European Union Studies Working Group

VIII^th Session – April 24, 2012, 13h - 15h, Seminar Room 2, Badia Fiesolana

How unions sustain integration in the absence of a EU demos

by Justin Valasek (Max Weber Fellow, ECO)

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze supranational decision-making by a democratic institution, defined as a supranational parliament with representatives that are directly elected at a subnational level, and compare 'supranational democracy' with decision-making by a council of national representatives. Since the parliament better reflects the composition of citizens' preferences, one might expect supranational democracy to increase aggregate welfare. Counter to this intuition, we find that legislative decision-making processes which involve the parliament are not generally welfare improving. Since supranational decisions must satisfy the participation constraints of the individual nations, legislation must be bundled across multiple policy areas, which results in log-rolling and agenda-setting power. Despite this negative result, we characterize a more general mechanism which generates a policy proposal based on the parliament's report of preferences and uses decision-making by the council as an 'outside option.' This mechanism outperforms decision-making by the council.

Nota bene! The presentation will heavily emphasize the intuition of the theory and the application to the EU, and will be accessible to interested parties who don't have any knowledge of, or interest in, game theory!

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Research for Growth?
The Contested Origins of the European Union Research Policy

by Veera Nisonen (Researcher, HEC)

Abstract: This paper examines the difficult creation of a common European research policy as part of the process of the emergence of the European Community (EC)/European Union (EU) as an increasingly powerful global political and economic actor. It will be shown that strong discursive continuity and institutional path-dependency, together with the ability of the promoters of the common research policy to adapt their claims to a broader ideational framework, were the key factors that enabled the EC to enlarge its role in a field in which it originally lacked policy competence and in which states have traditionally been reluctant to pool national sovereignty to supranational institutions. Moreover, it appears that the concept of EC research policy, and the concrete steps towards its realisation, would not have been possible without three fundamental ideational and political transformations: the changing relationship between science and the state and the subsequent establishment of national institutions and practices to promote and orient scientific activity; the emergence of economic growth as an ubiquitous political objective in all industrialised countries and the increasing conceptualisation of science in economic terms; the global breakthrough of liberalism and the rapid liberalisation of the world markets, where knowledge soon became regarded as a vital resource for power and money. These three developments were the origins of the crucial change in perception of the European policymakers concerning not only scientific research but also the major goals of European integration.

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