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Given its recent development of becoming a fully fledged legislature in EU politics, the European Parliament is increasingly compared to the USA House of Representatives. At the same time, a lot of scholars that have analyzed the evolution of party cohesion within the European Parliament (see, for instance, Hix et al. 2007) do not refer to the American example. This is surprising since there is a long tradition on research looking at party cohesion - socalled party votes - within the House of Representatives (see, for instance, Roberts and Smith 2003). This paper wants to bridge this gap by comparing and explaining figures of party cohesion between the USA House of Representatives and the EU European Parliament. The analysis of party or roll-call votes is part of a broader research agenda that deals with the question whether the European Parliament is developing towards a legislature such as the House of Representatives or, in other words, whether the European Parliament can be better understood by comparing it to the USA House of Representatives. Some comparative research on these two legislatures has already been done. Kreppel (2006), for instance, compared the European Parliament with the House of Representatives by looking at three emblematic features of the House: its legislative power, the role of committees and bipartisan voting. Despite the notion of 'American exceptionalism' that is often referred to when analyzing national legislatures of EU member states, her analysis demonstrated that the European Parliament shares these characteristics to a large degree. This paper will examine whether this also applies to party cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars tend to assume that in terms of institutional shape the US is generally more hierarchical and centralized than the EU and in terms of market integration the former is more of a single free market than the latter in the sense of fewer allowable trade restraints. This paper, however, in taking a closer look at the respective public procurement regimes of the United States and the European Union argues that in certain policy fields the European Union appears to have gone further than the United States in centralizing authority and eliminating interstate barriers to integrate the common market. It further contends that the arguments made in the US to explain the continuing existence of trade barriers in public procurement, based on the market participant exemption, don't hold up in comparative light and that the difference between the two polities is largely due to the role of the Commission as a federal-level entity specifically charged with creating a common market and a different attitude towards federal-level entities in this policy arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of domestic, country-specific conditions in the target countries for the conception and implementation of democracy promotion strategies by the European Union (EU) and the United States of America (US). First, an analytical framework is outlined to allow the identification of 'differentiated strategies'. We build upon the assumption that the 'grey zone' of semi-authoritarian regimes presents the greatest challenge to external democracy promotion. Empirically, we look for conceptual differentiation at the global level and analyze differentiation in implementation in four country case-studies (Morocco, Tunisia, Belarus, and Ukraine). In general, we find a surprising similarity between the two actors' democracy promotion efforts. Even though the EU highlights a cooperative approach whereas the US openly pursue a two-track approach, democracy promotion efforts of the two actors are similarly adapted to a country's context and its development in our four case-studies. Our findings suggest that both actors only choose a truly conflictive approach in reaction to a dramatic worsening of the political situation. In contrast, undemocratic but stable semi-authoritarian regimes are not the focal point of democracy promotion efforts: the scope for cooperative action is significantly limited and not backed up by a conflictive approach. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the assumption that sub-federal initiatives in multi-level systems matter, this paper compares climate change initiatives in the European Union and in the United States. It starts by considering different options for comparing environmental policy in the European Union and the United States (section 2). The next chapters describe climate change policy, first, in the European Union and, second, in the United States (section 3) in greater detail. Based on a comparative analysis of climate policy in the two multi-level systems (section 4), the concluding section asks whether the combination of federal and sub-federal perspectives can provide some general insights and lead to a better understanding of complex multi-level systems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]