Mark A. Pollack

Mainstreaming gender in the European Union

This article examines and explains the adoption of gender mainstreaming by the European Union (EU), and traces its implementation in five issue-areas of EU policy: Structural Funds, employment, development, competition, and science, research and development. The EU decision to adopt gender mainstreaming, as well as its variable implementation across issue-areas, can be explained in terms of three factors derived from social movement theory: the political opportunities offered by EU institutions in various issue-areas; the mobilizing structures, or European networks, established among the advocates of gender equality; and the efforts of such advocates to strategically frame the gender-mainstreaming mandate so as to ensure its acceptance by EU policy-makers.

International Relations Theory and European Integration

The explicit effort to theorize about the process of European integration began within the field of international relations (IR), where neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism long remained the dominant schools of thought. With the relaunching of the integration process in the 1980s and 1990s, however, IR scholars have begun to approach the study of the European Union using more general, and generalizable, theoretical approaches. This article examines the recent debate among realists, liberals, rational-choice institutionalists, and constructivists regarding the nature of the integration process and the EU as an international organization. Although originally posed as competing theories, I argue, realist, liberal and institutionalist approaches show signs of convergence around a single rationalist model, with constructivism remaining as the primary rival, but less developed, approach to the study of European integration.

CREEPING COMPETENCE: THE EXPANDING AGENDA OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY

The article attempts to explain the expansion of the European Community (EC) policy agenda to new policy areas such as the environment, regional development and research and technological development, and the variations in policy development from one area to another. Lowis classification of policy types-regulatory, redistributive and distributive-is adapted for use in the EC context. Each policy type, it is argued, deals with a distinct arena featuring different actors, different institutional decision rules, and different types of Council bargaining, and each therefore corresponds to a distinctive pattern of task expansion. Thus, regulatory policies can be explained in terms of functional spillover from the Internal Market, while redistributive policies can be understood as side-payments in larger intergovernmental bargains, and distributive policies are the result of the Commissions policy entrepreneurship and log-rolling Council bargaining. These three patterns of task expansion are examined in an empirical study of policy development across six areas.

The End of Creeping Competence? EU Policy‐Making Since Maastricht

From its origins in the Treaty of Rome to the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, the EU has expanded the range of its activities dramatically, adopting both budgetary and regulatory policies across a broad range of issue-areas. The 1990s, however, witnessed a political and economic backlash against the creeping centralization of policy-making in Brussels, threatening a major retrenchment, or even devolution, of EU policy-making. This article examines budgetary and regulatory data from the late 1990s and early 2000s, to determine whether the centralization of policy-making has slowed, or even reversed, during the post-Maastricht era. The data reveal selective evidence of retrenchment in EU budgetary expenditures, which have been limited by the fiscal restrictions of EMU, German resistance to any increase in its net contribution, and the new budgetary demands of enlargement. By contrast, data on EU regulation suggest that the EU has been, and remains, an active regulator across a wide range of issue-areas after Maastricht, and will continue to play the role of a regulatory state in the future.

Learning from the Americanists (Again): Theory and Method in the Study of Delegation

European(ist) scholars have largely followed their American(ist) colleagues in the formulation of theories about delegation of powers to non-majoritarian institutions, most notably through the application of principal-agent models of relations between legislative principals and their executive and judicial agents. This article suggests that Europeanists can once again learn from recent developments in both theory and method in the study of delegation in American politics. The first section discusses the methodological challenges of testing hypotheses about the conditions under which agents might enjoy some degree of autonomy from their legislative principals, and draws lessons from the recent Americanist literature. The section examines the development in American politics of a second wave of principal-agent analysis which aims to formulate and test hypotheses about the conditions under which legislative principals might delegate authority and discretion to bureaucratic agents. The third and final section of the article examines some preliminary applications of the principal-agent approach to the European Union and to the comparative study of European parliamentary democracies, and proposes a research agenda for the comparative study of national-level delegation in the parliamentary systems of Western Europe.

Rational Choice and EU Politics

Over the past two decades, rational choice theories have made rapid inroads into the study of EU politics. This paper examines the application of rational choice analyses to EU politics, assesses the empirical fruitfulness of such analyses, and identifies both internal and external challenges to the rational choice study of the EU. With regard to the empirical fruitfulness of rational choice, the paper notes charges of methodological ‘pathologies’ in rational choice work, but suggests that rational choice approaches have produced productive research programs and shed light on concrete empirical cases including the legislative, executive and judicial politics of the EU, as well as on other questions such as public opinion and Europeanization. Turning to external critiques, the paper examines claims that rational choice is ‘ontologically blind’ to certain phenomena such as endogenous preference formation and sources of change. While rational choice as a research program does focus scholars attention on certain types of questions, rational choice scholars have theorized explicitly, alongside scholars from other theoretical traditions, about both national preference formation and about endogenous source of change, thereby clarifying and advancing the study of both phenomena.

The Commission as an Agent

Nearly four decades into its existence, the precise causal role of the European Commission in the processes of European policy-making and European integration remains theoretically contested and empirically unmapped. The standard theoretical approaches are well known, and require little elaboration here. On the one side, intergovernmentalists such as Moravcsik and Garrett have generally depicted the Commission (and other EU institutions) as essentially passive agents of the EU Member States, facilitating cooperation and lowering transactions and monitoring costs, but unable to exert any independent causal. influence on the process of European integration. Supranational institutions like the Commission do not run amuck and shape the integration process, they argue, but obediently attend to the preferences of the Union’s most powerful Member States (Moravcsik, 1993; Garrett, 1992). On the other side, neofunctionalists, students of the Commission, and students of multi-level governance have often bristled at the idea of the Commission as a ‘mere agent’ of the member governments, asserting that the Commission possesses considerable autonomy or independence from the member governments and often deals directly with interest groups and subnational governments within the Member States (see, for example, Haas, 1958; Marks, 1993; Nugent, 1995).

The New Transatlantic Agenda at Ten: Reflections on an Experiment in International Governance*

The 1995 New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA) represents anovel experiment in international governance, linking the institutions of the EU and the United States at the intergovernmental, transgovernmental and transnational levels. This article draws lessons from the NTA after its first decade, noting tensions in the Brussels-Washington relationship, a highly variable pattern of effectiveness in transgovernmental regulatory co-operation, and a largely ineffectual record of transnational civil-society co-operation.

Europe, America, Bush : transatlantic relations in the twenty-first century

1. Introduction: Europe, America and Bush 2. Foreign and Defense Policy Cooperation 3. Trade and Economic Relations 4. Justice and Internal Security Cooperation 5. Transatlantic Environmental Relations 6. US and European Perspectives on Russia 7. The US and Europe in the Balkans 8. The Middle East: Focus of Discord? 9. Unilateral Europe, Multilateral America? 10. Conclusions: A Transformed Transatlantic Partnership?

The Engines of European Integration: Delegation, Agency, and Agenda Setting in the European Union

Introduction: Theory, Hypotheses and Research Design 1. Delegation, Agency and Agenda Setting in the European Union PART I: DELEGATION AND DISCRETION 2. The Commission as an Agent: Delegation of Executive Power in the EU 3. The Court of Justice as an Agent: Delegation of Judicial Power in the EU 4. The European Parliament an an Outlier: Delegation of Legislative Powers in the EU PART II: AGENCY AND AGENDA-SETTING 5. Liberalizing Europe: The Commission, the Court, and the Creation of a European Market 6. Regulating Europe: The Commission, the Court, and the Regulation of the European Market Conclusions: A Europe of Agents, A World of Agents