Constitutional Dynamics in the European Union: Success,Failure, and Stability of Institutional Treaty Revisions

ABSTRACT

Despite high institutional hurdles for constitutional change, one observes surprisingly many EU treaty revisions. This article takes up the questions of what determines whether a treaty provision is successfully changed and why provisions are renegotiated at subsequent Intergovernmental Conferences. The article presents an institutionalist theory explaining success and renegotiation and tests the theory using all core institutional provisions by means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The causal analysis shows that low conflict potential of an issue is sufficient for successfully changing the treaties. Furthermore, high conflict potential of an issue and its fundamental change are sufficient for it to be renegotiated.     

Civil service management and corruption: What we know and what we don't

Numerous studies have linked a range of economic, social, and institutional variables with corruption in government. Yet, most of this literature overlooks the management of public officials themselves. This is a relevant omission: almost all corrupt exchanges involve public officials. This article reviews studies—36 in total—that do address civil service management and anti‐corruption. It finds that prior works assess a narrow set of civil service management structures. Meritocratic recruitment and, less robustly, pay levels have been associated with lower corruption. By contrast, robust evidence on how corruption relates to other established public personnel management areas—such as distinct pay structures (rather than levels), promotion, transfer, and job stability practices—is largely unavailable. The article thus calls for research assessing the effects of a broader set of civil service management practices to gain a deeper understanding of corruption, and how to curb it.     

How Transparent are EU ‘Comitology’ Committees in Practice?

Much of the debate on transparency is normative in nature: more transparency is ‘good’ from the perspective of democratic accountability. After all, without information on what decisions are being taken and by whom, it will not be possible for various accountability forums to hold actors to account. This article goes beyond the rhetoric on the need for more transparency in the political system of the EU and examines, in practice as a matter of empirical research, how much transparency there really is. It also goes beyond a purely legal approach to access to information that depends upon the active participation of citizens and others in challenging refusals by specific institutions to grant access to specific documents. We are interested rather in the question as to what extent the institutions are systematically and pro‐actively providing access to their documents via the internet. We focus on the Register of Comitology of the European Commission as a relatively limited case study and, within this context, limit ourselves further to a study of all the documents published in the latest year for which a benchmark was available—2005. Are all comitology documents that exist in fact made available through this public register?     

Wage determination in late socialism: The case of Poland

Does economic transition necessitate a profound change in the inter-industry wage structure? This paper argues that principles of wage determination in centrally planned economies were not basically different from those prevailing in market economies. Even if the center became involved in wage setting, reward for human capital and the compensating differential had to be taken into consideration. Moreover, market power led to rent-sharing via wage bargaining and efficiency wages. Hence, this paper claims that wages in socialist economies were determined by similar factors to those in market economies. This is supported by comparison of inter-industry wage structures between socialist and capitalist countries and by results of the estimation of the wage equation for Poland. There is a noticeable degree of similarity in wage structures generated by both systems.