Refine
Document Type
- Public lecture (3)
- Article (1)
- Working Paper (1)
Language
- English (5) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (5)
Europeanisation situates local governments in a constantly changing environment, bringing challenges, opportunities, and constraints. These circumstances raise the question, how
local authorities adapt to the process of European integration, face its challenges, and use
its diverse opportunity structures. The article explores four dimensions, through which Europeanisation hits the ground of local government: downloading, uploading, dissemi-nation, and horizontal networking. It examines the distribution of different types of Europe-related activities at the local level using data from a survey sent to all 396 independent cities, towns, and municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Our empirical analysis provides an overview of the most and least frequent Europe-related activities within the different types of local authorities. The findings of our multivariate analysis shows that next to the direct affectedness by Europeanisation, the municipalities’ capacities in terms of financial and institutional resources have a major influence on their efforts towards Europe.
Academia and practitioners agree that the local level is crucial for EU cohesion. However, further conceptual and empirical development is needed. The paper introduces an under-standing of European cohesion consisting of a horizontal and a vertical dimension, covering individuals' relationships with each other and the polity. We review the predominantly nation-state-focused, interdisciplinary literature on support for the European Union (vertical dimension) and societal Europeanization (horizontal dimension) through a 'local lens', arguing in favour of combining the two dimensions in one framework of cohesion. We derive empirical expectations about the role of local agency for European cohesion and operationa-lise European cohesion, thus designing a coherent framework for analysing the local foundations of European cohesion.
This paper proposes a theoretical concept that is appropriate to analyse and understand the role of the government bureaucracy in transposing European Union law. The theoretical concept is based on the assumption that both formal and informal structures of bureaucratic organisations have an impact on public decision making behaviour. On the basis of two recent theoretical approaches that will enable us to analyse both structural and informal features of government bureaucracies, namely the policy capacity concept and the administrative styles concept, I will propose a theoretical concept that combines elements of both
approaches within one concept. The concept enables us ta analyse and understand the role of public administrations at the stage of implementation of public policies and derive hypotheses on the influence of administrative patterns of policy-making on transposing European Union law at the Member State level.
The paper is part of my PhD-project "Financial Regulation and the Implementation of EU directives in the European Union Member States", which examines the administrative procedures at the Member State level in the transposition of directives. The theoretical concept presented is supposed to help us analyse and
understand the impact of the government bureaucracy on the transposition of EU directives, especially with regard to the customisation of EU directives.