Regulating lobbying activities in the European Union: A voluntary club perspective

This article offers a systematic exploration of why interest groups sign up to the European Union Transparency Register, a non‐binding lobby regulation system. We distinguish between instrumental and normative perspectives to explain voluntary compliance, and find that concern for one's reputation represents the most important motivational driver. Based on this, we suggest that the Transparency Register can be understood as a “voluntary club” sponsored by European institutions. This theoretical perspective captures the appeal of the instrument among lobbyists, but also a number of inconsistencies in its current design, which make it unviable in the long term. We outline implications for the ongoing reform of the Transparency Register, and more generally for the regulation of lobbying activities. The analysis draws on semi‐structured interviews with various types of lobbyists active in Brussels, and on data from public consultations organized by the European Commission.     

Charles de Gaulle: The Warrior as Statesman

Charles de Gaulle is primarily remembered as the leader of “Free France” between 1940 and 1945, as well as for his time as president of the Fourth and Fifth Republics. This article explores some of the sources of his political belief system, using his military writings of the 1920s and 1930s before he became a celebrated politician. It suggests that his political views can only be understood as being influenced by his experiences as a soldier and his reflections thereon in those military writings.     

Squatting for Survival: Precarious Housing in a Declining U.S. City

Despite severely depressed property markets, housing in declining U.S. cities can be surprisingly unaffordable for poor residents. Yet the characteristics of decline, such as abundant vacant property and constrained economic/political conditions, also provide opportunity for squatting. This article explores survival squatting—illegal occupation of property as a means for procuring suitable housing by marginalized residents. Drawing on a 4.5-year ethnography in Detroit, I examine the mechanisms by which people strategically choose squatting as a method of sheltering in the context of local conditions, and the experiences and conditions of this practice. I situate these empirical findings within a broader discussion comparing squatting and other forms of housing that have received considerable attention by researchers (e.g., shelter use, sleeping rough, doubling up). Squatting is particularly risky and unstable, and often very hidden. Substandard housing conditions prevail, and substance abuse is common. Squatting may have negative implications for child welfare, but may also provide measures of independence, self-determination, and comfort for illegal occupiers. There is a critical need for further research in this area, both to inform comprehensive housing policies and to anticipate how squatters’ well-being is impacted by other urban initiatives, such as blight demolition.     

Unproblematic archaeology 1

This article, focusing on regional development issues, discusses thepolicy alternatives that might be mobilized to reverse the centralizing forces unleashed by the pursuit of neo-liberal policies in the European Union. It highlights the limitations of contemporary versions of the managed economy model, and explores the significance of anemerging model of development rooted in socioeconomics, and stressing the powers of ‘associationism’. While broadly sympathizing with this third way-in between market and hierarchy - as a basis for generating economic success, the article goes on to argue that questions of social equity and political democracy remain unresolved by the associationist agenda.