Center for European Studies

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Center for European Studies
3324 Turlington Hall
PO Box 117342
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
(352) 294-7142
(352) 392-8966 (fax)
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• Agenda
• Abstracts
• Participants

Abstracts

Burial or Resurrection? The Fate of EU ‘Pillars’ After Lisbon

Dr. Marco Brunazzo

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  (Presentation based on a draft paper by Marco Brunazzo and Pierpaolo Settembri.)

The Treaty of Lisbon is rightly commended for two beneficial innovations. In the first place, it has done much to simplify the basic legislative procedures of the Union and to apply them to an ever greater range of policy areas. In the second place, it has done away with the former so-called “pillar” structure. Recalling the origin and functioning of the pillars since the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty and sketching out a map of EU policy-making introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, the article argues that the various clusters of rules and actors that are involved in policy-making are better understood as “regimes” rather than described through the traditional concepts of competences, procedures or pillars.

Understanding the EU: A Comparative Perspective

Dr. Sergio Fabbrini

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The constitutionalisation of the European Union (EU) is necessarily a contested process. The final approval of the Lisbon Treaty will not resolve the division on the finalité of the union between those member states that interpret the EU as a political project and those that view the EU as an economic organization. This division is an outcome of the material and (especially) cultural asymmetries within the EU, asymmetry increased by the various enlargements. This is also the experience of the other main (democratic) union of states, the United States (US). However, whereas the contested process of constitutionalisation in the US was based, at least since the Civil War, on a common constitutional framework and it has been ordered by a super-majority procedure for settling disputes, the EU lacks a document that embodies a shared language and a procedure that is able to solve the disputes. Here is the puzzle: the EU needs a constitutional treaty for regulating its disputes, but the divisions between its member states make the approval of such a document highly implausible. How to sort out from this dilemma?

Constitutions Past, Present and Future:
The EU in Comparative Perspective

Dr. Andrew Glencross

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The purpose of this talk is to situate constitutional debates about the contemporary EU – as well as its future – in an appropriate comparative and historical context. This means examining analogous issues of constitutionalization and associated problems of political representation in the US and Swiss federal experiences. Constitutionalization is understood here in terms of limited government, judicial review and horizontal and vertical separation of powers. In a democratic/republican context, constitutionalization further gives rise to vexing questions about the location and mechanism of popular sovereignty. The constitutional experience of EU integration is thus contrasted with similar issues arising in the course of American and Swiss political development. The latter two can be seen to have resolved important constitutional issues through presidentialization and direct democracy respectively. Current EU constitutional debates are then discussed in terms of the applicability of not only presidentialization and direct democracy but also a sui generis notion of “politicization” to see what promises and pitfalls each model has for resolving constitutional conflict in the EU.

Referendum Voting in EU Democracy

Dr. Joseph Jupille

European Union member states have now held over thirty referendums on aspects of European integration. For some, referendums represent an appropriate vehicle for democratic involvement in the EU. I argue that the very complexity of the EU’s treaties, institutions and policies defies effective democratic engagement through the referendum vehicle. Through an examination of recent votes on the Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty, I identify the role played by calculation, community and cues in individual voting behavior in EU referendums, and also scrutinize the conditioning effect of EU complexity on the operation of these factors. I conclude that the EU is in a bind which, while not of its own making, nonetheless will condemn it to falling short on democratic grounds.

The Durability of EU Federalism

Dr. Daniel Kelemen

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Predictions of the EU’s imminent demise are a staple of EU politics. The Greek financial crisis has occasioned the latest round of hysteria about whether the European Union can hold together. Most analysis of the durability of the European Union is based on little more than conjecture and intuition. This paper argues that rigorous analysis of durability of the European Union should be based on conceptual frameworks found in the literature on stability and instability in federal systems. Applying these analytic lenses to the EU we can see that – media hysterics notwithstanding – EU federalism is highly durable.

The European Parliament and the Diffusion of
Regional Parliamentary Institutions Worldwide

Dr. Andrés Malamud

No process of regional integration has been safe of criticism for allegedly suffering from democratic or institutional deficit. These deficits, the argument goes, are the consequence of scarce accountability and the lack of transparency of regional decision-making. Different regional blocs have attempted a variety of ways to face these deficiencies, the most visible of which is the creation and empowerment of a regional parliament. This presentation analyzes comparatively five of these institutions in Europe and Latin America – i.e. the European Parliament, the Latin American Parliament, the Central American Parliament, the Andean Parliament, and the Mercosur Parliament – with the aim to understand their impact on representation, decision-making and accountability. The conclusions highlight severe contrasts across the Atlantic and advance a series of factors plausible to account for them.

Participants

Dr. Marco Brunazzo

Dr. Marco Brunazzo is a Researcher of Political Science at the University of Trento, Italy. He is a member of the Italian Society of Political Science (SISP), the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) and the European Union Studies Association (EUSA). From 2003, he is the secretary of the Editorial Committee of the Italian Journal Political Science. His teaching and research interests include Europeanization, Regional Policy, the Committee of the Regions, territorial institutions and local governance. Dr. Brunazzo’s scholarly articles appear in journals such as the Italian Journal of Political Science, Regional and Federal Studies, The Biannual Group of the Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Italian Politics and Society, Italian Journal of Public Policy, and The Institutions of Federalism and Modern Italy. He is the author of The Italian regions and the European Union: An Institutional and Public Policy Approach. He has contributed in many books on Italian and Regional Policy and has co-authored articles with Dr. Fabbrini, such as Federalizing Italy: The convergent Effects of Europeanization and Domestic Mobilization, in Regional and Federal Studies.

Dr. Sergio Fabbrini

Dr. Sergio Fabbrini is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Trento, Italy. He was educated at the University of Trento and Cambridge (UK). His teaching experience is vast: NATO Associate Professor of American and Comparative Politics at UC Riverside and Berkeley (1981-1983), Fulbright Professor of American and Comparative Politics at the Harvard University (US) (1987-89), Recurrent Visiting Professor of Comparative Politics at UC Berkeley (since 1991), Jean Monnet Chair Professor at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence (2001). He taught and lectured, among others, at the Nanjing University (China), at the Osaka, Tokyo and Sapporo Universities (Japan), at the Bath University (Britain) at the Andina University (Quito, Ecuador). He is member of the Steering Group on European Union of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). He is currently the editor of the Italian Journal of Political Science. His research interests include comparative politics and political institutions, transatlantic comparison (EU and US) and US policies, Europeanization of EU member states, Italian political system and political theory. Dr. Fabbrini has authored seven academic books, co-authored one book, edited and co-edited five other books, and published eighty articles in scientific journals or chapters in edited books in the fields of: Comparative, American, EU, Italian politics, of political theory and political economy, of public policy. His current projects include: “Comparison of the EU and US political systems and the future of transatlantic relations”, “The constitutionalization of a postnational democracy in Europe and the Europeanization of Italian politics and institutions”.

Dr. Andrew Glencross

Dr. Andrew Glencross is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a BA in Social and Political Sciences (2000) and an MPhil. in Historical Studies (2002) from Cambridge University. In the interim between those degrees he served as a Joseph Hodges Choate Fellow at Harvard University. In 2007 he completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy where he was subsequently appointed as a post-doctoral fellow. He has taught classes on the politics of European integration, American government and modern political theory. His primary research interest concerns European integration and especially the problems of negotiating state sovereignty and democracy in the EU as compared with the United States.

Dr. Joseph Jupille

Dr. Joseph Jupille is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Colorado European Union Center of Excellence (CEUCE). He previously served as Assistant Professor at Florida International University and Co-Director of the Miami European Union Center. While he teaches broadly across European, Comparative and International topics, his primary research interests lie in the area of institutional political economy. His first book, Procedural Politics, was published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on Theories of Institutions (with James A. Caporaso, under contract at Cambridge University Press), Institutional Choice in International Commerce (with Walter Mattli and Duncan Snidal, manuscript nearing completion), and Trading Rules: Forum Shopping Within and Among International Institutions (preparatory stages). His articles have appeared in Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, European Political Science Review, International Organization, and West European Politics.

Dr. Daniel Kelemen

Dr. Daniel Kelemen is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He received his MA and Ph.D. in Political Science at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Rutgers, Dr. Kelemen was Fellow in Politics at Lincoln College of the University of Oxford. He has been a Fulbright Fellow in European Union Studies at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels and a Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research interests include the politics of the European Union, law and politics, comparative political economy, federalism and environmental policy. He is author of The Rules of Federalism: Institutions and Regulatory Politics in the EU and Beyond (Harvard University Press, 2004), as well as numerous book chapters and articles in journals including International Organization, Comparative Political Studies, West European Politics, Journal of Public Policy and Journal of European Public Policy. He is currently writing a book on the judicialization of public policy in Europe, Suing for Europe? The Rise of Adversarial Legalism in the European Union (forthcoming in 2008 with Harvard University Press), and is co-editing, together with Keith Whittington and Greg Caldeira, The Oxford Handbook on Law and Politics (forthcoming in 2008 with Oxford University Press).

Dr. Andrés Malamud

Dr. Andrés Malamud is an Assistant Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences (ISC) of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He received his Ph.D. in Political and Social Science from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. His teaching and research interests revolve around regional integration, comparative government institutions and parties, and Latin American politics. He has conducted research and lectured at universities in Argentina, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. His work has been published in books and scholarly journals such as Latin American Research Review, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Iberoamericana-Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies [Stockholm], Iberoamericana. América Latina-España Portugal [Berlin], Portuguese Studies Review [Ontario], Desarrollo Económico [Buenos Aires], América Latina Hoy [Salamanca], Araucaria [Seville], Contexto Internacional [Rio de Janeiro], Revista Uruguaya de Ciencia Política, Revista Argentina de Ciencia Política, Análise Social [Lisbon], Sociologia Problemas e Práticas [Lisbon], and Relações Internacionais [Lisbon]. He is currently a member of the executive committee of the Latin American Political Science Association (ALACIP).