In the second half of the nineties, a number of EU Member States went through intense public controversies over agro-food biotechnology. These controversies occurred almost synchronously, brought about parallel issue-framings and actor-constellations, led national governments to adopt...

Trust in political institutions is one of the key elements which make representative democracies work. Trust creates a connection between citizens and representative political institutions. Democratic governments which enjoy a large degree of trust also tend to have higher degrees of legitimacy...

Comitology committees are often accused of not being accountable. This paper aims to provide building blocks to analyze the validity of this claim. After briefly discussing the meaning and aims of accountability, it is discussed where the actual accountability problems can be expected....

The notion of 'Administrative Authority' has several dimensions in EU law. From a functional perspective, administrative authority may be exercised according to three patterns: indirect administration by member states' governmental institutions - the typical Community pattern - direct...

Abstract Voters who participate in elections to the European Parliament tend to use these elections to punish their domestic governing parties. Many students of the EU therefore claim that the party-political composition of the Parliament should systematically differ from that of the Council....

Altneuland: The European Constitutional Terrain It is in many respects a New Land - for the first time the Union is openly, officially using the word Constitution in its formal self-understanding. But this, in turn, places it, at least lexically, in the age old terrain of constitutionalism which...