During the first weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, European Union (EU) member states competed over scarce countermeasures. Regarding vaccines, a few member states launched exclusive joint endeavours, yet eventually, the EU centralised vaccine …
In the European Union, agenda‐setting is formally centralized with the European Commission. During the last decade since the Lisbon Treaty, however, this agenda‐setting monopoly was challenged by other institutions against the backdrop of Treaty …
Rather than being constrained by the least ambitious governments, the EU has until recently set the pace of national environmental policy. The contribution examines why the EU was often able to set the pace despite the institutionalist expectation …
Soil is a non-renewable and increasingly deteriorating resource, yet it is barely protected by European Union (EU) legislation. This constitutes a puzzling gap within the otherwise encompassing and progressive environmental policy of the EU. To …
This paper looks at how policy‐makers use various alternative decision arenas to avoid internal policy incoherence. Inconsistency between goals and measures in a policy indirectly results from conflicting interests pulling in different directions …
In its pending decision on the constitutionality of the European Stability Mechanism and Fiscal Compact, the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) has recently ruled on several applications for temporary injunctions against the transposition of …
This article recalls a distinction between research designs that focus on either the ‘causes of effects’ or the ‘effects of causes’ and compares it to a related but not identical distinction between the aims of developing and testing theoretical …