Assessing the Responsiveness of European Union Institutions

This section focuses on the responsiveness of the main institutions of the European Union: the European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Ministers, European Council, and European Court of Justice. How do these institutions respond to policy demands from each other and other actors, including interest groups, national parliaments and ultimately citizens? How are they responding to profoundly important changes in the political environment, including those associated with economic crisis and globalisation? How are EU institutions responding to changes brought by EU enlargement and the new decision-making rules in the Lisbon Treaty? This section examines the ways in which EU institutions’ responses are reflected in their internal processes, their interactions with each other and other parts of the European and global political systems, and the policy outputs they produce. In doing so, the section explores how ideological, national and sectoral interests are constructed and interact within and among the institutions. The section also includes analyses of decision-making on institutional arrangements through intergovernmental conferences and crisis management. The section welcomes research informed by any of strand of institutional analysis: rational choice, historical and sociological. The focus is mainly on theoretically informed empirical analyses of EU institutions, although there is also room for contributions that are mainly theoretical in nature. The section gives priority to research that examines the empirical implications of theories from comparative politics or international relations. We welcome papers that use a diverse range of research approaches, and both quantitative and qualitative methods of inquiry. The section also includes papers that focus on different stages of the policymaking process, including the agenda setting, decision-making and implementation stages.