Joint Chair RSCAS/Political and Social Sciences Department
Professor of Comparative and European Public Policy
Tel. [+39] 055 4685 723 / 2723
Fax [+39] 055 4685 770
Email Adrienne.Heritier@eui.eu
Office SD 020, Convento, RSCAS
Postal Address
Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
European University Institute
Via delle Fontanelle 19
I-50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI)
Italy
Office Hours
For appointments, please contact Prof. Héritier directly
Secretaries
Sarah Beck (RSCAS), tel. [+39] 055 4685 796
Languages
German, English, French, Italian, Spanish
Short Biography
Adrienne Héritier has held a joint chair with the Social and Political Sciences Department since 2003. She was a Director of the Max Planck Project Group for ‘Common Goods: Law, Politics, and Economics’ in Bonn from 1999 to 2003. Before that, from 1995 to 1999, she held a chair in public policy at the EUI. She is a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a member of the Academia Europea. In 1994, she was awarded (jointly with Helmut Willke) the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize for research, by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Her research focuses on European policy-making, comparative public policy, European decision making processes, theories of institutional change and deregulation and re-regulation and new modes of governance. She is at present chair of the European Association for European Union Studies (EUSA).
Institutions, Governance, and Democracy
The Centre also investigates intentional negotiated change (through Treaty reorganisation and revision), as well as endogenous institutional change arising through the development of informal rules and the selection of lower-order rules. In this latter area a project funded by the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies (SIEPS) deals with ‘Interstitial Institutional Change’ and investigates institutional change in the European Union which takes place between the highly salient formal treaty revisions. The SIEPOL project (Seclusion and Inclusion in the European Polity: Institutional Change and Democratic Practices), directed by Adrienne Héritier and Peter Mair investigates an increasingly widespread yet understudied phenomenon in European politics: the shift of legislative decision-making from public, inclusive to informal, secluded arenas. More specifically, it explores whether, why, how and with which consequences EU legislation is increasingly “fast-tracked” under the co-decision procedure and passed as “early agreements”. The project is co-funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council.
Another project funded by the Swedish Institute for European Policy Research in Stockholm (SIEPS) conducted jointly with Catherine Moury, Fredrik Bergstrom and Carina Bischoff focuses on the changing rules of delegation to the Commission’s implementing powers. We ask why the rules governing comitology changed over time and develop an institutionalist bargaining argument according to which actors tend to choose the institutional rule which maximizes their institutional power and thereby their influence over policy outcomes and propose a number of hypotheses. We engage in a longitudinal qualitative analysis to empirically assess the theoretically derived hypotheses and show how the Commission, the Council and increasingly the Parliament, negotiated (and are still negotiating) over decision-making power in the comitology system, why and to what effect these rules changed and, how they, in turn, triggered the attempts of the “losers” to alter them to their own benefit. We quantitatively test our hypothesis by presenting and analyzing data’s on delegating and non delegating legislation in environmental policy, taxation and agricultural policy.
Competition Policy and Market Regulation
Confronting Social and Environmental Sustainability with Economic Pressure: Balancing Trade-offs by Policy Dismantling or Expansion? (CONSENSUS)
The EUI is a partner in this EU-funded Seventh Framework collaborative project, coordinated by the University of Konstanz. The project’s main concern arises in response to three important developments in the economy, the environment and society. First, the concept of sustainable development has emerged as an overarching long term goal of the EU and its member states. Second, the idea that economic, social and environmental objectives are necessarily and always mutually supportive cannot be taken for granted. There is still a need to improve our understanding of potential trade-offs between these different dimensions of sustainable development. Third, current political responses that aim to find ways to ensure that economic, social and environmental policies are indeed mutually reinforcing have to be seen in the context of the commitment to better regulation and deregulation rather than simply more new regulation. As a consequence, the search for synergy effects between the three different dimensions of sustainability must attend both expansive (regulatory) and dismantling (deregulatory) patterns inherent to policy change. The RSCAS-based part of the project is directed by Adrienne Héritier. The project will end in February 2011.
Other Work in Progress: Regulation
Adrienne Héritier, jointly with David Coen from University College London, works on the changes in regulatory policies (network utilities) in EU member states with a particular emphasis on the interaction between regulators and regulated firms. She is at present conducting a large survey of network firms of all sectors in all member states under the theme of “regulatory venue shopping”. The data have been collected and are at present analyzed and interpreted in the light of hypotheses on regulatory venue shopping.
For about two years Adrienne Héritier, jointly with Yannis Karagiannis from the Istitut de Barcelona de Relaciones Internacionals, has been conducting research on the regulation of civil aviation, in particular the emergence of regulatory transatlantic institutions in the field of civil aviation. The main focus is on the negotiation of a Open Skies Agreement between the EU and the US on the opening of aviation markets across the Atlantic.