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...

This paper is essentially a translation of a comment in German (Joerges 2000) on a series of articles in which Rainer Schmalz-Bruns (1998, 1999a, 1999b) developed a concept of legitimate governance beyond the constitutional state, which he called deliberative supra-nationalism and contrasted...

This article argues that against all odds, the corporatist inclusion of the major societal interests in public decision-making is still a relevant governance mechanism in the European multi-level system. At the national level,a diversity of systems continues to operate. At least in some cases,...

The cities of Graz in Austria and Freiburg in Germany have been perceived as ecological model cities since the late 1980s.This is shown by various international awards, press coverage and many visitors from other municipal administrations. Both cities have been well known for their attempts to...

This study develops and tests three explanations of trust in the European Union. Following the logic of rationality, trust originates from evaluations about the (actual and perceived) performances and procedures of the European Union. Trust within the logic of identity trust depends on...

The European Union represents an artificial construct built on the same pattern of formation of the nation states, being defined as „the imaginary political community of Europe (McNamara, 2011). The dynamic evolution of the European Union from an economic entity to a supranational political...

This article aims to show us the relation between the multilevel governance and the subsidiarity principle. The new provisions of the Lisbon Treaty will strengthen the democratic accountability of the EU and its institutions by creating new tools of communication and political dialogue. The...

What triggers the information exchange among the regional offices in Brussels? To answer this question, we develop a framework based on network theory and present the first large-N quantitative study on European Union-level inter-regional networks. Our results show that information exchanges...

This working paper contributes to a collective discussion in a workshop occurring in January 2011 at the International Institute of Social Studies, bringing scholars from Europe and Brazil and aiming inter-university research collaboration on linking policies on social responsibility to...

The role and impact of institutions on policy-making have been receiving a lot of attention in the academic literature on the European Union (EU). The current special issue aims to contribute to this broader institutionalist debate in the EU literature by paying attention to institutional...