AbstractThis paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about the scope for autonomous action of supranational organizations in the European Union, focussing on the European Commission. In the literature, the independence of the Commission is frequently questioned, while the relative autonomy...

AbstractThe quiet evolution of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) into a de facto decision-making body has received surprisingly little attention by integration researchers. Even less attention has been paid to the novel institutional form and underlying rationality of this...

AbstractThe 1987 Single European Act (SEA) is frequently identified as a momentous landmark for European integration because it altered voting procedures in the Council of Ministers - substituting widespread qualified majority voting for the unanimity which had prevailed since the famous...

Abstract Europe’s ‘political space,’ its dimensionality and its impact on European policies have received increased academic attention lately. Yet, one very basic element of this political space, the party composition of EU member states’ governments, has never been studied in a...

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....

AbstractOver the past decade, most OECD countries have begun to reform fundamentally their agricultural policies. Some dispute has emerged over the extent to which policy-making at the international level has triggered these reforms. These disputes raise important theoretical questions about how...