489   open full text
• The Framing of the Euro Crisis in German and Spanish Online News Media between 2010 and 2014: Does a Common European Public Discourse Emerge?
  Johannes Kaiser, Katharina Kleinen‐von Königslöw.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 06, 2016
  In recent years, Europe has been facing the Euro crisis, questioning the whole process of European integration. However, scholars argue that this crisis also presents an opportunity for the Europeanization of national public spheres as public attention regarding Europe has increased. Therefore, this study examines the media discourse on the crisis and the possible convergence of the national public spheres of Germany and Spain. It investigates how the issue is framed and who participates in the discourse during the crisis between 2010 and 2014 in German and Spanish online quality newspapers. Based on a content analysis of 7,256 statements in 961 articles, frames were identified in a data‐driven approach. Results show that German and Spanish media have Europeanized their framing during the crisis and mainly support Europe's policy. This convergence has occurred despite a slight renationalization of discourse participants, indicating that Europeanization has been increasingly sustained by national actors.

  November 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12515   open full text
• Democratic Deficits in Europe: The Overlooked Exclusiveness of Nation‐States and the Positive Role of the European Union.
  Joachim Blatter, Samuel D. Schmid, Andrea C. Blättler.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 28, 2016
  With the help of the Immigrant Inclusion Index (IMIX), a quantitative tool for measuring the electoral inclusion of immigrants, we demonstrate that European democracies are much more exclusive than they should be. All normative theories of democracy share the conviction that it is imperative that democracies include long‐term immigrant residents into the demos – either by granting citizenship or by introducing alien voting rights. But even the 20 most established and stable democracies within the EU are far from fully realizing the ideal of ‘universal suffrage’. This is true independently of whether we count in‐ and excluded people in numerical terms, or whether we evaluate the relevant laws and regulations. Therefore, we diagnose a substantial democratic deficit on the level of European nation‐states. By requiring its member states to enfranchise non‐national EU citizens on the local level, the EU, for once, plays a positive role in reducing one of the most fundamental democratic deficits in times of migration.

  October 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12491   open full text
• Explaining Implementation through Varieties of Capitalism Theory: The Case of the Telework and Work‐related Stress Agreements.
  Thomas Prosser.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 28, 2016
  Despite extensive literature on the implementation of European ‘soft’ law and Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) theory, no existing work has attempted to explain the implementation of soft law with reference to VoC. In this article, on the basis of a study of the implementation of the non‐legally binding European Telework and Work‐related Stress Agreements in four countries, we attempt to address this gap. Four hypotheses are developed, based on key tenets of VoC theory, which aim to explain divergent national implementation outcomes of the agreements. The predictive power of VoC emerges as mixed. Though a hypothesis concerning the propensity of Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) to implement the agreements via collective agreements is confirmed, evidence for remaining hypotheses is more ambiguous. Implications for theories of soft law implementation and VoC theory are reflected upon in conclusion.

  October 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12514   open full text
• Role Dynamics in a Structured Relationship: The EU–China Strategic Partnership.
  Anna Michalski, Zhongqi Pan.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 20, 2016
  In this article, we investigate the function of strategic partnerships as a new type of state interaction in the international system. We are primarily interested in the dynamics of strategic partnerships and to that aim we analyze the competitive role‐playing that occurs in the EU–China Strategic Partnership. We contend that EU and China engage in competitive role‐playing in order to enhance their position and status as global actors and to seek recognition of their international roles. The interaction between the EU and China is analyzed throughout four periods in which their role conceptions have undergone change and adaptation. The article claims to make a theoretical contribution by developing the understanding of social interaction in the international system by conceptualizing strategic partnerships as arenas (structures) in which international roles play out, and an empirical contribution by tracing the complexities of the EU–China Strategic Partnership by utilizing role theory's conceptual apparatus.

  October 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12505   open full text
• Twenty Years of the EU‐Turkey Customs Union: A Synthetic Control Method Analysis.
  Hüseyin Aytuğ, Merve Mavuş Kütük, Arif Oduncu, Sübidey Togan.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 20, 2016
  The paper studying the 1995 EU–Turkey Customs Union (CU) delivers a quantitative assessment of trade and GDP per capita effects of the CU on the Turkish economy. Our Synthetic Control Method based analysis reveals, contrary to the results of most studies in the literature, that the CU's effects have been substantial by any standards. In particular, the paper shows that in the absence of the EU–Turkey CU, Turkish exports to the EU and GDP per capita would have been 38 per cent and 13 per cent less, respectively.

  October 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12490   open full text
• Do EU Member States Apply Food Standards Uniformly? A Look at Fruit and Vegetable Safety Notifications.
  Lorena Tudela‐Marco, Jose Maria Garcia‐Alvarez‐Coque, Luisa Martí‐Selva.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 18, 2016
  The hypothesis that six EU Member States show a common behaviour on the implementation of food safety standards on fruit and vegetables imports is examined. To do so, we analyzed food border notifications recorded by the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF). Path dependence and reputation effects of past border notifications were explored for the whole period 2001–13, and for sub‐periods 2001–07 and 2008–13. Negative binomial (NB) and zero‐inflated negative binomial (ZINB) distributions were used to deal with over‐dispersion and excess of zero counts. Our findings suggest that the EU cannot be considered as a single unit when non‐tariff measures are studied, although there are some signs that Member State behaviour is becoming more uniform in the most recent period.

  October 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12503   open full text
• International Adjudication as a Mode of EU External Governance? The WTO Seal Case.
  Rike U. Krämer‐Hoppe, Tilman Krüger.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 12, 2016
  The literature on EU external governance has greatly advanced our understanding of rule transfers beyond Europe's borders. Contributions highlight different modes of such EU external governance. This contribution proposes to add international adjudication as another form of EU external governance. Acknowledging the important role of judicial decision‐making in shaping the international order, this article uses the example of WTO adjudication to add to existing conceptualizations of EU external governance. In our view, WTO dispute settlement offers possibilities for the EU to transfer EU norms to the international level and beyond its own borders. As we illustrate through an exploratory case study of the recent WTO seal dispute, the EU's internal setup matters greatly for its success.

  October 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12487   open full text
• In the CJEU Judges Trust: A New Approach in the Judicial Construction of Europe.
  Juan A. Mayoral.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 10, 2016
  This article aims to highlight the relevance of judicial trust in international courts, focusing on national judges' trust in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). EU scholars have put a great deal of effort into explaining how legal and political factors affect the use of preliminary references by national courts. However, there is still a gap in the literature on the development of trust as a functional principle encouraging co‐operation between national and international courts. This article explores the nature, causes and potentials of judicial trust for the EU judicial system. A theory is offered in the article, which links national judges' trust in the CJEU to their corporatist identification and profile, to their attitudes towards the EU, and to their beliefs about the CJEU's ability to provide decisions that: 1) offer a clear guidance on European Union law, and 2) will not undermine Member States' legal order.

  October 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12488   open full text
• European Military Capabilities: Enablers and Constraints on EU Power?
  Kaija Schilde.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 05, 2016
  How should we understand the role of the EU in the world – and its relational power vis‐à‐vis other international actors? And to what degree is the Russia–Ukraine crisis a critical juncture in EU power dynamics over time? This contribution to this Special Issue evaluates EU power through the lens of material power and capabilities, and analyzes patterns and changes in material capabilities as indicators of threat and strategic assessments. The findings demonstrate the Russia–Ukraine crisis as one critical juncture in the weight and means of EU military power/capabilities, representing a partial but significant shift away from the overall national tendencies of reducing military spending across Europe, and the decade‐long trends of strategic goals towards mobilizing EU military power outside of Europe. It also marks a deepening of strategic divergences across the EU regarding national clusters of capability development.

  October 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12444   open full text
• Limits of Cultural Engineering: Actors and Narratives in the European Parliament's House of European History Project.
  Wolfram Kaiser.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 03, 2016
  Concerned about the EU's apparent lack of cultural legitimacy, EU institutions have increasingly engaged in the transnational politics of history to enhance European identity and foster EU legitimacy. The House of European History museum project in Brussels marks a high point in the European Parliament's history politics. Based on document analysis and interviews, an analysis of the project's origins and evolution highlights the narrow limits of cultural engineering from above by EU institutions, however. The constraining dissensus in EU politics has forced the European Parliament to rely entirely on the curators and professional historians to legitimize its museum as one that conforms to prevailing curatorial and historical standards. As a result, the first permanent exhibition differs markedly from the original plan. Its narrative has become East Europeanized and the history of European integration proper has been marginalized.

  October 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12475   open full text
• Trojan Horses in EU Foreign Policy.
  Mitchell A. Orenstein, R. Daniel Kelemen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 28, 2016
  Why has the European Union been able to craft a unified sanctions policy against Russia but failed to rein in Russia's ‘Trojan horses’ within the EU that pursue pro‐Putin foreign policies? We argue that the EU suffers from a specific type of disaggregation in its foreign and security policy. While the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy has increased its capacities over time, the EU still lacks the power to prevent Member States from pursuing their own independent policies. In the face of the Ukraine crisis, for instance, the EU marshaled a surprisingly strong sanctions regime, but could not prevent Member States from pursuing divergent pro‐Russia policies, such as signing new energy deals or granting port access for Russian naval forces. As EU foreign and security powers grow, foreign powers face increasing incentives to cultivate Trojan horses among the EU Member States.

  September 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12441   open full text
• The Desire for Sovereignty – An Explanation of EU Attitudes in the Arab World.
  Mujtaba Isani, Bernd Schlipphak.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 22, 2016
  A growing body of survey research shows that the European Union (EU) has a relatively benign image around the world, except among Arab populations. What informs Arab citizens' sceptical attitudes toward the European Union (EU)? Combining literature on Arab public opinion and perceptions of the EU, we argue that Arab citizens' feelings about the EU are influenced most prominently by their desire for sovereignty. Moreover, traditional utilitarian and cue‐taking mechanisms should also impact Arab EU attitudes. We empirically test our argument using data from the third wave of the Arab Barometer (AB). Our findings confirm that Arab citizens' EU views seem to be informed by their desire for sovereignty, as well as economic considerations and trust in domestic elites. Having provided evidence on Arab opinions about the EU, we discuss relevant theoretical and methodological directions for future research.

  September 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12485   open full text
• Responding to Non‐Linear Internationalisation of Public Policy: The World Trade Organization and Reform of the CAP 1992–2013.
  Carsten Daugbjerg.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 21, 2016
  The transfer of regulatory authority to international organisations can initiate domestic policy reform. The internationalisation process can be a one‐off transfer of authority to international institutions or an ongoing process. In the latter situation, the level of internationalisation may be gradually increased by expanding the regulatory scope of the regime or by deepening it. However, internationalisation processes may also involve stalemate or even reversal. How do domestic policy makers respond to such non‐linear internationalisation? To answer this question, this paper analyzes the relationship between developments in the GATT and WTO farm trade negotiations and the reform trajectory of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) from the early 1990s to 2013. Until 2008, the EU gradually changed the support instruments of the CAP to limit their trade distorting impact. After the Doha Round stalled in 2008, international trade policy concerns were downgraded and domestic concerns took priority in the 2013 reform.

  September 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12476   open full text
• Transnational European Party Federations as EU Foreign Policy Actors: The Activities of Europarties in Eastern Partnership States.
  Angelos‐Stylianos Chryssogelos.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 09, 2016
  This article assesses how the involvement of European party federations (Europarties) in the politics of Eastern Partnership (EaP) states relates to the objectives of the EU in the region. Under specific scope conditions, Europarties can promote EU interests and values and help EU neighbourhood policy overcome some of the inconsistencies created by the lack of the enlargement tool. The article conceptualises Europarties as transnational actors whose external activities match the pathways of EU influence in EaP states. Empirically, by examining political developments in Georgia and Moldova, the article demonstrates how Europarties function as a conduit for EU strategic influence over pro‐European elites, as well as a normative influence on the functioning of party politics in EaP states.

  September 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12477   open full text
• What Type of Power has the EU Exercised in the Ukraine–Russia Crisis? A Framework of Analysis.
  Mai'a K. Davis Cross, Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 06, 2016
  What impact has the Russia–Ukraine crisis had on the EU as a foreign policy actor? Most studies examine how the EU has evolved as an actor over time of its own initiative, but tend to discount the role that the external context or structure of the international system might play in constraining or enabling the EU's exercise of power. This Special Issue seeks to understand the EU's influence in the world through recognizing its embeddedness in an unpredictable and uncertain international system. Specifically, we ask whether and to what extent the Russia–Ukraine crisis serves as a critical juncture and catalyst for shaping the EU's power.

  September 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12442   open full text
• Trust and Decision‐making in Times of Crisis: The EU's Response to the Events in Ukraine.
  Michal Natorski, Karolina Pomorska.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 05, 2016
  It is a common assumption that through decades of co‐operation there has been an emergence of trust between the Member States of the European Union. Yet, we have little evidence about the nature of trust and its implications for decision‐making, in particular in times of crisis. Hence, our article's central question: how does trust matter in the process of decision‐making during crisis? Our argument is that uncertainty during the crisis enabled trust‐building between the actors: Member States and European institutions. In the case of the Ukrainian crisis, this happened in parallel to the decreasing levels of trust in EU–Russia relations. Consequently, the EU was able to agree and implement the instruments of coercive power. To illustrate our argument, we look at the adoption of EU sanctions in reaction to the annexation of Crimea, the downing of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 plane and the war in Donbass.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12445   open full text
• Arguing Sanctions. On the EU's Response to the Crisis in Ukraine.
  Helene Sjursen, Guri Rosén.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. September 05, 2016
  Despite diverging perspectives and interests, the EU's Member States have forged a common response to the Russia–Ukraine crisis. How can this be? In this article, we suggest that in order to explain the Member States' ability to reach agreement in this case, we must take into account the normative force of the arguments presented in favour of a common response. We find that neither a concern for security (as would be expected from a realist perspective) nor the institutionalization of a norm of cohesion (which would be the constructivist expectation) triggered the collective response. Instead, agreement was established due to concurrence over a fundamental breach of the Ukrainians' right to self‐determination. This finding is significant in theoretical terms in that it confirms that norms may trump interests. It does not, however, allow for definite conclusions with regard to the robustness of integration in EU foreign policy.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12443   open full text
• Hard‐line Euroscepticism and the Eurocrisis: Evidence from a Panel Study of 108 Elections Across Europe.
  Francesco Nicoli.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 29, 2016
  The 2014 European elections led to a sharp rise in the electoral consensus of parties and independent parliament members perceived as eurosceptic. This paper analyzes the interconnections between distressed economies and the electoral success of hard‐line eurosceptic parties. On a panel of 108 elections between 2008 and 2015, the random‐effects model shows the relative effect of long‐ and short‐term political trust, economic performance indicators, and institutional variables in determining the rise of hard‐line eurosceptic parties. In contrast with previous studies, which have tended to de‐emphasize the effect of economic performance in determining the success of eurosceptic forces, the results of this paper detect both a direct and a mediated effect of the economic crisis on the electoral success of hard‐line eurosceptic parties.

  August 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12463   open full text
• The Single Market: Trade Barriers and Trade Remedies.
  Michelle Egan, Maria Helena Guimarães.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 26, 2016
  In this article we investigate how well the single market functions in practice by examining barriers to trade in goods markets and we discuss efforts to improve the governance of the single market. We use two unique datasets of specific trade obstacles to empirically examine which barriers continue to undermine EU cross‐border trade, and whether non‐judicial remedies have provided some degree of effective informal market governance in tackling trade impediments. Based on four hypotheses on country, industry and policy variables we test the probability of removing trade barriers in the pre‐litigation phase of infringement proceedings rather than by Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decisions. We then assess the usage and effectiveness of the informal mechanism Solvit to resolve trade obstacles in the single market. We conclude that informal mechanisms operate in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ as judicialization remains the last resort option when informal co‐operation does not achieve the desired goals.

  August 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12461   open full text
• The European Parliament's Diplomacy – a Tool for Projecting EU Power in Times of Crisis? The Case of the Cox–Kwasniewski Mission.
  Cristian Nitoiu, Monika Sus.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 25, 2016
  The aim of this paper is to shed light on the way the European Parliament's diplomacy affects EU power, particularly during times of crisis. The analysis is focused on the Cox–Kwasniewski mission that the Parliament sent to Ukraine in 2012–13. Based on interviews and existing literature, we discuss the genesis and the development of the mission and then evaluate its impact. We argue that the mission with time became a key diplomatic instrument and enabled EU power projection by giving momentum to the promotion of the EU's approach towards Ukraine, which was already wavering due to the deadlock over the Association Agreement between Kyiv and Brussels and then due to President Yanukovych's refusal to sign the agreement.

  August 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12440   open full text
• Ukraine between a Constrained EU and Assertive Russia.
  Taras Kuzio.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 24, 2016
  The article analyzes three factors constraining EU power: its unwillingness to view Ukraine as a candidate for membership, a miscalculation of Ukrainian leaders and the ignoring of growing nationalism and xenophobia in Russia. These three factors constrained the EU in its ability to respond to the Russia–Ukraine crisis by ignoring past Russian support for separatist movements and invasion of Georgia and recognition of the independence of two separatist enclaves. The EU did not appreciate that Russia also viewed the EU (not just NATO) as a hostile actor intervening in what it views as its ‘zone of privileged interests’.

  August 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12447   open full text
• Commercializing Citizenship in Crisis EU: The Case of Immigrant Investor Programmes.
  Owen Parker.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 23, 2016
  Immigrant investor programmes (IIPs) – aimed at attracting investment in return for residency or citizenship for wealthy foreigners – have proliferated in EU Member States in recent years. Such schemes constitute part of a much broader commercialization of citizenship, which has intensified during the crisis. They have been particularly controversial in the EU because they rely for their attractiveness in part on the reality of EU citizenship and the rights of mobility and residence that it entails. The European Commission, among others, has presented them as threat to national citizenship and yet the EU at once champions a ‘post‐national’ citizenship and is arguably culpable in the very commercialization of citizenship of which investor schemes are a stark manifestation. This paper unpacks the tensions in the theory and politics of investor migration in the recent EU context, arguing that they reveal what is termed a ‘quadrilemma’ at the heart of a multi‐level citizenship.

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12462   open full text
• Outside Earnings, Electoral Systems and Legislative Effort in the European Parliament.
  Christian Staat, Colin R. Kuehnhanss.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 23, 2016
  Parliamentarians are often allowed to pursue other work in addition to their mandate. Using data on the 7th European Parliament (2009–14), we analyze the relationship between the outside earnings of its Members (MEPs) and their parliamentary activities. The supranational nature of the European Parliament thereby allows a novel analysis of ‘moonlighting’ free of country‐specific bias. We find outside earnings to be negatively correlated with the particularly work‐intensive production of draft reports and opinions. Utilizing the considerable freedom of Member States in organizing elections, we find this relationship to be dependent on the electoral system under which MEPs are elected. While the effect of the trade‐off between outside and parliamentary work is predominantly negative in all other systems, outside earnings of MEPs from centralized but candidate‐focused systems correlate positively with their productivity, indicating a possible benefit from selection effects.

  August 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12460   open full text
• The EU's Power in the Russia–Ukraine Crisis: Enabled or Constrained?
  Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski, Mai'a K. Davis Cross.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 21, 2016
  The article presents conclusions of this Special Issue. It first summarizes the empirical findings of the individual contributions to this Special Issue in terms of whether EU power was enabled or constrained in response to the crisis. Second, the article synthesizes these findings to advance some overarching arguments about the EU as an actor in this crisis, and the types of power that were evident in this case. Third, it examines the significance of the study overall, and highlights some key policy implications. Finally, the article takes a broader perspective, and suggests that this framework is valuable more generally for understanding how various crises might impact the EU as a foreign policy actor.

  August 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12446   open full text
• ‘Stability on the Borders’: The Ukraine Crisis and the EU's Constrained Policy Towards the Eastern Neighbourhood.
  Jolyon Howorth.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 19, 2016
  The Ukraine crisis itself is, to some extent, the result of a flawed approach on the part of the EU to the strategic question of its relationships with its Eastern neighbours, an approach rendered more fraught by the parallel American enlargement of NATO. The EU has found itself constrained in its reaction to the Ukraine crisis by policies adopted over previous decades. In the first part, this article will situate the crisis in the historical context of the twin enlargements of the EU and NATO. Secondly, it will assess the consequences of the European neighbourhood policy in fostering the crisis. In the third part, this article will argue that, during the crisis itself, the EU acted in ways that were more constraining than enabling. Finally, the article will evaluate the EU's response in terms of the criteria laid out in the Introductory Framework to this Special Issue.

  August 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12448   open full text
• The Commission, the Single Market and the Crisis: The Limits of Purposeful Opportunism.
  Isabel Camisão, Maria Helena Guimarães.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 19, 2016
  The economic and financial crisis opened a window of opportunity to place the Single Market back on top of the European agenda as part of a two‐tiered crisis response, which also included reinforced financial supervision and economic co‐ordination. We argue that the Commission acted as a ‘purposeful opportunist’ in both tiers; but whereas in economic governance issues there was breakthrough change in the Commission's achievements and competences, in the Single Market realm policy change was fairly modest. Using process tracing analysis our goal is to explain why the Commission did not succeed in furthering a genuine Single Market reform. Our findings suggest that the Commission's entrepreneurship was constrained by the limited salience of Single Market issues in the crisis context and by the lack of actual political commitment from the other relevant stakeholders. Thus, our research highlights the limits of the Commission's opportunistic behaviour in less advantageous circumstances.

  August 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12464   open full text
• Flexible Austerity and Supranational Autonomy. The Reformed Excessive Deficit Procedure and the Asymmetry between Liberalization and Social Regulation in the EU.
  Daniel Seikel.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 01, 2016
  This paper analyzes how the apparently merely technical introduction of reversed qualified majority voting for the excessive deficit procedure included in the Six Pack and the Fiscal Compact shifts not only the institutional balance between the European Commission and the Member States but also the relationship between liberalization and social regulation in the EU. In bringing together institutional analysis and a political economy perspective, the paper shows how the strengthening of the Commission's discretionary decision‐making authority in a context of intergovernmental power imbalances between debtor and creditor states extends the asymmetry between market‐making and market‐correction to the area of political decision‐making. In consequence, economic and social policies are subordinated to the primacy of austerity.

  August 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12439   open full text
• European Money in Greece: In Search of the Real Impact of EU Structural Funds.
  Asteris Huliaras, Sotiris Petropoulos.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 24, 2016
  The impact of EU (European Union) Structural Funds (from the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund, the Cohesion Fund, etc.) channelled to Greece and other countries over the last 35 years has been thoroughly evaluated by EU‐commissioned impact reports and relevant academic studies. However, several political consequences of development transfers have been largely neglected. Concepts, methods and conclusions reached by studies of North–South development aid can help greatly to understand the medium‐ and long‐term political impact of EU funds. This article is based on interviews with EU and Greek politicians, officials, beneficiaries and various stakeholders. The conclusion is a less positive – but familiar in other parts of the world – story.

  July 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12432   open full text
• Why is the Court of Justice of the European Union not more Contested? Three Mechanisms of Opposition Abatement.
  Benjamin Werner.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 24, 2016
  The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is famous for playing a central role in promoting the process of European integration. Although the Court has always been criticized for this pro‐integrationist role, Member States have never cut back the CJEU's power. Recently, however, the environment for legal integration has changed: the CJEU is dealing more and more with politically sensitive issues; and that in a period when the integration project as such is becoming increasingly contested. Contrary to the expectations of many scholars, this had not led to more resistance against the CJEU's case law or its power. This article approaches this surprising fact by investigating the CJEU's jurisprudence on Golden Shares, which has substantially reduced national competencies in the contentious issue of corporate control. It shows that the persistent acceptance of the CJEU can be explained with the low and manageable short‐term costs of legal integration.

  July 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12438   open full text
• Strengthening the Rule of Law in the EU: The Council's Inaction.
  Peter Oliver, Justine Stefanelli.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 21, 2016
  In May 2014 the Legal Service of the Council delivered an opinion on the European Commission's Rule of Law Framework, stating the Commission's new mechanism was unlawful. This article sets out a critical analysis of this opinion, and questions whether the annual rule of law dialogue announced by the Council in December 2014 is a feasible response. Hungary is used as a case study to highlight the total failure of the Council to take any action whatsoever in the face of the grave and systemic abuses of human rights committed by the government of that country since 2010; and Poland where an autocratic regime has been in place since the autumn of 2015 is also mentioned. This is contrasted with the efforts of the majority of the Members of the European Parliament to tackle the acute challenge and with the Commission's action on specific breaches. A co‐ordinated strategy is sorely needed.

  July 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12402   open full text
• You'll Never Lobby Alone. Explaining the Participation of Sub‐national Authorities in the European Commission's Open Consultations.
  Matti Van Hecke, Peter Bursens, Jan Beyers.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 20, 2016
  The multi‐level system of the EU (European Union) constrains the institutionalized representation of the regional tier of government. Consequently, SNAs (sub‐national authorities) seek to represent their interests through various lobbying practices, including taking part in the European Commission's open consultations. In this article, we argue that varying levels with which SNAs take part in open consultations cannot be adequately explained by regional‐level conditions such as resources or autonomy. Instead, we hypothesize that the specific policy context strongly affects regional involvement in open consultations. We test our hypotheses with evidence of the participation pattern of 296 SNAs in eight online consultations situated in five policy areas: CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), EAP (Environment Action Programme), Horizon 2020, COH (Cohesion Policy) and TEN‐T (Trans‐European Network for Transport). Our analysis demonstrates that the probability that SNAs take part in open consultations increases significantly when private interests of the same region and/or other SNAs of the same country participate in the same consultation.

  July 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12425   open full text
• Conditionality, Democracy and Institutional Weakness: the Euro‐crisis Trilemma.
  Kevin Featherstone.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 14, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12411   open full text
• Justice and Home Affairs.
  Jörg Monar.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 14, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12409   open full text
• Luxembourg's EU Council Presidency: Adapting Routines to New Circumstances.
  Anna‐Lena Högenauer.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 14, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12410   open full text
• Governance and Institutions: A More Political Commission.
  Desmond Dinan.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 14, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12427   open full text
• Eurozone Crisis Management, Citizenship Rights and the Global Reach of EU Data Protection Law: EU Legal Developments in 2015.
  Thomas Horsley.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 14, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12412   open full text
• Europe as a Global Actor: Searching for a New Strategic Approach.
  Karolina Pomorska, Sophie Vanhoonacker.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 14, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12430   open full text
• Distributive Politics, Electoral Institutions and European Structural and Investment Funding: Evidence from Italy and France.
  Lisa Maria Dellmuth, Dominik Schraff, Michael F. Stoffel.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 13, 2016
  Extensive research suggests that political factors bias the domestic allocation of the European Structural and Investment Funds (SIF) in ways that may not be in line with EU goals. This article offers the first systematic and comparative analysis of the role of electoral institutions in shaping county‐level allocations of SIF. Drawing on theories of distributive politics and federalism, this article argues that electoral institutions provide politicians in the executive branch of national government with incentives to use at least a part of the SIF to buy votes in NUTS 3‐level counties, whereby vote‐buying is more common under majority voting than under proportional representation. The results of a statistical analysis of SIF allocations across 202 Italian and French NUTS 3‐level counties during 2007–13 confirm this argument. The article concludes by discussing the findings and their implications for future research on EU budgetary implementation and cohesion policy.

  July 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12433   open full text
• Juncker's political European Commission and an EU in crisis.
  John Peterson.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 13, 2016
  This article investigates the European Commission under the Presidency of Jean‐Claude Juncker during a time of acute crisis in the European Union. It asks what it means for Juncker to preside over a ‘political Commission’, following his appointment as the so‐called Spitzenkandidat of the centre‐right after the 2014 EP European Parliament election. More generally, it considers what makes the Juncker Commission distinctive. We ask whether Juncker views his EP mandate as giving him licence to head a Commission that is more ambitious than those headed by his predecessor, José Manuel Barroso. We provide empirical raw material for theorizing about the EU, particularly given the prominence of the new intergovernmentalism as a theoretical paradigm of European integration. We argue that it is time to redefine the term ‘intergovernmental’, especially given how the Commission has become more directly linked to and dependent on EU national capitals in a time of acute crisis.

  July 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12435   open full text
• The 2015 Latvian Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
  Daunis Auers, Toms Rostoks.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 13, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12428   open full text
• Eurozone Governance: From the Greek Drama of 2015 to the Five Presidents’ Report.
  Dermot Hodson.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 12, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12408   open full text
• The Politicization of European Integration.
  Hanspeter Kriesi.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 11, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12406   open full text
• A Feasible Unemployment‐Based Shock Absorber for the Euro Area.
  Andrea Brandolini, Francesca Carta, Francesco D'Amuri.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 11, 2016
  Based on theoretical insights, this article identifies the broad characteristics that a shock absorber based on unemployment should have in order to be incentive‐compatible and politically feasible. It then empirically derives the combination of activation thresholds, experience rating, eligibility criteria and benefit generosity which define the systems offering the highest stabilization for given levels of redistribution. The analysis suggests that the shock absorber should: (1) give rise to macro cross‐national transfers, mimicking those that would be generated by a notional euro‐wide unemployment benefit scheme of minimal coverage and generosity, (2) be activated by a trigger and (3) feature partial experience rating. The simulation results, confirmed by robustness checks, show that even systems that do not redistribute resources between countries can have a non‐negligible stabilization impact in the medium run. Low benefit take‐up rates in southern Europe reduce the stabilization properties and the size of the scheme.

  July 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12398   open full text
• Rising Hopes in the European Economy Amidst Global Uncertainties.
  István Benczes, Balázs Szent‐Iványi.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 08, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 08, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12413   open full text
• Chronology: The European Union in 2015.
  Charlotte Galpin.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 06, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  July 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12405   open full text
• Beelines, Bypasses and Blind Alleys: Theory and the Study of the European Union.
  Tim Haughton.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 30, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 30, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12436   open full text
• Which Budgetary Union for the E(M)U?
  Nazaré Costa Cabral.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 30, 2016
  This article considers whether the creation of a budgetary union in the European EMU (economic and monetary union) is a feasible and suitable way to resolve the current impasse created by the euro crisis. The article begins by identifying the major drawbacks concerning the transposition of prescriptions regarding fiscal federalism to the current E(M)U scenario, with the outlook that this appears to be an extemporaneous solution. It then indicates the alternative conception of an incomplete budgetary union, which is mostly characterized by the setting up of specific insurance mechanisms. These alternative measures are shown to be more realistic and feasible, since they combine path dependency with an innovative appropriation of specific features of the classic federalism model, modifying them to an E(M)U scenario in a heterodox way.

  June 30, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12424   open full text
• Recent Developments in the Acte Clair Case Law of the EU Court of Justice: Towards a more Flexible Approach.
  Agne Limante.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 24, 2016
  This article examines the acte clair doctrine in light of the recent rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Ferreira da Silva and X and van Dijk. It first analyses the earlier case law on acte clair, disclosing inconsistencies in the application of its requirements. Then, it offers a critical review of Ferreira da Silva and X and van Dijk. It claims that the Cilfit criteria, although often quoted in judgments and doctrine, have been applied neither consistently nor truly rigidly by the Court. Instead, a more flexible approach to acte clair requirements is taking shape, while the Court is simultaneously reminding national courts that its discretion on preliminary reference issues is not unlimited. Finally, the article criticizes Ferreira da Silva and X and van Dijk for missing the opportunity to further clarify the normative content and the legal status of the Cilfit criteria.

  June 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12434   open full text
• The Communitarization of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice: Why Institutional Change does not Translate into Policy Change.
  Florian Trauner, Ariadna Ripoll Servent.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 21, 2016
  This article proposes an explanation as to why institutional change – understood as more competences for the European Union's supranational institutions – has rarely led to policy change in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). It draws attention to the constraints that newly empowered actors have faced in the wake of introducing the co‐decision procedure. If the key principles of a given AFSJ sub‐policy – its ‘policy core’ – were defined before institutional change occurred, the Council (as the dominant actor of the early intergovernmental co‐operation) has found it easier to prevail in the altered structural environment and to co‐opt or sideline actors with competing rationales. The article compares the importance of the new decision‐making procedure with two alternative pathways potentially leading to policy change, namely, the power of litigation and the impact of unexpected external events.

  June 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12397   open full text
• The ECB's Monetary Dialogue with the European Parliament: Efficiency and Accountability during the Euro Crisis?
  Stefan Collignon, Sebastian Diessner.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 21, 2016
  The monetary dialogue between the European Parliament and the European Central Bank (ECB) is a key component for the democratic accountability of the independent central bank. We provide new evidence for the efficiency of the dialogue and present the results of a survey conducted amongst the members of the parliament's ECON (economic and monetary affairs) committee. We find that while the monetary dialogue may have had little or even a negative impact on financial markets, it plays a significant role in informing and involving members of parliament and their constituencies. Amidst an intensifying debate about the communication and transparency of the ECB, these findings shed new light on the current state of affairs of ECB accountability and its alleged need for enhancement.

  June 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12426   open full text
• The Impact of the Economic Crisis on European Union Environmental Policy.
  Charlotte Burns, Paul Tobin.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 16, 2016
  The ongoing European economic crisis provides a focus for academics wishing to understand the relationship between major exogenous shocks and changes to environmental protection. Yet, measuring change, particularly to policies, is notoriously fraught with difficulties. This research note explores the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with capturing change in response to the economic crisis in Europe, specifically focusing upon the environment. The environment is typically touted as a European Union success story, but there is good reason to suspect that this policy sector may have been – and continues to be – negatively affected by the economic downturn. We suggest a toolkit of measures that can capture changes to this sector, and which may also be employed by researchers of other policy sectors.

  June 16, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12396   open full text
• Local Responses to the European Social Fund: A Cross‐City Comparison of Usage and Change.
  Katharina Zimmermann.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 14, 2016
  Governance in the European Union has become increasingly complex and multi‐facetted in the last decades. The article argues that the ESF (European Social Fund) is a crucial example in this regard since it combines financial incentives, procedural requirements and programmatic conditions. In order to analyse local responses to this complex governance tool, the article deploys analytical tools from the Europeanization literature and builds on in‐depth case knowledge from 18 cities in six European countries. A QCA (Qualitative Comparative Analysis) combined with case discussions reveals three different types of responses to the ESF. In ‘transformer‐cases’, both usage of the ESF and change brought by it can be observed. In ‘cream‐skimmer‐cases’, only usage but no change was measured, and in ‘refusenik‐cases’, neither usage nor change was detected. While usage of the ESF can be explained by individual motivation of local actors or the incentivizing dimension of the funds, change is apparently more complex.

  June 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12395   open full text
• Can Information Increase Turnout in European Parliament Elections? Evidence from a Quasi‐experiment in Denmark.
  Esben Hogh, Martin Vinæs Larsen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 13, 2016
  We examine the effect of information on turnout at a European Parliament election in Denmark. We utilize a quasi‐experimental design to sidestep the substantial problems related to causal inference associated with identifying the effect of information. Specifically, we look at a group of Danish first‐time voters, some of whom were exogenously exposed to information in the run‐up to the 2014 European Parliament election, by participating in a one‐day workshop about EU (European Union) politics. We find that those who participated were more knowledgeable about and more likely to vote in the upcoming European Parliament election. This suggests that increasing political participation in the EU could, in part, be a matter of exposing the European public to more information about EU politics.

  June 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12407   open full text
• Cracks in the Foundations: Understanding the Great Rule of Law Debate in the EU.
  Amichai Magen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 13, 2016
  The article offers a succinct conceptual and analytical framework for approaching the ‘great rule of law debate’ currently unfolding in the EU (European Union) and the contending positions of the various EU institutions embroiled in it. It addresses the challenge of conceptualization imbued in the notion of the rule of law, and critically examines the definition of the concept provided by the EC (European Commission). It then demonstrates that over the course of modern European integration, the rule of law emerged as a central dimension in four distinct core areas of EC/EU identity and activity. Should the contemporary crisis of foundational values persist or deepen, each of the four is expected to be adversely affected. Finally, the article explores the emerging ‘rule of law turn’ in the EU.

  June 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12400   open full text
• The ‘Leap’ from Coordination to Harmonization in Social Policy: Labour Mobility and Occupational Pensions in Europe.
  Igor Guardiancich.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 01, 2016
  The Supplementary Pension Rights Directive, legislated in 2014, represents a leap from minimum co‐ordination of social security rights to minimal harmonization, thereby facilitating the portability of occupational pensions across the EU. The Lisbon Treaty, which relaxed the voting requirements in the Council, accelerated its adoption. In the ‘shadow of the vote’, opponents (mainly continental CMEs) abandoned the defence of the status quo for less exacting legislation. The majority of Member States instead understood that consensus was necessary to appease the domestic concerns of countries like Germany and to strengthen their negotiating position vis‐à‐vis the Parliament. Despite the inevitable watering‐down, the final law modifies domestic pension arrangements across the EU, thereby benefiting mobile workers. The implications are twofold. First, political economists should take into account the growing European influence on domestic pension policy‐making. Second, the extension of QMV to sensitive areas of social policy will probably enhance overall harmonization.

  May 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12394   open full text
• Personality and Euroscepticism: The Impact of Personality on Attitudes Towards the EU.
  Julie Hassing Nielsen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 25, 2016
  Attitudes towards EU integration are widely studied, yet we know only little about the role of personality for EU attitudes. Utilizing a framing experiment encompassing positive and negative frames of EU integration, this article reports on how personality influences attitudes towards EU integration, and how personal predispositions moderate framing effects, impacting EU attitude formation. The study relies on Danish and Swedish data (N = 1808). I test both the direct impact of personality on EU attitudes and personality's moderating impact on framing effects. I find that extraversion and openness positively correlate with positive EU attitudes, while people scoring high on neuroticism tend to support the EU less. Furthermore, I find that personality moderates different EU frames. Individuals with certain personality traits are more influenced by framing effects than others, while positive and negative frames also are perceived differently according to personal predispositions. I find only little country differences between Denmark and Sweden.

  April 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12381   open full text
• Loose Ties or Strong Bonds? The Effect of a Commissioner's Nationality and Partisanship on Voting in the Council.
  Kira Killermann.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 21, 2016
  This article studies the consequences of the increased appointment of political Commissioners for the legislative process. Based on the principal–agent relation between the Council and the Commission, it is hypothesized that governments sharing national and partisan ties with the Commissioner responsible for a legislative proposal are less likely to cast a negative vote. Analysing 687 contested legislative proposals voted upon between 1999 and 2014, it is found that a Member State is indeed less likely to vote against a proposal by the Commissioner from that Member State. Likewise, if the responsible Commissioner is a member of the same European Party Group as at least one of the governing parties, contestation is less likely. European Commissioners seem to use the discretion the EU's legislative system grants them to promote the preferences of their home country and also – to a lesser extent – their party family.

  April 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12359   open full text
• China, the European Union and the Fragile World Order.
  Zhimin Chen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 12, 2016
  The EU (European Union) and China are the two arguably most unusual powers in today's world: the EU as the most integrated regional association of states and China as the largest developing great power. As the post‐Cold War American‐led liberal world order is facing challenges from forces unleashed by the power transition and power diffusion in the international system, this article will look into the order‐shaping roles of the EU and China, to identify their respective visions of a desirable world order and to conceptualize how the EU and China can make themselves ‘building blocks’ of a working world order through parallel, complementary and concerted order‐shaping.

  April 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12383   open full text
• The EU Convergence Machine at Work. To the Benefit of the EU's Poorest Citizens?
  Tim Goedemé, Diego Collado.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 06, 2016
  Social cohesion in the EU (European Union) is usually assessed on the basis of GDP per capita and relative poverty rates. These indicators show that the ‘European convergence machine’ led to greater social cohesion between old and new Member States (EU‐15 and NMS) until the onset of the crisis. In this article we offer an alternative perspective by directly comparing EU citizens’ disposable household incomes. Using four waves of EU‐SILC data, we explore what happened between 2005 and 2011 in the EU‐15 and NMS regarding changes in the lowest household incomes in relation to the EU‐wide median. Results show that, overall, the convergence machine seemed to work well for the lowest incomes in the NMS, but not so much for those living in the EU‐15. At the same time, differences in living standards remain quite large. This points to important continued challenges for EU policy initiatives in the social domain.

  April 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12382   open full text
• Beyond Integration Theory: The (Anti‐)Constitutional Dimension of European Crisis Governance.
  Christian Kreuder‐Sonnen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 23, 2016
  Political science analyses of the governance of the euro crisis largely build on conventional theories of European integration to account for the extent to which institutional developments either reflect supranationalism, inter‐governmentalism or historical path‐dependencies. This analytical focus captures the usual integration dynamics and institutional design outcomes, but overlooks the constitutional dimension of how the crisis affects the EU's legal order. In this agenda‐setting article, I draw attention to legal scholarship that highlights important deviations from the EU's ‘legal normalcy’. Legal studies find that a number of emergency measures were taken on an extra‐legal basis and through quasi‐autocratic procedures. Normative reconstructions interpret this practice as a form of transnational state of exception which transitions into permanent traits of authoritarianism in the EU's legal order. I argue that their findings offer a new terrain for political science research which transcends the explanatory categories of integration theory.

  March 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12379   open full text
• The Effect of Removing Voting Rules: Consultation Practices in the Commission's Delegated Act Expert Groups and Comitology Committees.
  Katrijn Siderius, Gijs Jan Brandsma.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 23, 2016
  The Lisbon Treaty changed the system of delegating executive powers to the European Commission: it introduced the delegated acts system as an alternative to comitology, which continues to exist in parallel. This new system allocates veto power to the European Parliament and the Council, in which Member State expert groups are consulted without having a formal vote. The Council fears that the absence of formal voting will tempt the Commission to ignore Member State input in the expert groups. This article investigates to what degree this fear is justified. To what degree do formal voting rights affect the consultation of Member State experts? On the basis of interviews with Member State experts who participate both in expert groups as well as in comitology committees, we demonstrate how consultation patterns differ between the two settings.

  March 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12380   open full text
• Involuntary Public Policy‐making by For‐Profit Professionals: European Lawyers on Anti‐Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing.
  Karin Svedberg Helgesson, Ulrika Mörth.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 28, 2016
  EU directives on AML (anti‐money laundering)/CTF (counter‐terrorism financing) entail involuntary public policy‐making by for‐profit professionals on politically sensitive issues. This raises fundamental questions on the role of private actors in public policy‐making apart from their roles as lobbyists and contractors. From a democratic perspective, the involuntary public policy‐making by European lawyers is particularly problematic as it involves guardians of the rule of law who, we argue, are simultaneously forced to act as agents of the state. In the case of AML/CTF, lawyers are within the political system rather than outside it. We show that expectations concerning how lawyers are to work closely with the state in the United Kingdom and Sweden differ, and that the policy‐making styles lawyers apply in practice were either ‘pragmatic’ (UK) or ‘evasive’ (Sweden). Our findings provide a first step in understanding the new role of for‐profit professionals as involuntary public policy‐makers, and its possible effects.

  February 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12356   open full text
• Determinants of Bargaining Satisfaction Across Policy Domains in the European Union Council of Ministers.
  Javier Arregui.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 28, 2016
  This research is about the extent to which the policy outcomes in the European Union (EU) decision‐making process represent the policy preferences defended by Member States. Few studies have systematically analysed bargaining satisfaction within the Council. This research uses as a measure of bargaining satisfaction the salient weighted distance between a Member State's policy preference and the decision outcome. This is the first analysis to frame EU Member States' satisfaction using the content of the issues and distinguishing among policy domains. The analysis also includes a substantive number of cases from the post‐2004 enlargement. The empirical analysis shows, in contrast to previous work, that the level of variation of fulfilment in the decision‐making within the Council is considerable across policy domains. The main determinants of bargaining satisfaction are related to both structural and agency factors.

  February 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12355   open full text
• Is the European Commission Really in Decline?
  Neill Nugent, Mark Rhinard.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 25, 2016
  In the academic debate on the relative powers and influence of the EU institutions, it has become common to suggest – especially in the case of advocates of the ‘new intergovernmentalism’ – that the European Commission is in decline. In this article we show that while in some limited respects this is indeed the case, the Commission's overall position in the EU system is not one of having become a weaker institutional actor. The extent of the losses of its powers and influence tends to be exaggerated, while in some aspects its powers and influence have actually been strengthened. We show this by focusing on three of the Commission's core functions – agenda‐setter, legislative actor and executive – all of which are widely portrayed as being in decline. We incorporate into our analysis both the formal and informal resources available to the Commission in exercising the functions.

  February 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12358   open full text
• The Role of Political Efficacy on Public Opinion in the European Union.
  Caroline Mcevoy.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 17, 2016
  Recent developments in EU (European Union) support literature confirm that citizen attitudes towards the EU are shaped by both input‐oriented factors relating to the procedural fairness of the system (e.g. political representation and identity) and output‐oriented factors based on the EU's capacity to yield economic benefits. This article builds on these models by suggesting a theoretical framework of support that is driven by both perceptions of the economy and political efficacy. Using data from the 2013 Eurobarometer 80.1, I find that political efficacy is a key predictor of public opinion towards the EU and that citizens who feel their voice is represented in the EU are more likely to maintain support for the EU even when their perceptions of the economy are poor. The findings in this article have particular significance to the puzzle of declining support for the EU following the onset of the ‘great recession’ in 2008.

  February 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12357   open full text
• Banking Union in Historical Perspective: The Initiative of the European Commission in the 1960s–1970s.
  Emmanuel Mourlon‐Druol.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 27, 2016
  This article shows that planning for the organization of EU banking regulation and supervision did not just appear on the agenda in recent years with discussions over the creation of the eurozone banking union. It unveils a hitherto neglected initiative of the European Commission in the 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival work, this article explains that this initiative, however, rested on a number of different assumptions, and emerged in a much different context. It first explains that the Commission's initial project was not crisis‐driven; that it articulated the link between monetary integration and banking regulation; and finally that it did not set out to move the supervisory framework to the supranational level, unlike present‐day developments.

  January 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12348   open full text
• The European Union Legislature as an Agent of the European Court of Justice.
  Gareth Davies.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 21, 2016
  The European Union is unique among jurisdictions in having constitutionalized its policy goals and methods, by embedding these in the Treaties. As a result, the legislature is far more constrained in its activities than is the case in other constitutional orders. Yet the Treaties are indeterminate, and it is the Court of Justice which interprets and delimits them, and instructs the legislature on how and to what extent it may pursue them. There is, in substance, a principal–agent relationship between the Court and the EU legislature, enforceable by the Court's capacity to annul legislation contrary to its preferences. An examination of internal market legislation shows that indeed it consists of codification of prior case law. The judicial constraints on the EU legislature are sufficiently tight that the legislature is more akin to a subordinate implementing regulator than to an autonomous political policy‐maker.

  January 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12353   open full text
• Not all Treaties are Created Equal: The Effects of Treaty Changes on Legislative Efficiency in the EU.
  Jørgen Bølstad, James P. Cross.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 18, 2016
  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 which the EU creates new laws. An interrupted time series approach is utilized to detect the total effects of treaty change on the decision‐making process. This study thus complements existing research on the effects of decision‐making rules, by employing a design more robust to the challenge of endogeneity. The findings suggest that the Amsterdam treaty was very successful at increasing legislative efficiency. In contrast, the Nice treaty does not appear to have had a notable impact, and, more interestingly, neither does the Lisbon treaty.

  January 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12349   open full text
• The Role of the European Parliament and the US Congress in Shaping Transatlantic Relations: TTIP, NSA Surveillance, and CIA Renditions.
  Davor Jančić.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 15, 2016
  This article analyses the manner in which the parliaments of the EU and the US – two key global strategic partners – participate in the shaping of transatlantic relations. The article argues that the European Parliament (EP) and Congress aim not only to influence their executive branches but also to act autonomously in the transnational arena through parliamentary diplomacy. They seek to secure concessions both formally by scrutinizing transatlantic international agreements, such as TTIP, as well as informally by exposing injustices and diplomatic misconduct through human rights advocacy and institutional pressure, such as in the cases of the NSA surveillance and CIA renditions. The article demonstrates that the EP and Congress have created capacities for internal scrutiny and transnational interparliamentary dialogue and that they utilize their consent powers to make claims, condition transatlantic negotiations and gain greater presence, visibility and influence in international affairs.

  January 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12345   open full text
• Unpacking ‘International Terrorism’: Discourse, the European Community and Counter‐Terrorism, 1975–86.
  Stef Wittendorp.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 14, 2016
  According to convention, the emergence of ‘international terrorism’ led the European Community (EC) member states to initiate co‐operation from the mid‐1970s onwards. A different story is told here by examining how ‘international terrorism’ appeared as threatening and co‐operation in the context of the EC became regarded as a logical solution. The article frames this as political events (‘international terrorism’) overflowing the space of politics (the state), whereby the latter felt it necessary to set up a series of arrangements to try to encapsulate the excesses of the former. It shows how the interpretation of terrorism as an illegitimate political provocation constituted an obligation for states to respond. Stressing the international character highlighted individual states' inability to tackle terrorism, which made it possible for co‐operation to appear as obvious. Trevi and the Dublin Agreement are examined as manifestations seeking to work around, and thus reinventing, the limits of state sovereignty.

  January 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12352   open full text
• From Summitry to EU Government: An Agenda Formation Perspective on the European Council.
  Marcello Carammia, Sebastiaan Princen, Arco Timmermans.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 11, 2016
  While some observers have claimed that the European Council has become the key institution in European Union politics, others have argued that the Council's role has remained relatively stable over time. In this article, we argue that an analysis of agenda formation dynamics in the European Council may help us understand better how the European Council works and how its role has evolved over time. Building on theories of agenda‐setting, we identify two ideal‐typical modes of agenda formation: selective targeting and routine monitoring. Based on a comprehensive dataset of coded European Council Conclusions in the period 1975–2011, we show that the substantive content of the European Council agenda shows little change over time. However, in terms of agenda formation dynamics, we find a marked shift toward routine monitoring of issues. This supports the claim that the European Council is developing into the EU's de facto government.

  January 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12346   open full text
• A Banking Union of Ideas? The Impact of Ordoliberalism and the Vicious Circle on the EU Banking Union.
  David Schäfer.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 05, 2016
  The establishment of the EU banking union reveals two major shortcomings of liberal intergovernmentalism. First, it fails to explain the preference formation of the most important actor – the German government. The banking sector was divided between public and private banks, and there is no clear‐cut pattern about whose interests the German government promoted. Second, material bargaining power cannot account for German concessions despite favourable power asymmetries. This article seeks to demonstrate how an ideational frame can convincingly fill these gaps. Ordoliberal ideas were constitutive for German preferences. The manipulative use of ideas as strategic resources by the German government's opponents explains why it made significant concessions. Germany's government publicly acknowledged that breaking the ‘vicious circle’ between banks and sovereigns was the main objective of the banking union. This became a rhetorical trap used by a coalition of Southern European member states to force the German government to make concessions.

  January 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12351   open full text
• Europeanization and the Soft Law Process of EU Corporate Governance: How has the 2003 Action Plan Impacted on National Corporate Governance Codes?
  Idoya Ferrero Ferrero, Robert Ackrill.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 05, 2016
  Europeanization addresses the impacts of EU (European Union) membership on national politics and policies. Over time, new policy processes have been developed, such as the use of soft law and the open method of co‐ordination. What, though, are the consequences of these new processes for Europeanization? This article contributes to this under‐researched area by examining the extent to which EU soft law influences policy adoption at the national level. Our empirical application is corporate governance, an area of growing EU policy interest, with significant soft law elements. We analyse the extent to which the European Commission's 2003 plan to enhance corporate governance achieved its aim of ‘co‐ordinating corporate governance efforts of Member States’. Our quantitative analysis of 95 national codes issued over 1992–2010 suggests that the Action Plan did influence national policy‐making, but that the degree of national policy alignment depends on when the corporate governance code was issued, where, and by whom.

  January 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12344   open full text
• Impact of Career Paths on MEPs’ Activities.
  Robert Geffen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 05, 2016
  The increasing powers of the European Parliament in recent decades have made it a more attractive institution for ambitious politicians keen to build their political career in the EU's multi‐level system. A key contribution to the debate about the career paths of MEPs is made by Scarrow (). Her work, which identified three different career paths taken by MEPs, has been widely cited and used as a basis for other studies on this topic. Building on Scarrow's work, this paper describes two additional categories of MEPs – former national politicians and ‘one‐off’ MEPs – and links MEPs’ careers with their activities in Parliament. It finds that over and above the factors that have previously been identified as influential on an MEP's behaviour, his or her career path and ambitions are relevant in explaining certain legislative behaviour across Member States and party groups.

  January 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12347   open full text
• Africa–EU Relations and Normative Power Europe: A Decolonial Pan‐African Critique.
  Ueli Staeger.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 29, 2015
  The debate on NPE (Normative Power Europe) has flourished for more than a decade. NPE has shaped Africa–EU relations considerably, especially since the founding of the AU (African Union). Yet while the EU aspires to be a post‐imperial, normative power, this postcolonial critique suggests NPE is a neo‐Kantian, Eurocentric discourse that reinvigorates an outdated European moral paternalism. The article explores the role of NPE in Africa–EU relations through a Foucauldian conceptualization of knowledge in EU foreign policy, and insists particularly on how pan‐African regionalization and NPE led to unwarranted optimism about deploying European norms in Africa. To the contrary, a decolonial perspective reveals that AU–EU inter‐regional structural and organizational convergence enchains only frail normative convergence, which will diminish as the pan‐African project unfolds further.

  December 29, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12350   open full text
• Neo‐Functional Peace: The European Union Way of Resolving Conflicts.
  Gëzim Visoka, John Doyle.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 09, 2015
  The European Union has expanded its role in preventing conflicts and building peace, but its institutional practices remain insufficiently conceptualized. This article argues that, drawing from a strong self‐perception toward a neo‐functionalist interpretation of its own history, the EU uses 'neo‐functional peace’ as an approach for resolving protracted disputes, through deconstructing highly political issues into technical meanings in order to achieve mutually acceptable agreements. This article explores the EU's efforts to normalize relations between Kosovo and Serbia, and examines the reliance on aspects of neo‐functionalism for building peace after protracted disputes. We argue that neo‐functional peace has played a crucial role in normalizing political relations and reconciling some of the outstanding disputes between Kosovo and Serbia. Building on this case study, we suggest a theoretical concept of neo‐functional peace as a useful means to conceptualize the EU's peace support practices.

  December 09, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12342   open full text
• Crisis and Public Support for the Euro, 1990–2014.
  Felix Roth, Lars Jonung, Felicitas Nowak‐Lehmann D.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 08, 2015
  This article analyses the evolution of public support for the single European currency, the euro, from 1990 to 2014 for a 12‐country sample of the euro area (EA‐12), focusing on the most recent period of the financial and sovereign debt crisis, starting in 2008. We find that citizens' support for the euro on average was marginally reduced during the first six years of the crisis, and that support has remained at high levels. While the pronounced increase in unemployment in the EA‐12 throughout the crisis has led to a marked decline in trust in the European Central Bank (ECB), it is only weakly related to support for the euro.

  December 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12338   open full text
• Structural Data on Immigration or Immigration Perceptions? What Accounts for the Electoral Success of the Radical Right in Europe?
  Daniel Stockemer.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 19, 2015
  Targeting immigrants as a threat to employment, security and cultural cohesion, the radical right has averaged 10 percent of the vote in elections. What drives this vote? Are voters affected by the numbers of foreign‐born individuals in a geographical region, by negative perceptions about immigrants, or both? In this article, I entertain the possibility that it is not the number of foreigners but citizens’ perceptions about immigrants that explain individuals’ tendencies to vote for the radical right. To test this stipulation, I combine European Social Survey (ESS) data on individual perceptions of immigrants for more than 25,000 individuals with macro‐level data on the actual percentage of foreign‐born citizens across 200 European regions. Using a bivariate and multivariate framework, I highlight that it is only the individual perceptions of immigration indicator, and not the number of foreign‐born citizens, that is positively related to higher support for radical right‐wing parties.

  November 19, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12341   open full text
• Welfare‐theoretic Optimal Policies in a New‐Keynesian Economy with Heterogeneous Regions: Any Role for Financial Integration?
  Marcin Wolski.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 04, 2015
  This paper provides a welfare‐theoretic explanation of the inferiority of area‐wide policies, com‐ pared to their country‐specific equivalents, in the case when shocks spread unevenly across regions. Our analysis points out that under union‐wide policies, regions which suffer relatively more from shocks will benefit from policy interventions at the expense of others. Using the new‐Keynesian framework we propose a new area‐wide welfare‐theoretic loss function which is heterogeneity‐consistent, i.e. it guarantees the same outcomes as if a policy maker was targeting each of the regions individually. We study the dynamics of the theoretically‐induced losses resulting from the area‐wide policies using the example of the euro zone in the years 1999–2013 and compare it with the level of money market integration. Our study suggests that more intense financial integration was associated with smaller long‐run average losses from heterogeneity‐inconsistent aggregate policies. We find no similar effects for short‐run dynamics.

  November 04, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12337   open full text
• Legitimacy and Multi‐Level Governance in European Union Competition Law: A Deliberative Discursive Approach.
  Firat Cengiz.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 04, 2015
  Union competition law protects ‘consumer welfare’, but what role do consumers play in competition policy‐making? This is the question that this article seeks to answer. In the search for an answer, the article investigates the moral (output) and procedural (input) legitimacy of the recent competition law reforms. Following a discursive approach, the article looks into the roles played by institutions deliberating for citizens (consumer organizations, European Parliament and the Union Courts) in the reform process. This inquiry results in the questioning of the reforms’ legitimacy, and it also leads to broader conclusions regarding the legitimacy of multi‐level governance: expert discourses overshadow potential deliberative qualities of networks, which exacerbates networks’ legitimacy problems. Also, the input/output legitimacy dichotomy appears problematic, as expert policy‐making in the absence of citizen participation does not guarantee policies resonating with public interest.

  November 04, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12339   open full text
• EU, US and ASEAN Actorness in G20 Financial Policy‐Making: Bridging the EU Studies–New Regionalism Divide.
  Steffen Murau, Kilian Spandler.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 03, 2015
  This article compares the European Union's (EU) actorness in foreign financial policy to that of the US and ASEAN. It thus contributes to the dialogue between EU studies and the New Regionalism by putting it into practice through comparative research. It argues that a process‐oriented interpretation of the actorness concept can be used to compare the EU to both nation‐states and international organizations at the same time. This makes it possible to examine the ‘nature of the beast’ in specific foreign policy contexts on empirical grounds. The case study analyses EU, US and ASEAN actorness in the IMF reform negotiations within the G20 framework. The findings suggest that a ‘two‐way comparison’ of the EU is not only possible but also provides valuable empirical insights into the role of informal politics in the EU and other regions.

  November 03, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12340   open full text
• Societal Empowerment and Europeanization: Revisiting the EU's Impact on Democratization.
  Gergana Noutcheva.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 27, 2015
  The Europeanization literature predominantly credits the empowerment of pro‐reform political elites through the EU's incentives for the democratization of non‐EU countries. The existing studies under‐emphasize the societal dimension of the EU's impact and the normative context in which the EU's leverage is applied. Taking a societal perspective, this article examines societal empowerment as an alternative to elite empowerment and proposes four mechanisms of EU influence on democratization through societies taking into account the EU's structural power and actorness, and considering their effects on the societal sphere and societal actions. Applying the mechanisms to a tough case for societal mobilization for democracy – Bulgaria – the article shows how the EU, through representing a legitimate model of democratic governance, has created a strong pro‐reform societal constituency that can sustain the democratic dynamic. The article also demonstrates the relevance of cross‐national diffusion processes for pro‐democracy societal mobilization.

  October 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12322   open full text
• Europeanization through Policy Networks in the Southern Neighbourhood: Advancing Renewable Energy Rules in Morocco and Algeria.
  Angelos Katsaris.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 27, 2015
  This research contributes to the literatures of Europeanization and European public administration by investigating EU rule advancement outside Europe. The article argues that the European Commission requires professional networks to advance the European Union (EU) acquis in Morocco and Algeria regarding climate change mitigation. However, certain conditions determine its network‐building efforts outside Europe. Functional interests and sectoral interdependence provide the Commission with increased bargaining power in Morocco. Thus, market access and expertise offers trigger Morocco to develop technical dialogue over renewable energies. Instead, a Commission‐led technical network over renewable energies creates antagonistic relations with the Algerian state elite. An alternative energy relationship with Europe beyond conventional resources could incur revenue losses for the state and a shift towards a different economic model. As a result, state hierarchies intervene in network‐building and lead professionals to stagnant outcomes. The study takes an actor‐centred approach, opting for proximity in network operations.

  October 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12320   open full text
• Quality Work and the Moral Economy of European Employment Policy.
  Sharon Bolton, Knut Laaser, Darren Mcguire.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 27, 2015
  Following a decade of radical economic and workplace restructuring, it is important to understand how state employment policies support or deny human flourishing. This article utilizes a realist document analysis approach and reviews European employment policy through a moral economy lens. It fuses different moral economy approaches, drawing together the work of Karl Polanyi and Andrew Sayer a multi‐layered conceptual lens is offered that explores the tensions between a commodification of labour and human needs. A dominant market ideology is revealed, highlighting how quality work has been subsumed by the flexicurity agenda in the EU.

  October 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12304   open full text
• Constraining Political Budget Cycles: Media Strength and Fiscal Institutions in the Enlarged EU.
  Esther Ademmer, Ferdinand Dreher.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 27, 2015
  This article revisits institutional constraints to political budget cycles (PBCs) in the enlarged European Union (EU). Based on a panel of 25 Member States, we show that governments frequently fiscally stimulate the economy prior to elections. We argue that the occurrence of PBCs in the enlarged EU can be well explained by a peculiar interaction of two prominently discussed institutional constraints: fiscal institutions and media strength. Fiscal rules only help to limit the extent of PBCs in countries where the media is relatively weak, whereas they fail to do so in countries that host a strong press. Suggesting that this may be due to the usage of creative accounting practices in weaker media environments, we conclude that a powerful press remains key to eradicating PBCs in the EU.

  October 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12306   open full text
• Exporting the Competition Policy Regime of the European Union: Success or Failure? Empirical Evidence for Acceding Countries.
  Michael H. Böheim, Klaus S. Friesenbichler.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 22, 2015
  This paper studies the role of a country's EU membership status as an explanatory factor of regulatory quality. It argues that accession to the European Union improves the quality of regulation via the implementation of pro‐competitive policies embedded in the Community Acquis. We assess this conjecture empirically for the (former) transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe, using Member States as well as developing and developed countries in Europe and Central Asia as a control group. The data used is a macro‐economic panel of 48 countries covering six three‐year periods between 1995 and 2012. We find that EU accession positively affected the quality of competition policies over and above an overall trend towards more market‐oriented policies. The improvement in competition policies was not reversed in a single country of the sample, documenting the strong and sustainable transformative power of the EU. The findings are robust when controlling for endogeneity issues.

  October 22, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12321   open full text
• The Return of Politics – The European Union after the crises in the eurozone and Ukraine.
  Luuk Middelaar.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 14, 2015
  A crisis can reveal characteristics of a political order which in normal times remain invisible. Two such moments of clarification hit European Union (EU) countries in quick succession. The euro crisis tested the resolve of leaders and peoples to save the single currency. The geopolitical standoff around Ukraine necessitated a joint response to a show of force. In both cases we saw a ‘return of politics’. Geopolitical interests trumped economic ones; a need for government (and not just governance) made itself felt; European politics became more salient and intertwined with domestic politics. In the turmoil, notwithstanding calls for a big leap toward greater unity, the European Union also showed its dynamic in‐between nature. The public perceives this politicisation perfectly, hence both its disenchantment and the calls for more democracy. EU integration, after ‘permissive consensus’ and ‘constraining dissensus’, could be moving to the era of binding dissensus.

  October 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12336   open full text
• ‘Heavy Fog in the Channel. Continent Cut Off’? British Diplomatic Relations in Brussels after 2010.
  Maja Kluger Rasmussen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 12, 2015
  What happens when a Member State challenges the unwritten rule of consensual decision‐making in the Council of the EU? Are their diplomats marginalized, or do other countries make an extra effort to attempt to get them on board? In this article, I use the UK (United Kingdom) in the area of financial and economic EU co‐operation as a case study to explore these questions. The British government has been unwilling to sign up for a range of recent EU crisis‐management measures and has not been afraid of utilizing its veto. Based on 33 interviews with diplomats from 20 countries, this article demonstrates that British diplomats have not become marginalized, but changes have occurred; other countries no longer go the extra mile to get the UK on board and they are worried that they will be seen as obstructive if they align themselves with the UK.

  October 12, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12319   open full text
• Risks, Costs and Labour Markets: Explaining Cross‐National Patterns of Far Right Party Success in European Parliament Elections.
  Daphne Halikiopoulou, Tim Vlandas.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 12, 2015
  Does the economy affect patterns of far‐right party support across countries? This article reconceptualizes micro‐level analyses that focus on the effect of unemployment through a framework of costs, risks and the mediating role of labour market institutions. It then derives several hypotheses and tests them on the results of the previous three EP elections in all EU Member States. Findings from multiple regression analyses indicate that unemployment, real GDP growth, debt and deficits have no statistically significant effect on far‐right party support at the national level. By contrast, labour market institutions influence costs and risks: where unemployment benefits and dismissal regulations are high, unemployment has no effect, but where either one of them is low, unemployment leads to higher far‐right party support. This explains why unemployment has not led to far‐right party support in some European countries that experienced the severity of the 2008 eurozone crisis.

  October 12, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12310   open full text
• Banking on Bonds: The New Links Between States and Markets.
  Daniela Gabor, Cornel Ban.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 12, 2015
  This article examines a neglected structural transformation in European finance: the growing importance of government debt as collateral for Europe's repo markets, where banks borrow cash against collateral. Seduced by the promises of repo market‐driven financial integration, the EU institutions and Member States encouraged private finance to generate its own architecture for the European repo market in the early years of the euro, sidelining known problems about systemic fragilities. These fragilities materialized after Lehman Brothers’ collapse and were exacerbated by the ECB's collateral policies. The European sovereign debt crisis shows that governments, just like private asset issuers, can rapidly become vulnerable to repo pro‐cyclicality and collateral crises.

  October 12, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12309   open full text
• The Centralization of EU Competition Policy: Historical Institutionalist Dynamics from Cartel Monitoring to Merger Control (1956–91).
  Laurent Warlouzet.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 08, 2015
  The contemporary strength of EU competition policy does not stem naturally and mechanically from the Treaty of Rome, nor is it only a consequence of the spread of ‘neoliberal’ ideas or the single market programme. It is also the product of decades of dynamics underlined by historical institutionalism, which allowed the Commission to secure decisive powers, despite the unwillingness of some of the most powerful Member States. In this regard, the two most important cornerstones were Regulations 17/62 on cartels and 4064/89 on mergers. The Commission benefited from the unintended consequences of decisions taken in the Council and from the path dependencies created by Regulation 17/62. It progressively developed a centralized institutional framework with itself at the centre.

  October 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12318   open full text
• Is Africa Really Following Europe? An Integrated Framework for Comparative Regionalism.
  Lorenzo Fioramonti, Frank Mattheis.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 08, 2015
  Since the establishment of the AU (African Union) in 2002, there have been indications that Africa may be following in Europe's footsteps in the process of regional integration. But is this really so? This article argues that, while there is an increasing focus on comparative regionalism in scholarly debates, we have not yet developed frameworks for empirical comparative research in this field. This often leads analysts to draw general conclusions from cases of institutional isomorphism, thus neglecting other critical dimensions. By applying an integrated framework, which takes into account the multi‐dimensional aspects of old and new regionalisms, this article shows that the most critical features of the European regionalization process, from the gradual stepwise approach towards shared sovereignty to the focus on trade integration and social cohesion, are largely absent from Africa's regionalism, which presents unique characters that are often overshadowed by traditional analyses.

  October 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12307   open full text
• Endogeneity Analysis of Output Synchronization in the Current and Prospective EMU.
  Philip Arestis, Peter Phelps.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. October 08, 2015
  The sustainability of European EMU (economic and monetary union) remains an important issue in light of existing plans for enlargement. This article conducts an endogeneity analysis of output synchronization, based on panel data estimation from 1994 to 2013, for different country‐groups, including core, periphery, central and eastern European countries, northern European countries and the prospective candidate countries, which are expected to adopt the euro over the coming years. The quantification of trade‐related and direct spillover channels associated with monetary integration provides insight into the relative importance of direct and indirect synchronization gains arising from EMU membership. The use of amplitude and concordance measures of synchronization and a range of estimators enhances robustness. Important endogeneity implications emerge from our analysis.

  October 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12303   open full text
• Regional Business‐Cycle Synchronization, Sector Specialization and EU Accession.
  Jürgen Bierbaumer‐Polly, Peter Huber, Petr Rozmahel.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 30, 2015
  We examine the effects of Eastern and Northern enlargement of the EU on regional business‐cycle synchronization and sector specialization. Difference‐in‐difference estimates show that cyclical synchronicity decreased and differences in sector structure increased in acceding region‐pairs after Eastern enlargement. For Northern enlargement, results are more ambiguous. Moreover, in both enlargement episodes, region‐pairs with highly synchronous business cycles before accession experienced weaker cyclical and structural convergence than region‐pairs with less synchronous cycles. Likewise, region‐pairs with more similar sector structures before accession experienced stronger divergence (or weaker convergence) of structural similarity and business‐cycle synchronicity after the enlargement. We argue that these results call for developing more differentiated hypotheses on EU enlargement's effects on business‐cycle synchronization and sector specialization.

  July 30, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12296   open full text
• Pressure and Expertise: Explaining the Information Supply of Interest Groups in EU Legislative Lobbying.
  Iskander De Bruycker.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 29, 2015
  EU politics has long been portrayed as an elite affair in which technocratic deliberation prevails. As a consequence, information supply by interest groups has typically been viewed as part of an expertise‐based exchange with policy‐makers. Less attention has been devoted to whether the supply of information is also used to exert political pressure. In addition to expertise‐based exchanges between interest groups and policy‐makers, can we identify the prevalence of information supply that aims to put pressure on EU policy‐makers? And under what conditions are different modes of information supply likely to occur? My analysis relies on interviews with 143 lobbyists who were active on a set of 78 legislative proposals submitted by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010. The results demonstrate that expertise‐based exchanges are dominant in interactions with civil servants, while political information is predominantly communicated to political officials and often the key substance in outside lobbying tactics.

  July 29, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12298   open full text
• Openness to Globalization and Regional Growth Patterns in CEE Countries: From the EU Accession to the Economic Crisis.
  Roberta Capello, Giovanni Perucca.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 22, 2014
  In the last decades a deep process of institutional reforms and economic reorganization took place in central and eastern EU countries (CEE). These changes occurred in a context of general economic integration. On the one hand, the European Union enlargement programme was launched and all CEE countries applied to become EU member between 1994 and 1996. On the other hand, the globalization of the world economy characterized this historical phase. This article explores to what extent openness to global markets mediated the impact of EU integration on the economic performance of CEE regions in different periods. The periods examined are defined by the main institutional changes that occurred on the road towards EU integration. Results show that globally open regions performed better than the others, at least in the first two periods analyzed.

  May 22, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12157   open full text
• The Battle for Influence: The Politics of Business Lobbying in the European Parliament.
  Maja Kluger Rasmussen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 06, 2014
  The European Parliament (EP) has become an increasingly important lobbying venue for business due to the recent enhancement of its regulatory powers. Existing research, however, disagrees on the extent to which the intensified business lobbying has resulted in increased business influence on EP policy outcomes. Some studies find a ‘business bias’ in the EP, while others still perceive it to be a forceful promoter of diffuse interests (such as consumer and environmental groups). This article examines the conditions under which business groups shape policy outcomes in the EP. The article uses a comparative qualitative case study design of four recent legislative dossiers, and draws on process‐tracing of EU documents and lobbying letters, and 145 interviews. It finds that the ability of business to leave its fingerprints on EP reports depends on a number of factors – most notably business unity, low issue salience and dossiers being dealt with by mainstream committees.

  May 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12156   open full text
• Generational Differences in Values in Central and Eastern Europe: The Effects of Politico‐Economic Transition.
  Ekaterina Turkina, Lena Surzhko‐Harned.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 02, 2014
  This article explores the effects of post‐communist transition and European enlargement on intergenerational politico‐economic values in three groups of countries: Central and Eastern European countries that became European Union members; countries with EU membership prospects; and those that have no membership prospects, at least in the foreseeable future. The analysis indicates considerable differences between these three groups of countries and shows that over time Europeanization served as an intra‐cohort mechanism of social change: it smoothed over intergenerational differences and led to a trend of convergence in values between new Eastern members of the EU and Western Europe. Europeanization also appears to have some harmonizing power on intergenerational differences in countries with EU membership prospects. At the same time, the rough post‐communist transition process and the lack of consolidation mechanisms created considerable intergenerational differences in European countries without EU membership prospects, as revealed by the dominance of cohort replacement mechanism in these countries.

  May 02, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12155   open full text
• EU Confidential: The European Parliament's Involvement in EU Security and Defence Policy.
  Guri Rosén.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. May 02, 2014
  In 2002, the European Parliament (EP) and the Council concluded an Interinstitutional Agreement that gave the EP privileged access to sensitive documents in the area of security and defence. It is argued that the Council let the EP become involved in this sensitive policy area because it accepted the legislature's argument for its right to access. In addition, the EP's bargaining strategy concretized the procedures and contributed to finalizing the deal after two years of negotiation. It is shown in this article that despite the EP's marginal powers in the area of security and defence and the traditional conception of this policy as an executive prerogative, it cannot be isolated from democratic principles. This article provides new evidence for previous claims that the EP's involvement in EU foreign policy is increasing due to legitimacy concerns. It also offers a theoretical account for why this is so.

  May 02, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12154   open full text
• Rethinking the ‘Erasmus Effect’ on European Identity.
  Kristine Mitchell.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 11, 2014
  The Erasmus programme for university student exchange was developed, in part, to foster European identity among its participants, who complete a short‐term sojourn studying in another European country. However, two previous panel studies of the impact of Erasmus participation on European identity find no significant ‘Erasmus effect’. This article analyzes new survey data – a novel panel study of 1,729 students from 28 universities in six countries – and finds the opposite: participation in an Erasmus exchange is significantly and positively related to changes in both identification as European and identification with Europe. Furthermore, the data underscore the significance of cross‐border interaction and cognitive mobilization for explaining identity change: transnational contact during the exchange is positively related to change in both dimensions of European identity, and increased knowledge of Europe and attention to European news over the course of the exchange is associated with enhanced identification with Europe.

  April 11, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12152   open full text
• External Perceptions and EU Foreign Policy Effectiveness: The Case of Climate Change.
  Diarmuid Torney.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 11, 2014
  Recent research on external perceptions of the European Union (EU) has not explored sufficiently the implications of its findings for the effectiveness of EU external policies. To address this gap, this article explores the relationship between external perceptions and effectiveness by considering the case of climate change in which, despite broadly favourable external perceptions, EU external effectiveness has been somewhat limited. It uses the case of Chinese and Indian relations with the EU on climate change to illustrate that the findings of the external perceptions literature should be interpreted in the light of the dynamics of specific policy areas as well as broader changes in the context of world politics. The argument is illustrated using the example of negotiations on the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012, which shows how, under certain circumstances, positive external perceptions may in fact limit external effectiveness.

  April 11, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12150   open full text
• From Business to Politics: Cross‐Border Inter‐Firm Networks and Policy Spillovers in the EU's Eastern Neighbourhood.
  Ekaterina Turkina, Evgeny Postnikov.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 10, 2014
  The European Union (EU) encourages cross‐border inter‐firm networks as a part of its external governance approach. What is the effect of these networks? Do they lead to regulatory convergence around EU standards in the eastern neighbourhood? Using original survey data, as well as data on regional enterprise‐related regulations, this article argues that the density of interaction among private actors and between private actors and regional governments in such networks create conditions for private actors to lobby for regulatory change, resulting in approximations to EU standards. By testing the transnational mechanisms of policy change, the article points to the possibility of integration, even in the absence of membership prospects. However, the findings also indicate that the extent of regulatory change is conditioned by cross‐border network structure as well as the institutional distance between the partnering regions.

  April 10, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12138   open full text
• EU Trade in Financial Services with ASEAN, Policy Coherence for Development and Financial Crisis.
  Alfredo C. Robles.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 10, 2014
  In the wake of the financial crisis, negotiating free trade agreements (FTAs) with Southeast Asia has become a priority for the European Union (EU). Paradoxically, all the indications are that the EU will demand that Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand liberalize financial services trade with the EU. This article asks whether the EU's policy undermines coherence between EU trade and development policies. It argues that the EU and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) agree that financial services are crucial for development, but that they differ on the approach to liberalization: the EU advocates broad‐ranging liberalization, whereas ASEAN countries favour a cautious approach, conditioned by their experience of the Asian financial crisis. In view of this divergence, the EU will have to rethink its approach to financial services trade liberalization in negotiations with ASEAN countries.

  April 10, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12148   open full text
• The Limits of Normalization: Taking Stock of the EU‐US Comparative Literature.
  Pier Domenico Tortola.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 10, 2014
  This article contributes to the research on the normalization of European Union (EU) studies by presenting an analysis and assessment of the EU‐US comparative literature. Using an original and comprehensive data set of 104 publications, it shows not only that these comparisons have grown considerably since the early 1990s, but also and more interestingly that EU‐US scholarship itself has increasingly conformed to mainstream political science by becoming more diverse, causal in nature and empirically inclusive. Unlike other accounts of normalization, however, it is argued here that these transformations are only partly desirable, and that a better direction for the future is to develop EU‐US research as a distinct programme within EU studies, centred on a ‘dual mission’ – theoretical and empirical – that accepts political science's scope and explanatory objectives, but at the same time sees the two cases as worthy of being studied in isolation owing to their importance and the political value of their comparison.

  April 10, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12143   open full text
• The Cultivation of Genetically Modified Organisms in the European Union: A Necessary Trade‐Off?
  François Randour, Cédric Janssens, Tom Delreux.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 10, 2014
  This article analyzes the reasons why in 2010 the European Commission proposed a legislative framework on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that could give some powers back to the Member States. This legislative proposal is puzzling since it moves the centre of decision‐making regarding the cultivation of GMOs from the EU level back to the domestic level and it also contradicts the generally acknowledged behaviour of the Commission as a competence maximizer. Using a multilevel governance perspective and based on an extensive literature review and semi‐structured interviews, the article examines the dynamics and relationships between the various levels of governance that generated pressures on the Commission to issue this counterintuitive proposal. The findings suggest that the Commission is making a (necessary) trade‐off between, on the one hand, the respect of international obligations and the preservation of the internal market, and on the other hand, internal pressures towards stricter regulation of GMOs.

  April 10, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12149   open full text
• Discreet Players: Jean Monnet, Transatlantic Networks and Policy‐Makers in International Co‐operation.
  Constantin Chira‐Pascanut.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 03, 2014
  The origins of the first supranational European community can be traced back to the bold and imaginative proposal drafted by Jean Monnet in early 1950. Yet his plan entered history under a different name: that of the statesman who offered his political backing – Robert Schuman. This article investigates the factors that made it possible for political leaders to accept this ground‐breaking idea. Furthermore, it investigates the source of Monnet's power and influence, which helped to persuade various leaders at different times. By adopting a transnational network approach, it concludes that policy‐makers' acceptance of the coal and steel plan was the result of Monnet's special method of persuasion, developed and refined over the years, and the activity of and pressure exerted by his close network of influential transatlantic friends.

  April 03, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12142   open full text
• Explaining Interest Groups' Articulation of Policy Preferences in the European Commission's Open Consultations: An Analysis of the Environmental Policy Area.
  Adriana Bunea.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. April 03, 2014
  Why do some interest groups express more policy preferences than others during open consultations organized by the European Commission? This article examines this question by testing an explanatory framework that emphasizes the inter‐organizational context in which lobbying takes place and interest groups' resource endowment. The empirical analysis focuses on environmental policy‐making. The findings show that interest groups' preference articulation behaviour is largely influenced by the number of inter‐organizational linkages they have with other stakeholders. Resource endowment matters in that resource‐rich interest organizations are found to be less likely to articulate their preferences via open consultations. Interest groups' organizational form is also a relevant predictor of the likelihood they articulate preferences: in consultations, European federations voice more preferences than national or individual organizations.

  April 03, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12151   open full text
• Transnational Networks and Paths to EU Environmental Compliance: Evidence from New Member States.
  Liliana B. Andonova, Ioana A. Tuta.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 27, 2014
  This article examines transnational environmental networks as an important and thus far under‐studied mechanism that can influence the pathways toward compliance with European Union (EU) legislation in new Member States. The argument stipulates that transnational networks, on balance, increase the capacity and political leverage of Central and Eastern European states and societal actors to activate management and enforcement paths to compliance with EU environmental norms. The theoretical framework specifies the network assets and the mechanisms through which they can support the two paths to compliance. In the empirical section, this framework is used to examine the impact of transnational environmental networks on the compliance with EU biodiversity directives in two of the most recent Member States: Bulgaria and Romania.

  March 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12126   open full text
• Who Decides What EU Issues Ministers Talk About? Explaining Governmental EU Policy Co‐Ordination in Finland.
  Anna Hyvärinen, Tapio Raunio.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 27, 2014
  The political dynamics of European Union (EU) governance has arguably strengthened the role of civil servants at the expense of democratically elected office‐holders. However, whether this applies to intra‐cabinet EU decision‐making is more difficult to analyze. Drawing on the agendas (1995–2012) of the Finnish ministerial EU Committee and on interviews with key civil servants, this article examines whether the interests of governing parties or bureaucratic procedures are more important in determining which EU policies are debated by the government and which in turn are decentralized to individual ministries. The analysis confirms the strong influence of both established administrative procedures and of a small elite of civil servants in setting the agenda of governmental EU policy formulation. The paper also shows that intra‐cabinet co‐ordination focuses on high politics issues, with individual EU laws seldom discussed by the government – a finding that raises important questions about the accountability of domestic EU co‐ordination.

  March 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12134   open full text
• EU Co‐Ordination and the Convergence of Domestic Unemployment Protection Schemes.
  Jörg Paetzold, Olaf Van Vliet.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 20, 2014
  The European Employment Strategy (EES) aims to promote convergence towards higher employment and lower unemployment by soft law instruments. Previous studies in the Europeanization literature on the impact of the EES are mainly focused on active labour market policies. This article explains cross‐national variation in national passive labour market policies. Building on new pooled time‐series data, the empirical findings reveal the presence of a convergence process among the most advanced economies regarding passive labour market policy efforts, with the EES fostering this trend even further. Furthermore, the findings support the argument that the EES creates pressure on governments to reform domestic labour market policies, but this pressure varies across countries and over time. The findings provide new insights into the relationship between Europeanization and convergence, which may be relevant for EU co‐ordination more generally – for example, for the EU 2020 strategy.

  March 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12139   open full text
• Explaining Task Allocation in the EU: ‘Retooling’ Federalism for Comparative Analysis.
  David Benson, Andrew Jordan.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 11, 2014
  Federal theories are once again enjoying renewed interest within European Union studies, where they potentially have multiple uses, including shedding more light on the enduringly puzzling issue of task allocation. Yet their overtly rationalist nature means that they may underestimate the contingent and socially constructed nature of integration principles and norms. One recent theory that tries to adopt a more socially nuanced explanation of task allocation is cryptofederalism. This article further develops its central arguments by adding insights drawn from social constructivism, then applying them to the animal welfare sector – a deeply controversial policy area where task allocation has always proven difficult to explain. It reveals that, once ‘retooled’, cryptofederalism adds a new but incomplete dimension to federal accounts of task allocation. Several scenarios of the potential future relationship between federalism and constructivism are then explored with respect to the changing ‘mosaic’ of European integration theory.

  March 11, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12131   open full text
• Politicizing Europe in the national electoral arena: A comparative analysis of five West European countries, 1970–2010.
  Swen Hutter, Edgar Grande.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 09, 2014
  Although politicization has become a key concept in European integration studies, it is still contested whether, when and to what extent European issues have become politicized in domestic political arenas. This article contributes to this discussion both in conceptual and empirical terms. It uses a new multidimensional index of politicization to systematically trace the development of politicization in national election campaigns in five West European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland) from the 1970s to 2010. The findings provide clear evidence that Europe has indeed been politicized in the past decades. Moreover, two different paths towards such a politicization are identified. One of these paths is dominated by populist radical parties from the right, while the other path is shaped by the conflict between mainstream parties in government and opposition. On both paths, conflicts over membership play an important role and cultural‐identitarian framing strategies are used.

  March 09, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12133   open full text
• Maastricht Social Protocol Revisited: Origins of the European Industrial Relations System.
  Satoshi Nakano.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. March 04, 2014
  The Protocol and the Agreement on Social Policy annexed to the Treaty on European Union (the so‐called ‘social protocol’) stipulated the procedural rules of the European system of industrial relations about twenty years ago. It has been pointed out, however, that the procedure has such distinct features as centricity of cross‐sectoral agreements and a close nexus between legislation and negotiations, which most of the national social systems lack. This article locates the origins of these features in the historical processes towards the 1991 social partners' agreement through some primary and secondary documents as well as a series of structured questionnaire studies and hearings. It is discussed that, contrary to what some conventional interpretations assume, the social protocol was an original model of horizontal subsidiarity, with actors' different preferences on the desirability of labour market order governed by both legislation and negotiations in its background.

  March 04, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12137   open full text
• Does National Identity Matter? Political Conditionality and the Crucial Case of Serbia's (Non‐)Co‐operation with the ICTY.
  Maria Pawelec, Sonja Grimm.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 27, 2014
  Seeking to explain the difficult cases of delayed democratic transition in the Western Balkans, recent literature argues that ‘national identity’ significantly limits the effectiveness of external actors’ political conditionality. This argument is tested in this article by investigating Serbia's co‐operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was demanded by the United States and the European Union (EU). The findings show that incidents of Serbian co‐operation with the ICTY were not preceded by widespread national identity change; rather, co‐operation occurred when Serbia was faced with consistent external pressure and the immediate prospect of small‐scale rewards. Conditionality thus remained effective. These findings challenge theoretical arguments that issues of national identity may impede external actors’ projection of power, independently of domestic actors’ cost‐benefit calculations. Moreover, they suggest that, in the future, external actors such as the EU may continue to rely upon political conditionality for their democratization agenda, even concerning domestically sensitive issue‐areas.

  February 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12140   open full text
• Operational Aspects of a Hypothetical Demise of the Euro.
  Francesco Papadia.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 27, 2014
  This article illustrates what would be the operational implications of a hypothetical demise of the euro. In order to do this, it examines what were the operational implications of establishing the euro and shows that the opposite endeavour would not just be its symmetric counterpart. The paper also looks at two developments that took place after the launch of the euro – the emergence of very large Target2 balances during the crisis that started in 2010 and the move towards financial integration – showing that they would add to the formidable operational complications that would be created by the demise of the euro. The paper concludes that the logistical difficulties considered here only look minor in comparison with the fundamental reasons that led governments and central banks to fight with determination the risk of a demise of the euro. In absolute terms, they are important enough to tilt the balance of costs and benefits in the direction of preserving the eurozone.

  February 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12135   open full text
• Reluctant Donors? The Europeanization of International Development Policies in the New Member States.
  Simon Lightfoot, Balázs Szent‐Iványi.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 27, 2014
  The European Union (EU) played an instrumental role in re‐starting the international development policies in central and eastern European Member States, but questions remain about how far this policy area has been Europeanized since accession. Focusing on the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, this article investigates why the new donors have been reluctant to adopt the EU's development acquis more fully. The article traces the socialization processes offered by the EU's development policy rule‐making and subsequent national rule implementation. The conclusions reveal three reasons why socialization has been weak: perceptions among the new Member States on the procedural legitimacy of the development acquis; low domestic resonance with the development acquis; and inconsistencies in the activities of norm entrepreneurs. The article contributes to our understanding of development policy in the EU – particularly how decision‐making takes place within the Council and its working groups post‐enlargement.

  February 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12141   open full text
• Uno, Duo, Trio? Varieties of Trio Presidencies in the Council of Ministers.
  Mads Dagnis Jensen, Peter Nedergaard.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 25, 2014
  The trio Presidency function entails that Member States in groups of three are responsible for drawing up a common programme for the Council for a period of 18 months and for assisting each other. This article contributes new knowledge by focusing on the variation between four different trio Presidencies that have ended their terms since the function was launched in 2007. A typology is developed to classify past and future trio Presidencies. It is shown that there are considerable variation between past trio formations with regard to whether they follow the same objectives (scope) and how much they co‐ordinate to achieve these (depth). The observed variation is linked to the environment in which the trio Presidency operates, the individual trio members' attitude toward European integration, their territorial structuring of the state, their size, the ideology of the government and personality of the involved actors.

  February 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12130   open full text
• European Deposit Insurance and Resolution in the Banking Union.
  Daniel Gros, Dirk Schoenmaker.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. February 19, 2014
  Since the European Council of June 2012, ‘banking union’ is a key item for the EU's policy agenda. This contribution outlines the state of the policy debate – identifying the elements that are missing but important from a theoretical viewpoint. Concrete proposals are made as to how the missing elements could be added in the form of a new European Deposit Insurance and Resolution Authority, which would work alongside the ‘single supervisory mechanism’ under which the European Central Bank assumes supervisory powers for the largest eurozone banks. The paper also illustrates how a gradual transition could align incentives and mitigate the political resistance to a full banking union. Finally, new estimates are provided for how much would be needed for a European Deposit Insurance and Resolution Fund.

  February 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12124   open full text
• With or Without Force? European Public Opinion on Democracy Promotion.
  Jörg Faust, Maria Melody Garcia.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 24, 2014
  This article investigates the impact of European citizens' socio‐economic backgrounds, political orientations and countries of origin on their support for democracy promotion in general and on democracy promotion via military means. Analyzing survey data from 11 European Union (EU) member countries, we show that citizens with more extreme political orientations are less likely to support general democracy promotion. In contrast, particularly those citizens with extreme rightist orientations are more likely to support democracy promotion via military means. Regarding the impact of socio‐economic background variables, higher education and working skills are positively associated with democracy promotion in general, but make citizens less likely to support democracy promotion via military means. Finally, even if the majority of Europeans do not support democracy promotion via military means, the heterogeneity of country effects suggests that the assumption of a common European identity regarding democracy promotion needs to be refined.

  January 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12120   open full text
• In a Spirit of Solidarity? Justifying the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in National Parliamentary Debates.
  Carlos Closa, Aleksandra Maatsch.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 10, 2014
  This article examines national parliamentarians’ approval of the increased budgetary capacity of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in autumn 2011. Following the analysis of vote outcome and plenary debates in 11 euro states, it is found that the financial position of a state (creditors versus debtors) does not explain the patterns of support and opposition. Rather, two other factors account for these differences: Euroscepticism, and the government and opposition cleavage. In particular, whereas Eurosceptic MPs voted and argued against the EFSF, the parliamentary majorities supported it. Surprisingly, although the legal basis of the EFSF draws on solidarity among the European Union Member States, the supporters of the EFSF did not refer to this principle in their speeches but rather to pragmatic considerations such as national economic interests.

  January 10, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12119   open full text
• Actorness beyond the European Union: Comparing the International Trade Actorness of SADC and ECOWAS.
  Merran Hulse.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 06, 2014
  Actorness is no longer the preserve of the European Union. Due to their participation in interregional relations, other regional organizations are developing and institutionalizing the requirements of international actorness, but insofar as a comparative framework for systematically comparing and contrasting actorness across different organizations is lacking, it is difficult to predict the likely outcomes of such relations. Taking a comparative regionalisms approach, this article develops a comparative and generalizable framework of actorness. Adding to the extremely limited literature on non‐EU actorness, the model is tested in an analysis of the actorness of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in the field of international trade negotiations. Despite SADC's stronger identity and presence, it is ECOWAS – having more effective decision‐making and better capabilities – that possesses greater actorness – a fact likely to impact on inter‐regional outcomes.

  January 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12111   open full text
• The People Against Europe: The Eurosceptic Challenge to the United Kingdom's Coalition Government.
  Chris Gifford.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 06, 2014
  This article approaches Euroscepticism as central to a contemporary dynamic of government and opposition. Populist Eurosceptic mobilizations exemplify opposition to depoliticized forms of political rule and demonstrate the tight political coupling of the national and the European. In the case of the United Kingdom, a depoliticized post‐imperial governing approach to European integration has proved highly contested. From this perspective, the article examines the recent politics of Europe under the coalition government (from 2010 to 2013) as a period of Eurosceptic mobilization that successfully challenges European policy. What on the surface appears to be a problem of party management for the Conservative leadership is more accurately understood as a broader conflict between government and a populist Eurosceptic opposition. The outcome of this conflict is to further embed hard Euroscepticism within British politics to the point where maintaining governing autonomy on Europe is severely constrained, if not unfeasible.

  January 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12112   open full text
• A Political Economy Approach to the European Union Gas Model: Continuities and Changes.
  Rafael Fernandez, Enrique Palazuelos.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 06, 2014
  The European Union gas model worked steadily for nearly four decades: since the time that gas first emerged as an important resource in European energy demand. However, since the late 1990s this stability has been disrupted by a number of factors. The EU reform agenda has been the most important of these. Following a structural‐conduct‐performance plan, the European Commission has forced changes on players, scenarios and exchange mechanisms through legislative action in order to build a new energy model based on those operating in the United States and the United Kingdom. The main point of this article is that despite these actions, many features of the traditional model have been modified but not removed, and many changes have not brought the results initially expected. These results are mainly due to the fact that the power relations among the main players of the pre‐reform model are still in place.

  January 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12113   open full text
• How to Explain the Transnational Security Governance of the European Union?
  Kamil Zwolski.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. January 06, 2014
  This article argues that empirical developments in international security governance offer untapped opportunities for strengthening intellectual links between European Union (EU) studies and international relations. To uncover these links, the article first demonstrates how the EU has started to address various chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear security risks through adopting an approach conceptualized as ‘transnational security governance’. The article subsequently argues that this approach can be convincingly explained by drawing on the insights from the study of the sociology of bureaucracy and bureaucratic behaviour in international relations. In this story, the EU's approach to international security is an example of normal bureaucratic practice, stemming in particular from the bureaucracy's moral and expert authority. Importantly, the engagement with the broader social science scholarship will benefit EU studies as much as other sub‐disciplines.

  January 06, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12121   open full text
• European Energy Security: Natural Gas and the Integration Process.
  Pami Aalto, Dicle Korkmaz Temel.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 23, 2013
  This article explores energy security and integration within the European Union (EU) in the case of natural gas. It theorizes the underlying institutional dynamics of integration by drawing upon the English School as to how more deep‐seated informal institutions condition policy‐making by EU institutions and Member States as well as the operations of transnational actors such as energy companies. The informal institution of sovereignty constrains the push of the market institution towards a convergent type of integration. Together with the bilateral energy diplomacy and great power management institutions, sovereignty also limits integration in the external gas trade. Internal integration overall remains dependent on the wider European context as is also seen in the functioning of the environmental stewardship institution. The ambiguities among actors occasioned by the implementation of the Third Energy Package suggest a further integration need, but that is constrained by several further driving forces.

  December 23, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12108   open full text
• Composition of Exports and Export Performance of Eurozone Countries.
  Peter Wierts, Henk Van Kerkhoff, Jakob De Haan.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 19, 2013
  This article investigates to what extent the composition of exports is related to the export performance of eurozone countries using a data set on exports from the oldest eurozone countries to their top 20 trade partners for the period 1988–2009. The results suggest that a higher share of high technology exports in total exports is positively related to total exports. Export composition also conditions the effects of the real exchange rate and partner income growth. The effect of the real exchange rate on exports becomes smaller the higher the share of high technology exports in total exports. The effect of partner income on exports becomes larger the higher the share of high technology exports in total exports.

  December 19, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12114   open full text
• European Commission Officials' Policy Attitudes.
  Jerome Schafer.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 19, 2013
  European Commission officials are usually thought to prefer more to less supranational authority. A large body of work assumes that they maximize the power of their organization. This study suspends a priori preference attribution and empirically investigates variation in support for supranational authority over five policy areas. The analysis uses Kassim et al.'s survey data from 2008 (N = 1,901). The first finding in this article is that Commission officials do not systematically prefer more supranational decision‐making. Following the logic of fiscal federalism, they support changes in EU policy scope to the extent that this would improve public good provision. The second finding, taking a political psychology perspective, is that individual calculations of efficiency are mediated by ideological beliefs. Because issues are complex and information is costly, Commission officials rely on heuristics to assess what the European Union should do. They are biased information‐processors.

  December 19, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12115   open full text
• Regional Powers as Leaders or Rambos? The Ambivalent Behaviour of Brazil and South Africa in Regional Economic Integration.
  Sebastian Krapohl, Katharina L. Meissner, Johannes Muntschick.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 19, 2013
  The behaviour of regional powers towards their own regions is often volatile in the developing world, which leads to unstable integration processes. This article argues that this volatility is due to limited intra‐regional gains from regional integration in developing regions, which implies that the behaviour of regional powers is constrained by extra‐regional economic interests. When regional integration is not in conflict with extra‐regional interests, regional powers provide regional leadership. However, when extra‐regional interests are in conflict with regional integration, regional powers become regional Rambos. This argument is illustrated with the two examples of Brazil's behaviour in Mercosur and South Africa's behaviour in SADC. Both regional powers provided leadership during some periods of the regional integration processes, but became Rambos when important extra‐regional interests were at stake. This damaged regional integration processes in South America and Southern Africa considerably.

  December 19, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12116   open full text
• Economic Growth and Inflation in Europe: A Tale of Two Thresholds.
  Jesús Crespo Cuaresma, Maria Silgoner.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 19, 2013
  This article reassesses the impact of inflation on long‐term growth for a panel of 14 European Union countries in the years prior to monetary unification. While previous research mostly focuses on a linear nexus or allows for a piecewise linear relationship with a single threshold, this study takes account of a more complex relationship. The empirical estimates for the full EU sample confirm the hypothesis that the relationship between inflation and growth is positive for very low inflation rates (that is, below an estimate of 1.6 per cent), insignificant thereafter and negative for high, two‐digit inflation levels. The estimate of the inflation level that divides the insignificant from the negative effect is found to be higher in the group of traditional cohesion countries than for the rest of the sample.

  December 19, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12117   open full text
• The Effect on Immigration of Changes in Regulations and Policies: A Case Study.
  Ådne Cappelen, Terje Skjerpen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 19, 2013
  Net migration has become the main factor driving Norwegian population growth. This article explores how changes in regulations and immigration policies have affected gross immigration to Norway. As in previous econometric studies, it finds that income differences and income distribution have a bearing on immigration, as well as aspects of the labour market. Various immigration policies have largely had the expected effects, and Norway's membership of the European economic area since 1994 and inclusion in the Schengen area in 2001 have resulted in higher immigration. The enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007 substantially increased immigration to Norway. By 2010, the EU‐related changes in regulations increased total immigration by some 20 per cent compared to a counterfactual situation where Norway did not become party to either of these agreements. The partial and accumulated effect on the total population in Norway in 2010 is estimated to be about 2 per cent.

  December 19, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12118   open full text
• The BRICS and Other Emerging Power Alliances and Multilateral Organizations in the Asia‐Pacific and the Global South: Challenges for the European Union and Its View on Multilateralism.
  Stephan Keukeleire, Bas Hooijmaaijers.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 16, 2013
  Over the past decade the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and other emerging power alliances (such as BASIC [Brazil, South Africa, India and China] and IBSA [India, Brazil, South Africa]), as well as multilateral organizations in the Asia‐Pacific and the global south, have become increasingly important players on the world stage. None of the variations on Asian regionalism and emerging power alliances is in itself very influential. Taken together, however, they are not inconsequential for the European Union (EU) and its position on multilateralism. Their views on multilateralism differ from the EU's vision with regard to contents and methodology. Problematic for the EU is that their views not only structure the relations between the emerging powers themselves, but that these powers also increasingly try to promote them as the basic principles for structuring international relations and regimes on a global level.

  December 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12102   open full text
• The Legal Mind of the Internal Market: A Governmentality Perspective on the Judicialization of Monitoring Practices.
  Åsa Casula Vifell, Ebba Sjögren.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 16, 2013
  The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the broader effects of monitoring practices in the European Union. The empirical setting is Solvit, a Commission‐initiated network tasked with informal resolution of misapplications of internal market directives by national authorities. All Member States must operate a Solvit centre within their administrations. Using a governmentality approach, the article investigates the normative underpinnings of the technologies deployed by Solvit and the experts which operate them. A survey study of the Solvit network shows the development of an EU identity and a cognitive judicialization which contributes to a depoliticization of issues. This allows Solvit to expand its remit from ex post monitoring to ex ante regulation. While a governance instrument can be designed for a delimited task, a governmentality approach highlights more general mechanisms by which such an instrument's influence and reach may be extended beyond its modest appearances.

  December 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12110   open full text
• The EU as a Normative Power and the Research on External Perceptions: The Missing Link.
  Henrik Larsen.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 11, 2013
  In research on European foreign policy two important axes of debate have been running relatively independently of each other for more than a decade: the study of the European Union as a normative power (NPE) and the study of external perceptions of the EU. However, the studies of external perception offer some findings that are central for the NPE debate. This article's argument is that the external perceptions literature points to a limited (if still identifiable) perception of the EU as a normative power depending on the geographical area. By comparison, the image of a powerful economic actor is prevalent. The article raises the question of whether the thin and geographically varied character of the perceptions relating to the EU as a normative power justifies the general designation of NPE. A new agenda focusing on geographical differences and interaction with other sources of power is outlined.

  December 11, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12109   open full text
• Between Youth Policy and Employment Policy: The Rise, Limits and Ambiguities of a Corporatist System of Youth Representation within the EU.
  Didier Chabanet.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. December 03, 2013
  This article outlines the evolution of youth European policies, in a context marked for over 25 years by a very high level of youth unemployment, exacerbated since 2008 by the economic crisis. It is striking that the European Union (EU) has until recently preferred a transversal approach to youth, considering youth unemployment as an issue among others. Moreover, the difficulty of the EU to co‐operate with a wide spectrum of youth organizations is obvious, especially with those in favour of a far more protective approach against youth employment. However, we seem to witness the rise of a corporatist system in the field of youth, in which a few organizations are considered as legitimate interlocutors, even if they are consulted on issues which are the less sensitive at the expense of youth unemployment policies.

  December 03, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12105   open full text
• Structure, Capacity or Power? Explaining Salience in EU Decision‐Making.
  Dirk Leuffen, Thomas Malang, Sebastian Wörle.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 22, 2013
  Salience as the intensity of interest is a key explanatory factor of European Union decision‐making. In this article, the ability of three explanatory models to explain the realized values of Member States’ salience is hypothesized and tested. On the basis of the DEU II data, the analysis shows that a mixture of national interest group heterogeneity and membership length has the highest predictive power. The results support the liberal intergovernmentalist claim that domestic interests determine European decision‐making.

  November 22, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12100   open full text
• EU Climate Norms in East‐Central Europe.
  Mats Braun.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 22, 2013
  This article suggests that the literature on how the European Union (EU) diffuses its norms externally and that on how it diffuses them internally should be linked. Therefore, the focus is on a field where the EU is described as a ‘normative’ power: climate change. The article analyzes how EU climate norms are diffused to new Member States. It argues that there are two roads to state socialization: through civil servants participating in EU work, and via domestic norm entrepreneurs. The empirical analysis is based on how four of the Member States that joined the EU in 2004–07 worked with the Climate and Energy Package of 2008–09. With the exception of one of the countries, there are few indications of an ongoing socialization process among them. For the EU as a normative power it is important to reflect upon why the underlying EU climate norms are rejected in the studied countries.

  November 22, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12101   open full text
• European Governance and the European Parliament: From Talking Shop to Legislative Powerhouse.
  Manfred Kohler.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 21, 2013
  This article provides an insight into the status quo and functions of the European Parliament (EP) in the European Union (EU) multi‐level governance system in order to better locate the structural issues the EP is facing in terms of accountability and legitimacy in the EU. The study mainly finds that the EP's extension of powers by the treaties and non‐treaty‐based inter‐institutional agreements has led it to become a legislative powerhouse, the work of which is concentrated in the less visible committees. This development, however, comes at the cost of the EP's function as a public arena of debate and conflict, with the big party groups mainly voting like a singular bloc in the plenary because decisions had already been agreed in the committees. In sum, increasing competences and workloads do not lead to more legitimacy and accountability.

  November 21, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12095   open full text
• Of Gay Rights and Christmas Ornaments: The Political History of Sexual Orientation Non‐discrimination in the Treaty of Amsterdam.
  Martijn Mos.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 14, 2013
  This article asks why sexual orientation was included in the anti‐discrimination clause of the Treaty of Amsterdam (Article 13) in the absence of active support within the Council of Ministers and even though few Member States had established it as protected ground prior to the intergovernmental conference. A detailed historical analysis reveals how the European Parliament (EP) gradually developed into the hub of a transnational advocacy network that promoted gay rights to the European Commission and the Council. The dynamics of the intergovernmental conference enabled the EP to introduce sexual orientation into the treaty‐making process, while the use of naming‐and‐shaming tactics vis‐à‐vis the Dutch Presidency secured the ground's final inclusion. This political history has theoretical implications since it presents a challenge to extant liberal intergovernmentalist and institutionalist analyses of the Amsterdam Treaty and suggests that the EP should be afforded more attention by neofunctionalist scholars.

  November 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12094   open full text
• Comparing Constitutional Change in European Union Member States: In Search of a Theory.
  Christer Karlsson.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 14, 2013
  This article explores the under‐researched issue of how constitutional change is brought about in modern democracies. Despite the fundamental importance of constitutions, we know surprisingly little about whether constitutional change is achieved by changing the explicit wording of the constitutional document, or by way of changing the meaning of the constitution while leaving the constitutional text unaltered. Which is the more common method and what variations in the use of these different methods are there in democratic political systems? This study systematically compares the use of explicit and implicit constitutional change in European Union (EU) Member States. The results show that implicit constitutional change is the more frequently used method, but also reveal substantial differences between EU countries. The article closes by discussing the road towards a theory of constitutional change. It does so by presenting five testable propositions that could lay the foundation for a theory of constitutional change.

  November 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12098   open full text
• Who are the Europeans? European Identity Outside of European Integration.
  Kaija E. Schilde.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. November 07, 2013
  What do we know about the relationship between Europe, the European Union and European identity? While national identity is a multifaceted phenomenon, European identity has been linked to the growth of the European Union. This article attempts to analyze some of the attributes of individuals with European identity in central and eastern Europe prior to EU accession by applying existing hypotheses on correlates of European identity. The phenomenon of identification with Europe prior to EU accession provides a window into understanding the identity mechanisms that inform the concept of European identity. The first Eurobarometer surveys measuring European identification in central and eastern accession states reported a puzzling finding: that more people, not less, identified with Europe than in existing EU states. An analysis of the Eurobarometer results provides counter‐intuitive comparisons and contrasts between eastern and western Europe and uncovers potential mechanisms illustrating the content of contemporary European identity.

  November 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12090   open full text
• Challenges to Local Authorities under EU Structural Funds: Evidence from Mixed Quasi‐markets for Public Service Provision in Romania.
  Daniel Pop, Roxana Radu.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 05, 2013
  The emergence of quasi‐markets – new regulatory tools to design and manage public service delivery through competition – has led to a new ecology for local authorities, who increasingly operate alongside for‐profit, not‐for‐profit and other governmental contractors for social service provision. This raises a series of challenges related to the secondary regulatory measures to correct for market and government imperfections under conditions of competition between entities with different objective functions. In shared governance systems, such as the European Union structural funds, additional tensions are generated by the double role of the public sector as purchaser and potential provider of services. This analysis presents empirical evidence from a transitional context in which quasi‐markets have been newly established, based on data from the Romanian human resource development operational programme (RO‐SOPHRD) between 2007 and 2011. These findings enhance our understanding of the dynamics of distortions created by quasi‐market environments for public service delivery in emerging economies.

  August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12064   open full text
• Conditionality, Communication and Compliance: The Effect of Monitoring on Collective Labour Rights in Candidate Countries.
  Sara Kahn‐Nisser.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 05, 2013
  This article presents findings of an empirical analysis which show that the level of candidate countries' compliance with the accession conditionality is positively associated with the extent of annual pre‐accession monitoring. Focusing on conditionality and labour rights in 11 post‐communist CEE candidate countries, in the period between 1998 and 2009, the study analyzes the relationship between the extent of annual monitoring and the post‐communist CEE candidate countries' labour rights scores, two years later. A positive, statistically significant association between the two variables is found. The article proposes an explanation of the findings based on discursive institutionalism, and integrates this with the theory of conditionality. According to discursive institutionalism, monitoring supported conditionality through strategic, normative and communicative mechanisms. It strengthened certainty regarding rewards and sanctions, reduced domestic costs of compliance and supported normative convergence.

  August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12065   open full text
• Is the Convergence Party Over? Labour Productivity and the Technology Gap in Europe.
  Andrea Filippetti, Antonio Peyrache.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 05, 2013
  Closing the technology gap to reduce labour productivity disparities across Europe is crucial for the European cohesion policy. This article explores the sources of labour productivity growth in Europe over the period 1993–2007 in light of the enlargement process. Labour productivity growth has been mostly driven by capital accumulation. New Member States have significantly reduced their inefficiency and their technology gap. Disparities in the levels of labour productivity are still substantial and, to a considerable extent, they can be attributed to technology gap differences. This raises concerns about the process of convergence in labour productivity in Europe and suggests further policies aimed at reducing the technology gap.

  August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12066   open full text
• Informal Politics in the EU.
  Thomas Christiansen, Christine Neuhold.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 05, 2013
  Traditionally, much of the focus of the study of politics has been on formal arrangements and formal institutions. In recent years, however, this dominant focus has given way to an increasing concern with informal aspects of politics. This can be said for both the study of comparative politics and international relations more generally and for research on governance within the European Union in particular. Against this background, the aim of this research note is, first, to review the findings of research on informal governance and, second, to explore whether analytical concepts can be applied to the EU, with the aim of bringing greater conceptual clarity to the field and identifying future research agendas in this area. In a final section, the article also addresses the normative dimension of informal governance in the EU, discussing both the benefits and the risks of such arrangements from the perspective of transparency, efficiency and democratic accountability.

  August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12068   open full text
• The Limits of Entrapment: The Negotiations on EU Reduction Targets, 2007–11.
  Jakob Skovgaard.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. August 05, 2013
  In 2007, the EU decided to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20/30 per cent, something which was considered a proof of the EU's willingness to take on high targets independently of others. In the period 2009–11, the EU was debating but could not reach an agreement on stepping up to a 30 per cent reduction target. This raises the question: why did the EU go from being capable of adopting high targets independently of others to being incapable of agreeing whether it should increase its mitigation effort? It is argued that whereas actors sceptical of a high target could be rhetorically entrapped in 2007, such entrapment was impossible in the 2009–11 period. The lack of entrapment can be explained in terms of changes in the international and socio‐economic contexts, which led to changes in the policy processes and the normative environment, which again made effective entrapment impossible.

  August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12069   open full text
• Wielding Soft Power in a World of Neglect: The Europeanization of Greek and Portuguese Public Employment Services.
  Sotirios Zartaloudis.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 29, 2013
  The Europeanization literature has extensively examined the influence of the European employment strategy (EES) on Member States' employment policies. However, two least‐likely cases – Greece and Portugal – have been neglected in the literature. This article focuses on the activation of public employment services (PES), which has been one of the key elements of the EES. Based on a sample of 44 semi‐structured interviews and primary and secondary document research on seven reform episodes during 1995–2009, it finds that the EES altered Greek and Portuguese employment policies by empowering policy entrepreneurs and, when the latter were absent, through European Social Fund financial conditionality. While the literature considers policy learning as the chief EES‐Europeanization mechanism, little evidence is found herein to support such an explanation. The findings may be relevant for a number of EU policies based on voluntarism and EU funds, such as the new flagship EU initiative Europe 2020.

  July 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12060   open full text
• Did the EU Summits Succeed in Convincing the Markets during the Recent Crisis?
  Dieter Smeets, Marco Zimmermann.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 29, 2013
  Using an event study approach, this article examines whether crisis meetings of European heads of state and government, as well as their agreed and communicated results, had a significant impact on Europe's financial markets. The analysis is based on daily data for seven Member States of the eurozone (France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain), starting in autumn 2008 and covering the time period until April 2012. To summarize the findings, the high‐profile meetings appear to have only minor effects that ceased quickly. Therefore, it can be concluded that investors consider Europe's economic and political crisis management insufficient and its communication strategy little convincing. While controlling for additional effects, it was found that European Central Bank policy measures may have had short‐run effects on bond returns and the exchange rate, but no intended influence on stock prices, except for Italy.

  July 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12062   open full text
• The Silence of Ministers: Consensus and Blame Avoidance in the Council of the European Union.
  Stéphanie Novak.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 29, 2013
  According to conventional wisdom, in areas where the Council of the European Union is supposed to decide by qualified majority voting, it does not vote but rather decides ‘by consensus’. This article aims to explain why the Council does not vote and what ‘consensus’ means. Given that consensus is often used by international organizations and EU institutional bodies, it is important to explain how it differs from unanimity. The article argues that formal voting is avoided because it would disclose the identity of opponents and would be detrimental to the negotiation process. Furthermore, ministers tend not to register their opposition even when they remain unsatisfied with an adopted measure because they expect to be blamed by their constituencies for having failed to defend national interests. Consensus is not necessarily used to signal that a general agreement is reached. It sometimes results from a strategy of blame avoidance that conflicts with democratic accountability.

  July 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12063   open full text
• EU–Turkey: Integration without Full Membership or Membership without Full Integration? A Conceptual Framework for Accession Alternatives.
  Cemal Karakas.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 29, 2013
  The EU accession aspirations of the de jure European country Turkey remain a highly contested issue. Due to the national preferences and mainly socio‐cultural resentment in some EU Member States and due to its limited integration capacity, the EU offered Ankara a discriminatory ‘full membership minus’. The current EU law and the various paradigms of ‘differentiated integration’ do not only provide the spatial, temporal and thematic scope for a conceptual framework on accession alternatives, they also limit it. In this context, the gradual integration/membership concept could be an interesting option for both parties. The depreciation of full membership in the case of Turkey has weakened the EU conditionality policy in general. On the other hand, ‘external’ flexibilization can help to overcome deadlock by allowing the Member States and accession candidates such as Turkey to co‐operate at different levels of integration.

  July 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12061   open full text
• There is No such Thing as a Free Open Sky: Financial Markets and the Struggle over European Competences in International Air Transport.
  Christian Rauh, Gerald Schneider.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 25, 2013
  Aviation is a prime example of a policy area where the clash over supranational regulatory responsibilities had pronounced economic repercussions. In this article, we examine the economic effects of the European Commission's struggle to obtain competences in international air transport. Stock market reactions to key events in the political conflict between 1995 and 2004 unravel whether investor beliefs about the distribution of power in the EU follow the basic conjectures of neofunctionalism, intergovernmentalism or institutionalism. The event studies show that particularly judicial proceedings and the involvement of the ECJ send credible integration signals to financial markets. This supports the hypothesis that investors consider the subtleties of the EU's decision‐making apparatus carefully and only react to developments that definitively alter the political regime and thus also the market situation. These findings are in line with an institutionalist interpretation of a reform that has radically changed the international aviation regime.

  July 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12057   open full text
• Different Efforts in European Economic Integration: Implications of the EU Index.
  Jörg König, Renate Ohr.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 25, 2013
  European integration is a multilayer process consisting of significant differences in efforts and capabilities of the Member State's individual EU participation. Hence, general statements about the national level of European economic integration are very vague. In order to fill this gap, this article presents a composite indicator measuring the extent of economic integration within the European Union – the EU Index. Existing composite indicators concerned with economic integration (globalization indices) were not designed to capture the specific European dimensions. The EU Index offers a unique basis, as now the national differences can be illustrated by one statistical measure. Large heterogeneities are found between the Member States with respect to overall European economic integration and to various sub‐indices. By using cluster analysis, it is also shown that the prevailing economic heterogeneities in the EU are combined with a strong and even growing clustering of its members, thereby challenging present and future steps of European integration.

  July 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12058   open full text
• EU Unilateral Trade Policy‐Making: What Role for Import‐Dependent Firms?
  Jappe Eckhardt.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. July 25, 2013
  This article looks at political mobilization and the influence of import‐dependent firms in the context of the European Union's (EU) trade defence instrument (TDI) policy. By looking at this increasingly relevant set of economic actors during (unilateral) TDI decision‐making, the article provides a much needed complement to the existing EU trade policy literature, which is dominated by analyses of the trade policy preferences and involvement of import‐competing and export‐dependent firms during multilateral and bilateral trade co‐operation. The article defines import‐dependent firms and theorizes the circumstances under which they are capable of lobbying and of wielding influence in EU TDI cases. The argument is discussed with case study evidence drawn from a series of recent EU TDI episodes.

  July 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12059   open full text
• How European Union Politicization can Emerge through Contestation: The Constitution Case.
  Paul Statham, Hans‐Jörg Trenz.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  This article takes the European Union's constitution‐making as a case study to examine ‘how’ politicization can emerge through contestation by political actors in response to political opportunities. It advances understanding of the conditions and processes through which politicization emerges by undertaking empirical analysis. The primary data source is an original sample of political actors' claims‐making over European integration issues retrieved from news samples in France, Germany and Britain during the constitution event (2000–05). Main tenets of prominent theories on politicization are unpacked and tested in relation to the evidence from the claims‐making analysis. The findings demonstrate the transformative impact of the French referendum as a specific opportunity: politicization was largely restricted to internal national contestation by French actors; political party competition was the prominent contestation form; and the Socialists mobilized against the constitution by advocating ‘Social Europe’. This transformed the political space by introducing competition over Europe into the party system's core.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12032   open full text
• European Union Lobbying and the Golden Cage of Post‐Socialist Network Capitalism in Hungary.
  Dorottya Sallai.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  The literature on business lobbying has shown that firms increasingly extend their interest representation activities from the domestic to the European level. Consequently, over the last 20 years, individual firms have become influential political actors in Brussels. Yet, after nine years of full membership, eastern European (EE) corporations stay away from EU‐level policy‐making. This article argues that the institutional structures emerging in post‐socialist countries constitute obstacles to firms developing the necessary capabilities for supranational lobbying. While firms in London and Brussels become increasingly professional in their lobbying strategies, large post‐socialist firms handle lobbying exclusively at the highest level of the organizational hierarchy through informal interpersonal networks. It is argued in the article that the confinement of lobbying strategy to the top echelon of corporate management reduces its effectiveness and scope. Consequently, EE companies are unable to integrate into EU lobbying.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12029   open full text
• The Single Market as an Engine for Employment through External Trade.
  José Manuel Rueda‐Cantuche, Nuno Sousa, Valeria Andreoni, Iñaki Arto.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  This article quantifies for the first time the European employment effects of extra‐EU exports and the correct number of jobs generated through the intra‐EU trade (single market) associated with the production of such exports. The literature has neglected very often the latter effects mainly due to the lack of an appropriate methodology and data. The main results of the article show that, between 2000 and 2007, an increasing number of European jobs were dependent on extra‐EU exports and on the strengthening of the trade linkages across the internal market. During the period considered, the EU employment supported by extra‐EU exports grew from 22 to 25 million jobs, out of which 9 million jobs (in 2007) were due to spillover and feedback effects associated with the single market. Between 2000 and 2007 the EU also became a more vertically integrated economy, and reduced the labour intensity of the extra‐EU exports.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12039   open full text
• The National–Transnational Wage‐Setting Nexus in Europe: What have We Learned from the Early Years of Monetary Integration?
  Paul Ramskogler.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  Wage growth has become increasingly interdependent in the European monetary and economic union but a stubborn differential in wage growth rates of some European countries persists. Can peculiarities of national wage‐bargaining systems explain this situation? The article develops the idea that wage growth differentials across Europe are due to differences in wage‐bargaining systems. It is demonstrated that wage growth in the exposed industry is restrained by competition. Spillovers from the exposed sector of the economy to the public sector thus can induce overall wage restraint. However, it is shown that spillovers from the exposed to the public sector differ according to the wage‐bargaining system. Pattern‐setting regimes lead to substantial spillovers and thus induce higher wage restraint than other wage‐bargaining systems.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12033   open full text
• The Year that Israel Considered Joining the European Economic Community.
  Sharon Pardo.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  The history of Israel–EU relations has received considerable scholarly attention. The conventional starting point for this history is almost invariably April 1958, when Israel became the third country in the world to request the establishment of a diplomatic mission in Brussels. The background and the lead up to that request, however, have been largely neglected. The article seeks to fill this scholarly lacuna by relating the hitherto untold story of Israel's exploration in 1957 of the possibility of obtaining full economic and political EEC membership. A centrepiece of the article is the revelation of the 1957 clandestine meeting(s) between Shimon Peres, then director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defence and special envoy of Prime Minister David Ben‐Gurion, and Jean Monnet, in which the two discussed possible full Israeli membership in the EEC. The article is based on some newly revealed archival documents and interviews with former high‐ranking Israeli officials.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12036   open full text
• Europeanization of National Foreign Policy: The Case of Denmark's and Sweden's Relations with China.
  Anna Michalski.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  This article examines the link between constructed identity, socialization and interests in the Europeanization of national foreign policy. Theoretically, it contributes to the understanding of the conditions motivating Member States to have recourse to European Union (EU) opportunity structures in order to balance normative foreign policy interest with material interests. Empirically, the article contributes to understanding the influence of Europeanization on the foreign policy of Denmark and Sweden in their relations to China. It discusses perspectives on Europeanization of national foreign policy in the analysis of change in identity, institutions and policy, and explores the misfit thesis in relation to European identity construction and elite socialization, strategic calculation and the influence of alternative sources outside the EU. The research aims, study design and case selection are then presented prior to the analysis of the Europeanization of Denmark's and Sweden's relations with China.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12034   open full text
• Europeanization beyond Contested Statehood: The European Union and Turkish‐Cypriot Civil Society.
  George Kyris.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  This article investigates the impact of the European Union (EU) on the Turkish‐Cypriot civil society, pegged to the Europeanization debate. The article contributes to the discussion on Europeanization and the role of the EU in contested states, which remains a neglected topic in the literature. The argument advanced is that a series of factors that relate to the contested statehood of the Turkish‐Cypriot case mediate the occurrence of Europeanization and they often contribute to an exceptional EU impact on domestic civil society. In this regard, the Turkish‐Cypriot example has strong comparative value for the study of the international role of the EU, the Europeanization of contested states and the importance that the EU places on contacts with civil society, as an alternative avenue to relations with states.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12035   open full text
• European Union Actorness in International Institutions: Why the EU is Recognized as an Actor in Some International Institutions, but Not in Others.
  Thomas Gehring, Sebastian Oberthür, Marc Mühleck.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  This article examines why the European Union (EU) is recognized as a relevant actor in some international institutions, but not in others. Drawing on theories of international institutions and corporate action, it develops a theoretical approach toward EU actorness that demonstrates under which conditions third parties gain an interest in recognizing this actor as a relevant party to international institutions and how the EU can become an actor in its own right. The EU is expected to be recognized as a relevant actor in an international institution if it has acquired action capability in the relevant governance area, while formal status plays an inferior role. This hypothesis is subsequently assessed for six international institutions that vary regarding the degree of EU action capability and the EU's formal status, including the WTO and IMF, FAO and WHO as well as two international environmental regimes. Empirical results confirm the fruitfulness of the theoretical approach.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12030   open full text
• When the Agent Knows Better than the Principal: The Effect of Education and Seniority on European Parliament Rapporteur Assignment.
  William T. Daniel.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  This article examines the assignment of legislative rapporteurships to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Original data sources are used to test the assumption that committee reports are routinely awarded to MEPs with higher levels of education and seniority at the European level. The hypotheses are supported by an extensive multivariate regression analysis, which also demonstrates the increasing value of rapporteurships, following the initiation of Parliament's veto player status under co‐decision. The article surpasses existing accounts of committee work in the European Parliament to include data on the individual balance of legislative power for the legislature's full history, 1979–2009.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12028   open full text
• Regional Authority, Transnational Lobbying and the Allocation of Structural Funds in the European Union.
  Adam William Chalmers.
  JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies. June 20, 2013
  The allocation of European Union (EU) structural funds is subject to fierce regional lobbying. This article examines the extent to which regions with greater political authority are better able to lobby for funds than their weaker counterparts. Existing research acknowledging the importance of regional authority in these processes has used inadequate indicators. This analysis, drawing on the Regional Authority Index, is the first to use regional‐level data disaggregating between regional authority as self‐rule and shared‐rule. It also uses data that measure the lobbying capacity of regions' Brussels‐based lobbying offices. Controlling for a battery of competing and control variables, Tobit regression analyses of 181 regions receiving funds in the 2007–13 period suggest that regional authority expressed as shared‐rule, but not self‐rule, has a significant impact on the allocation of structural funds in the EU.

  June 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jcms.12038   open full text