Artikler

Indhold : Nr. 3 : Årgang 9 : 2006

 

Tema

Encounters with Europe

by Claudio Radaelii & Roman Pasquier

Europæiseringen af ligestilling i Danmark

by Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen & Mads Christian Dagnis Jensen

Europæiseringen af den offentlige forvaltning

by Klaus H. Göetz

Europæisering: Bottom-up eller top-down?

by Jens Blom-Hansen

Kausalitet eller Intervention? At måle EU's konsekvenser for national politik

by Morten Kallestrup

Den bløde Europæiserings retning

by Peter Nedergaard

Europæiseringen af CO2-reguleringen

by Lene Holm Pedersen, Kasper Lindskow & Yosef Bhatti

Regeringernes koordination af EU-politikken og den demokratiske forankring

by Tore V. Olsen & Ove K. Pedersen

Kommentar

Mats Lindbergs misforståelser slører de gode intentioner

by Jan Hylleberg

Bogomtaler

 

Siden Danmarks indtrædelse i EF i 1973 har spørgsmålet om det europæiske samarbejdes indflydelse på den nationale selvstændighed været et tilbagevendende tema i den offentlige debat. Det skabte foruroligelse, da den daværende formand for kommissionen, Jacques Delors, i 1988 vurderede, at omtrent 80 procent af al lovgivning i medlemsstaterne på de økonomiske og sociale områder stammede fra Bruxelles. Med tal som disse er det ikke svært at forstå, hvorfor mange frygter for tabet af national selvstændighed. Men er frygten berettiget? Hvordan påvirkes dansk politik egentlig af EU? For at give et dækkende svar må man undersøge de faktiske konsekvenser af den europæiske integration for det nationale politiske system. På trods af unionens mangeårige eksistens har samfundsvidenskaben først i de senere år fået øjnene op for denne problemstilling, der er blevet kendt under betegnelsen ’europæisering’. Siden midten af 1990’erne har europæiseringsstudiet tiltaget i betydning, og vi har i dag at gøre med et felt, der indtager en central placering på den forskningsmæssige dagsorden.

 

Dette nummer af Tidsskriftet Politik sætter fokus på studiet af europæisering som et højaktuelt forskningsområde med politisk relevans. Formålet med temanummeret er for det første at udbrede kendskabet til europæiseringsstudiet i en dansk sammenhæng. Derudover håber vi at kunne præge feltet ved at bidrage med indsigt i EU's påvirkning af vores nationale politiske system og give inspiration til, hvordan konkrete undersøgelser af europæisering kan gribes an. Temanummeret er blevet til i samarbejde med konferencen ‘Europeanisation – Theorising and Researching on the Impact of Europe’, der blev afholdt på Institut for Statskundskab ved Københavns Universitet den 16. februar 2006.

 

Abstracts:

 

Encounters with Europe: Concepts, definitions, and research design

Claudio M. Radaelli, Professor, Centre for Regulatory Governance, University of Exeter & Romain Pasquier, Professor, University of Rennes

 

 

This article examines the issues of research design raised by research on Europeanization. Specifically, we briefly introduce the basic concepts and the classic approach of integration theorists, and move on to discuss two more recent proposals made by scholars working on Europeanization. We compare the baseline model and the bottom-up approach to research design. As the latter is less known than the former, we explain how it works and its advantages. We also show how Europeanization research can contribute to major questions at the core of comparative politics by taking a bottom-up perspective. However, we do not conclude that the choice is a dichotomy. Although in this article we make the case for bottom-up analysis, future research could usefully combine baseline and bottom-up designs to produce and compare empirical findings on Europeanization.

 

 

 

The Europeanization of Gender Equality in Denmark

Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen, Adjunkt, Institut for Statskundskab, Københavns Universitet & Mads Christian Dagnis Jensen, Stud. scient. pol.,

Institut for statskundskab, Københavns Universitet

 

The paper examines the Europeanization of Danish gender equality. The analytical findings point out that European integration has had substantial impact on the rights to equal treatment in Denmark. The analysis demonstrates that the process of implementation involves a complex series of ‘decision points’ that extend beyond the control of national governments.

 

 

Europeanization of Public Administration – or a European Administration?

Klaus H. Goetz, Professor, Lehrstuhl Innenpolitik, Universität Potsdam

 

The majority of research on Europeanization either advocates that (1) EU-integration increases the power of the executive branch and the de-parlamentarization of the state; (2) that Europeanization means strengthening the bureaucracy; (3) that EU integration ‘presidentializes’ the democratic politics within the states; or (4) that the EU integration gives centralization an advantage in the relations between governments. This article argues that the different theses all fail to emphasize the connection between the horizontal (state to state) and vertical (EU to state) dimensions of the Europeanization by using the Central and Eastern European EU integration as an example.

 

 

Europeanization: Top-down or Bottom-up?

Jens Blom-Hansen, Professor, Institut for Statskundskab, Aarhus Universitet

 

Under the name of ‘Europeanization’ the focus of EU-studies has shifted from formulation to implementation of EU policy. The article introduces the main europeanization approaches and argues that they share the implicit assumption that influence in EU-member state relations is unidirectional. That is, the EU influences the member states, not vice-versa. Building on the 'capture'-theory the article argues that the direction of influence might as well be the opposite. This means that the member states exploit the EU in their pursuit of narrow national policy goals. Empirically, the value of this perspective is substantiated in an analysis of Denmark’s relation to the EU structural funds.

 

 

Causality or Intervention? Measuring the Consequences of EU on National Politics

Morten Kallestrup, Adjunkt, Institut for Økonomi, Politik og Forvaltning, Aalborg Universitet

 

The European Union has significant consequences for domestic politics and policies in the member-states. Though this statement has been put forward for a long time, sufficient empirical data to sustain the claim was only provided just recently. Yet, in spite of having experienced considerable developments in both empirical and theoretical terms since the mid-1990es, the Europeanization literature still suffers an important methodological set-back, namely the implicit assumption that the EU is the independent variable. This article claims that it is prosperous to establish research designs, in which the EU is considered an intervening and/or conditional variable of domestic policy-making, rather than the independent variable. Based on empirical data from quantitative as well as qualitative comparative case studies, this claim is emphasized as being much more in correspondence with recent analytical results than is the classical top down-approach of Europeanization studies.

 

The Direction of the Soft Europeanization – an analysis of the direction of the learning processes within the committees of the OMC

Peter Nedergaard, Lektor, International Center for Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School

 

The main question to be answered in this article is: Who learns from who in the international committees that cooperate through benchmarking, indicators, best practise etc., i.e. the so-called OMC committees? The intention is to contribute to research in europeanization by exploring the direction of horizontal learning processes.

Based on the literature concerning policy diffusion and policy learning, the article proposes two hypotheses regarding what determines the direction of learning processes in transnational committees. These hypotheses are tested against empirical evidence from a questionnaire survey distributed to the participants of the Nordic and European OMC committees. The article concludes that the direction of learning processes primarily is determined by the economic and political performance of participating countries. The degree of similarity between countries does, however, also play a minor role.

 

 

The Europeanization of CO2 Regulation – a Comparative Analysis of Cause and Effect

Lene Holm Pedersen, Ph.d., adjunkt Institut for Statskundskab, Københavns Universitet. Kasper Lindskow & Yosef Bhatti, begge stud.scient.pol., Københavns Universitet.

 

The article investigates EU influence over national CO₂-regulation in the Scandinavian countries in the perspective of the European Emission Trading Scheme. Departing from the methodological debate within Europeanization theory, a strategic case design is developed in order to distinguish the EU variable from other potential explanations. The article shows that regulatory systems were predominately influenced by the EU whereas the levels of regulation seem to be determined by a global factor, the Kyoto Protocol. This result implies that scholars studying EU’s effect on national regulation should be cautious in prejudging the causal influence of the EU variable.

 

 

The Governments’ Coordination of the EU Policy and its Democratic Roots

Tore V. Olsen, Ph.d., International Center for Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School & Ove K. Petersen, Professor, International Center for Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School

 

 

EU membership requires adaptation of national political institutions to the continuously developing institutions of the European Union. As small states, both Denmark and Sweden aspire to present a well prepared and consistent national position at the European decision making bodies in order to make their voices heard and win potential European allies for their cause. At the same time, established administrative and constitutional traditions lay the conditions for the adaptation of national political organizations to EU membership. The article compares, within the framework of institutional theory, how the adaptation of Danish and Swedish political institutions have taken place as a form of ‘bricolage’ in which institutional innovations are combined with the continuation of existing national principles and traditions.