This paper offers a conceptual-democratic map to help orient the debate and to clarify the stakes for democracy in Europe. It presents three models for how democracy can be reconstituted.
ARENA Working Paper 01/2008 (pdf)
Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum
This study investigates the role of political journalism in EU constitution-making.The ratification process is analyzed as a critical juncture of European integration in which enhanced debates and politicization are expected in all member states.
ARENA Working Paper 02/2008 (pdf)
Hans-Jörg Trenz, Maximilian Conrad and Guri Rosén
The new agenda of “Europeanisation” in public sphere research lacks theoretical grounding and methodological coherence. This paper raises the question of standards and makes a distinction between the what, the how and the why of Europeanisation.
ARENA Working Paper 03/2008 (pdf)
Hans-Jörg Trenz
This paper systematically explores the different components of the democratic legitimacy of the European Union from the standpoint of a deliberative democratic theory.
ARENA Working Paper 04/2008 (pdf)
Agustín José Menéndez
The aim of this paper is to shed light on the identity problem of the European Union by investigating the EU’s justifications of past and present enlargements.
ARENA Working Paper 05/2008 (pdf)
Helene Sjursen
This paper outlines an analytical framework allowing for an assessment of the democratic legitimacy of the decision-making system of the EU’s second pillar.
ARENA Working Paper 06/2008 (pdf)
Anne Elizabeth Stie
The transformation of European Foreign and Security Policy raises important challenges to democratic accountability. This paper assesses the state of democracy in this policy field by exploring three different ways in which the EU polity can be defined and assessing these against the existing literature.
ARENA Working Paper 07/2008 (pdf)
Helene Sjursen
This study examines party contestation over Europe in mediated public discourses across seven countries. Data on party claims-making, drawn from media sources, are used to test hypotheses on party contestation over Europe, its relationship to the left/right cleavage, and the nature and emergence of Euroscepticism.
ARENA Working Paper 08/2008 (pdf)
Paul Statham
The authors argue in this article that Europe has in fact had a kind of executive order for centuries but that we only now see that the contours of this order are qualitatively different from the intergovernmental order inherited from the past.
ARENA Working Paper 09/2008 (pdf)
Deirdre Curtin and Morten Egeberg
In this essay Johan P. Olsen argues for improved theoretical understanding in the field of EU governance in order to overcome four impediments in the literature: tidying up the conceptual morass, amending the inconclusive evidence, ousting the ghost of “the state” as a major frame of reference, and getting beyond the tyranny of dichotomies.
ARENA Working Paper 10/2008 (pdf)
Johan P. Olsen
In this article the author proposes that sociological accounts of European integration should focus around the basic problem of internal differentiation and external adaptation of an emerging European society.
ARENA Working Paper 11/2008 (pdf)
Hans-Jörg Trenz
In this article Trenz argues that the tension between normative standards and legitimating practice should be considered as constitutive for the emergence of a European public sphere. Against recent attempts to define the European public sphere in purely descriptive terms, this implies the need to re-introduce the normativity of the public sphere as part of the dynamics of an evolving communicative space in Europe.
ARENA Working Paper 12/2008 (pdf)
Hans-Jörg Trenz
In this paper Marianne Riddervold seeks to contribute to the debate about the role of norms in EU foreign policy by looking at EU policies in the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the making of a Consolidated Maritime Labour Convention (ILOMLC).
ARENA Working Paper 13/2008 (pdf)
Marianne Riddervold
In this paper Åse Gornitzka and Ulf Sverdrup examine patterns of participation in the large and organized expert group system under the European Commission.
ARENA Working Paper 14/2008 (pdf)
Åse Gornitzka and Ulf Sverdrup
ARENA Working Paper 15/2008 (No full text version available)
Johan P. Olsen
In this paper, Ian Bache's main purpose is to establish whether EU cohesion policy has promoted multi-level governance in Britain and other member states and, therefore, to assess whether any identified governance change can be characterized as a process of Europeanization.
ARENA Working Paper 16/2008 (pdf)
Ian Bache
In this paper Daniel Gaus seeks to counter assumptions about the structure of the interpretive pattern regarding the legitimacy of political rule. He claims to show an internal contradiction in the type of normative justification that aims to overcome a “touch of stateness” by explaining the EU’s legitimacy with its assumed non-statal character.
ARENA Working Paper 17/2008 (pdf)
Daniel Gaus
In this paper, Manuela Alfé, Thomas Christiansen and Sonia Piedrafita look at the impact of the 2004/2007 enlargement on the comitology system, analysing how implementing committees have been working and how the new members are adapting. They further examine the main implications of these changes for the system as a whole and consider the most important challenges for the future.
ARENA Working Paper 18/2008 (pdf)
Manuela Alfé, Thomas Christiansen and Sonia Piedrafita
In this paper Pieter de Wilde empirically investigates the relationship between media coverage of EU policy-formulation and the involvement of national parliaments in these processes.
ARENA Working Paper 19/2008 (pdf)
Pieter de Wilde
In this paper Johan P. Olsen asks how we can make sense of New Public Management (NPM) inspired autonomy reforms. He looks at the last three decades and how many public sector reforms have aimed at giving administrative agencies and non-majoritarian institutions more autonomy from majority-based institutions and common sets of rules.
ARENA Working Paper 20/2008 (pdf)
Johan P. Olsen
In this paper, Erik O. Eriksen claims that the EEA Agreement to a large extent has made Norway a de facto EU member. Norway's democratic deficit will increase as the cooperation within the EU expands and the institutions are reformed.
ARENA Working Paper 21/2008 (pdf)
Erik. O. Eriksen
In this paper Cathrine Holst looks at the gender justice in the EU. The paper is a critical discussion of the normative assumptions in the EU gender justice index that is to be launched in the near future.
ARENA Working Paper 22/2008 (pdf)
Cathrine Holst
In this paper the author explores how and to what extent it is possible to contribute to the Democratisation of the European political order by means of modifying the ways in which taxes are deliberated upon, decided and collected in the old continent.
ARENA Working Paper 23/2008 (pdf)
Agustín José Menéndez
In this paper, the EU’s second pillar procedure is assessed against five criteria for its putative lack of democratic qualities. The evaluation shows that decision-making is dominated by secrecy and unelected officials who act extensively on behalf of national ministers without proper accountability mechanisms available.
ARENA Working Paper 24/2008 (pdf)
Anne Elizabeth Stie
In this paper Egeberg and Heskestad 'unpack' the demographic composition in terms of nationality of the three latest commissions’ cabinets. Based on studies of comparable phenomena, they find reason to believe that decomposition of a particular demographical cluster within an organisational unit reduces the impact of such demographical factors on officials’ decision behaviour.
ARENA Working Paper 25/2008 (pdf)
Morten Egeberg and Andreas Heskestad