By examining connections between recent federal and state elections in Germany, we evaluate whether German elections seem to be maintaining some interesting preunification patterns broadly reminiscent of American elections, even as the re-absorption of the East has made the German party system...

This article uses the Domestic Structures and European Integration (DOSEI) data set of actors’ preferences on 65 issues in the 2003-4 Intergovernmental Conference to extract the underlying preferences of the governments, the Commission and the European Parliament on the main dimensions of...

This article analyzes the literature on procedural models of European Union politics. We present an overview of the main models of the legislative procedures, with a focus on their relevance to European Union politics and the literature today. We discuss early controversies in the literature and...

The Treaty of Lisbon reformed the budgetary process in the European Union. We present a game-theoretical analysis and an empirical evaluation of the new annual budgetary procedure. We find that the procedure operates much like the ordinary legislative procedure, and puts the European Parliament...

This paper studies the democratic deficit in the European Union (EU). It examines what constitutes a democratic deficit, analyzes whether there is one in the EU, and offers suggestions for a solution. I focus on the output of the legislative process and study whether policies deviate from those...

This article presents spatial models of policy-making in the European Union and focuses on interest group lobbying. It analyzes the two principal legislative procedures: consultation and codecision. Lobbying is modeled as a game of strategic information transmission from an informed lobbyist to...

We formulate a game-theoretical model of closed rule legislation in the presence of informational asymmetries. In the model an agenda setter with private information proposes a policy to a legislature. The legislature appoints an oversight committee to monitor the agenda setter. We study the...

Collective choice bodies throughout the world use a diverse array of codified rules that determine who may exercise procedural rights, and in what order. This paper analyzes several two-stage decision-making models, focusing on one in which the first-moving actor has a unique, unilateral,...

In this paper we study the implications of the introduction of the co-decision procedure for the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy and its reform. We use a game-theoretical model of the legislative procedures in the European Union and show that the move from consultation to...