Sources of EU Support: The Case of Germany

The determinants of support for European integration and the European Union have been analysed by previous research from a comparative perspective: factors that help to explain the differences between the levels of support of the EU member states are considered to be the factors that drive EU support in general. This article takes a different approach using a cross-time perspective to identify the sources of EU support and to investigate the causal structure of the effects. We analyse German support for European integration which is very volatile over time and test potential explanations for these fluctuations. Three bundles of factors are considered: the economy, the increasing scope of EU policies, and the domestic political process. It appears that all three are associated with fluctuations of German support for European integration. However, domestic politics seems to be mightier than often understood. The empirical evidence that is presented in support of these claims is taken from the Mannheim Eurobarometer Trendfile and recent Eurobarometer surveys, from the Comparative Political Data Set, and from the official handbook of the Bundestag.     

Democratization in the Middle East and North Africa: A More Ambidextrous Process?

Democratization is always an ambidextrous process. On the one hand, it triggers a universalistic set of norms, events, processes and symbols. On the other hand, democratization involves a much more particularistic set of ‘realistic’ adaptations to the structures and circumstances of individual countries. In analysing the structures and conjunctures of countries in the Arab World during the past decades, scholars looked at them from the perspective of persistent authoritarianism. This essay exploits democratization theory – as well as its converse ? by analysing the universalistic set of events, processes and symbols of democratization elsewhere in the world, and then identifying the particularistic characteristics of timing, location and coincidence that seem likely to affect the political outcome of regime change in the countries affected by recent popular uprisings in the Arab World.     

Raising the Question on ‘Who Should Get What?’ Again: On the Importance of Ideal and Existential Standards

This contribution compares the importance of ideal standards and existential standards on people’s ideas on fair earnings. Ideal standards refer to persons’ preferences for a distribution rule according to which earnings ought to be allocated among members of a social aggregate. Existential standards refer to conditions of the social context, like the average earning or pay inequality, that serves as points of reference when people shape their ideas on just earnings. In line with the theoretical literature, we find that both standards are relevant for shaping people’s ideas on just earnings. However, there seems to be greater consensus among our respondents on the importance attached to the existential standards than over that attached to the ideal standards. We also found a “reversed just gender wage gap”: by assigning higher earnings to fictitious female than fictitious male employees, our female and male respondents seem to compensate former gender-related income discrimination against female employees in the German labor market. Our analysis is based on the answers of 676 respondents living in Germany who participated in an internet-based factorial survey.     

Policy representation

Abstract This paper examines the extent to which conditions for the 'representative party government' model of representation exist in the EU. It suggests that, although application of the model is obviously limited, there is some support for its relevance. Using surveys of voters and candidates for the European Parliament the paper shows that some policy positions of representatives are constrained more by their party group than their nationality, and to some degree there is obvious congruence between the opinions of candidates and their voters. This is particularly so with respect to left–right orientation; far less with respect to European Monetary Union where elites appear much more enthusiastic than their electorates.     

Bitter pill for the pharmaceutical industry

In Case C-431/04 of 4 May 2006 the European Court of Justiceruled that a combination of an active ingredient and an excipientcannot be understood as ‘combination of active substances’in the sense of Article 1(b) of Council Regulation 1768/92 andthus is not entitled to SPC protection.