As we write, the world is still in the grips of a financial crisis. Germany was one of the first countries to bail out a bank in July 2007. Then, in September 2007, the United Kingdom (UK) witnessed a run on a building society, Northern Rock, and the subsequent widespread nationalization of its...

Ideas regarding ‘better regulation’ and ‘high-quality regulation’ have become key aspects of contemporary administrative reform initiatives. What explains the popularity of this agenda? What does the comparative experience tell us about its impact? And what is its future? This article...

Much has been written on the diffusion of public management and regulatory reform tools. Available evidence suggests that cross-national policy diffusion is an increasingly significant phenomenon, especially in the European context. While internationalisation of policy discourses and expert...

Mega-events such as the Olympic Games and the football World Cup represent a special venue for the practice of risk management. This paper explores management of security risks in the case of two sporting mega-events, the London 2012 Olympic Games and the FIFA 2006 World Cup in Germany. The...

Open Method Co-ordination (OMC) has been treated in the literature as the Lazarus of European integration. Developed at the Lisbon Summit, it has led to the reincarnation of the European Union, both in terms of what it does and how it does it. No longer is the European Union to be centred around...

Globalisation is said to have diminished the capacity of states to regulate their economies. However, while a body of doctrine has developed concerning the need for capable, independent regulation, there is relative paucity of theoretical discussion concerning the nature of state regulatory...

As the legislative body of the European Union, the European Parliament groups 732 elected representatives from over 170 national political parties from 25 member states. At the EP level, these members are affiliated with seven major party groups representing distinct policy positions. In this...

The European Parliament (EP) possesses a highly specialized committee system, operating in a complex institutional and political environment, yet little empirical work has investigated how MEPs are assigned to EP committees and what consequences this process has for representation and...

Party politics in the European Parliament (EP) consists of competition between transnational party groups, each consisting of multiple national member parties from the 27 member states of the European Union (EU). Identifying the policy space that these parties inhabit and their ideological...

This major Handbook provides a state-of-the-art study of the recent history and future development of international public management reform.