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This article examines the increasing relevance of Islam and religion in the institutional arrangement of the EU post-Maastricht and the future policy implications for the complex political system of the EU. By adopting a combination of qualitative methodologies that are theoretically rooted in historical institutionalism and in a systemic view of the EU, the paper studies the emergence of Islam and religion as policy issues in two institutional settings, the European Commission and the European Parliament, during the 1990s and up to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The analysis shows a growing attention to faith communities on the part of the Commission, in the post-Maastricht context, culminating in the elaboration of semi-official avenues for encounter and dialogue with religious groups. It also indicates how, in turn, these semi-official practices and the ideas behind them have gradually imposed themselves upon multiple levels of the EU political system, thus opening up an institutional space in the EU for consultations with and 'informal policies' towards faith communities, both within and outside the EU borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how the EU regulatory state expands into fiscal surveillance and what conflicts arise in the process. That the EU should have gone down the route of regulating budgets is puzzling. In Majone's original concept, the regulatory state is meant not to interfere with member states' budgetary redistributive policies. Yet the revision of the Pact strengthened the regulatory content of fiscal surveillance by reformulating the policy problem, strengthening delegated monitoring by the Commission, with Eurostat rather than DG Ecfin at its helm, and by extending control through specialised information. The analysis implies that the revision of the Pact in March 2005 cannot simply be dismissed as a watering down of its fiscal rules. However, there are limitations to regulatory expansion. One limitation is the inherent tension between the requirements of control and the economic justification of fiscal rules, another that economic justifications remain ambiguous and contentious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European state aid control, a part of competition policy, typically follows the logic of negative integration. It constrains the potential for member states to distort competition by reducing their ability to subsidise industry. In addition, this paper argues, ambiguous Treaty rules and heterogeneous member state preferences have enabled the European Commission to act as a supranational entrepreneur, not only enforcing the prohibition of distortive state aid, but also developing its own vision of 'good' state aid policy. In order to prevent or to settle political conflict about individual decisions, the Commission has sought to establish more general criteria for the state aid that it still deems admissible. These criteria have been codified into a complex system of soft law and, more recently, hard state aid law. The Commission has thus created positive integration 'from above' and increasingly influences the objectives of national state aid policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political dynamics behind Europe’s new banking union in two stages. First it examines the accretion of political power to two European institutions – the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) – during the financial crisis, emphasising the ways in which the European Central Bank (especially under Mario Draghi) altered the relationship between principals and agents in the European institutional architecture. Second, it process-traces the policy conflicts and compromises that led to a Europeanisation and centralisation of bank supervision, recapitalisation, recovery and resolution in a remarkably short two years – a transfer in sovereignty to the supranational level equal to that involved in the creation of Economic and Monetary Union. The article argues, contrary to other analyses that stress the intergovernmental nature of the process and the bargains concluded, that the emergence of banking union reflected something of a neo-functionalist logic whereby supranational actors successfully interpreted the crisis as requiring supranational solutions, and shaped the outcomes in the face of sometimes fierce member state opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bank ring-fencing is an important post-crisis regulatory response to the moral hazard dilemma surrounding too-big-to-fail banks. Since national governments bore the worst of the costs of rescuing the largest banks, it is reasonable to expect that the authorities would have the greatest incentive to promote tough ring-fence reform. However, in confrontation with the EU’s Liikanen Group and the EU Commission, France and Germany established a weaker set of national reforms. This article asks why these national governments pursued legislation that was more accommodating to their largest banks than the EU proposals. It argues that France and Germany were defending market-based banking in their largest universal banks. They were defending the ability of their largest banks to hold large volumes of trading assets which, in the view of the EU Commission and others, was a major cause of the financial crisis. The conclusions suggest that the direction of change will continue to be towards further market-based banking, despite the associated costs revealed by the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how the European Commission has responded to external criticism and demands for the democratisation and reform of the way it uses expert groups in EU policy making. The article analyses the nature and character of the Commission’s dialogue with its critics and the degree and extent to which it was prepared to adapt its existing internal processes and procedures to the reform agenda. Recent theories inform us that organisations respond in different ways to external criticism and demands for reform, including full adaptation, evasion, institutional decoupling and reinterpretation. The main findings suggest that the Commission was not completely resistant to changing its approach to the use of expertise. The Commission reinterpreted its critics’ demands by introducing reforms that defused this external pressure, while protecting the effectiveness of its existing internal ideology and processes. These findings serve to enhance the Commission’s image as an increasingly normalised bureaucracy and reinforce the importance of knowledge and expertise as a key source of Commission legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Does lobbying success in the European Union vary systematically across interest group type? Interest groups lobby the European institutions in order to achieve policy decisions that are in line with their own preferences. While some argue that different types of interest groups are equally able to shape European policy-making, others contend that lobbying success is systematically biased towards some powerful interest groups. The empirical evidence is contradictory as previous studies focused either on a specific interest group type or on a specific policy area so that it is difficult to draw general conclusions. This study therefore presents an extensive empirical analysis of lobbying success across a wide variety of interest groups and policy issues by combining a quantitative text analysis of Commission consultations with an online survey among interest groups. The findings are promising as they indicate that lobbying success does not vary systematically across interest group type. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the past, economic integration in Europe was largely compatible with the preservation of different national varieties of capitalism. While product market integration intensified competition, member states could build on and foster their respective comparative advantage. Today, this no longer unequivocally holds true. This article contends that a new, 'post-Ricardian' phase of European integration has emerged in which the Commission's and the European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) attempts to promote economic integration systematically challenge the institutions of organised capitalism. It demonstrates this by discussing recent disputes over the Services Directive, the Takeover Directive, and company law. In the current phase of European integration, the Commission's and the ECJ's liberalisation attempts either transform the institutional foundations on which some of the member states' economic systems rely or they create political resistance to an extent that challenges the viability of the European project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Commission has developed an analysis of supplementary pensions which constructs the policy area as regulatory by separating 'allocative' issues, such as smoothing lifetime income and promoting saving, from traditional 'redistributive' or 'budgetary' welfare concerns, such as ensuring an adequate minimum income. In the allocative sphere, it promotes market-oriented values, notably 'actuarial fairness'. However, the progress of European measures on supplementary pensions is impeded by alternative approaches. The social partners play a large role in regulating supplementary pensions, and they provide an approach to regulation that is antagonistic to the adoption of common EU rules. Member states might be expected to view EU-level regulatory activity more favourably as providing a lever for pension reforms, but several states which had already embarked on substantial changes to their pension systems did not welcome EU-led reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discussion of the Services Directive from 2004 onwards showed an unprecedented extent of politicisation of a single-market issue. Coinciding with the Eastern enlargement in 2004, the easing of the services freedom through the Directive raised significant redistributive issues, given the differences in labour costs. The article analyses why mutual recognition is so controversial in services, by contrast with its acceptance in developing the internal market in goods. It is shown that the problem of trust in the regulatory systems of other member states that arises under mutual recognition is being addressed through administrative cooperation, but the problem of inequality between workers that arises from the application of home country regulations has not been resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of the Lisbon strategy before and after its major watershed reform in 2005, with particular attention to the role of the European Commission. Operating in an ambiguous partial delegation of power, the Commission changed from performing a strong administrative role in the 2000-04 period to performing a political role after 2005. The institutional analysis of this article combines contextual factors and internal factors for explaining this variation. The findings reveal that although internal factors play an important part in explaining change, they are highly related to contextual factors. More precisely, the ability of the Commission to unfold actively its ideological and normative leverage and unfold specific forms of procedural leverage after 2005 is highly related to the member states' decision to clarify the formal division of tasks between them and the Commission. In other words, situations of procedural ambiguity are not necessarily to the advantage of the Commission, since it does not invariably have the ability to use this ambiguity in its favour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts by discussing 'agencification' and fragmentation in national governments. When dealing with the problems that these developments might cause for democratic control and agency accountability, one only tends to look at the relationships between agencies and various national stakeholders, in particular ministerial departments. Has a 'methodological nationalism' hindered us from seeing the emerging executive centre at the level above, i.e. the European Commission, and the re-coupling of nationally decoupled agencies into a multilevel Union administration? The development of the EU, due to its peculiar institutional architecture, takes quite another direction than intergovernmental cooperation and comes to challenge governments in an unprecedented way. National agencies become parts of two administrations - a national as well as a Union administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]