What is the scope for autonomous action of the European Commission? Its independence is much more contentious than that of the European Court of Justice, which is generally considered quite autonomous. While the literature on the Commission focuses predominantly on its ability to use its...

In the course of completing the Single European Market the liberalization of telecommunications is a key issue. A central question is how public policy and market mechanisms can be combined to achieve a regulatory structure that strikes a balance between public service and advanced business...

Vor dem Hintergrund der Simmel'schen Wertbildungstheorie wird die Frage nach der Bedeutung und den Folgen des Konsums von Modefälschungen gestellt. Erklärungen für die Wertentstehung von Kopien und deren Verhältnis zu Originalen werden mit qualitativen Daten aus Konsumentenbefragungen...

Prior studies that try to explain who gets tenure and why remain inconclusive, especially on whether non-meritocratic factors influence who becomes a professor. On the basis of career and publication data of virtually all sociologists working in German sociology departments, we test how...

The rise of the consolidation state follows the displacement of the classical tax state, or Steuerstaat, by what I have called the debt state, a process that began in the 1980s in all rich capitalist democracies. Consolidation is the contemporary response to the "fiscal crisis of the state"...

As Hacker and Pierson (2010) have observed, politics is primarily organization: "organized combat." To understand the outcomes of politics, we have to look at how it is organized over time: by whom and with what resources? I take Sweden as an example of how politics as organized combat has...

Recent literature on the European debt crisis emphasizes that rising external trade and lending imbalances between the European Monetary Union's (EMU) Northern and Southern member states served as a crucial determinant behind speculative divergence between these two regions. However, these...