European Union Studies Working GroupDepartment of Political and Social Sciences |
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!
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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