The European Commission–Appointment, preferences, and institutional relations

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in commissioners that duplicate the policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision rules still prevent the Commission from being a Council clone in aggregate. Rather, it is predicted a priori that Commission policies are on average more in accord with the aggregate position of the Parliament than that of the Council. This prediction is confirmed for a dataset covering 66 dossiers with 162 controversial EU legislative proposals passed between 1999 and 2002.     

Socio‐legal Scholarship in Canada: A Review of the Field

This article is the second in an occasional series dealing with the development, current status, and future of socio‐legal studies in selected countries. It follows Kim Economides's review of socio‐legal studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand.     

From general training to projeetization: Implications for learning processes and the roles of trainers

A large component of development aid in the past has been in the form of scholarships for officials and managers to attend short and long training programmes in the west. However, it has increasingly been felt that the impact of such programmes is limited, and hence the donor community is placing increased emphasis on ‘projectized’ training programmes, i.e. training that is geared to specific development projects in a particular country. This shift has implications for the nature of the training, the learning processes involved and the roles of trainers. This article explores these issues, firstly reviewing the debate between ‘open’ and ‘projectized’ training, and then going on to report on a case study involving a ‘projectized’ learning event run for the Nigerian Civil Service as part of its Civil Service reform programme. The case study explores the main differences between ‘open’ and ‘projectized’ training, demonstrates some of the potential problems with ‘projectized’ learning and, where appropriate, suggests solutions and offers a number of practical suggestions for trainers to consider for operating in an increasingly ‘projectized’ training scene.