This book argues that a third wave of research on the EU is needed to adequately understand the increased interconnectedness between the European and national political levels. In particular, the book asks: how has Europeanization affected current modes of integration and cooperation in the EU? The authors argue that deeper integration in other areas requires a degree of input legitimacy that is currently lacking in the EU.

Cybersecurity is set to be one of the dominant themes in EU governance in the coming years, and EU law has begun to adapt to the challenges presented by security with the adoption of the Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive. This book explores the binding effects of the legal instruments and analyzes the impact of the constraining factors originating from NIS-related domestic policies across Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Poland upon the transposition of the NIS Directive. Combining insights from law and political science, the book offers a comparative empirical analysis of national policies and regulations regarding network and information security, as well as the national legal framework deriving from the NIS Directive’s transposition. The book argues that the more the Directives offer a regulatory leeway to EU Member States for the transposition of their content, the more the preservation of national interests by EU Member States affects the uniform application of directives across the EU. Highlighting the need to go beyond the study of the legal compliance of European directives, the volume offers a new perspective on the interests of Member States and European law, bridging the gap between the politics and law of European integration. It will be of interest to students, academics, and practitioners with an interest in EU Law and cybersecurity.

This collection sets a new agenda for conducting research on the EU and learns from past mistakes. In doing so it provides a state-of-the-art examination of social science research designs in EU studies while providing innovative guidelines for the advancement of more inclusive and empirically sensitive research designs in EU studies

As the power and scope of the European Union moves further, beyond traditional forms of international cooperation between sovereign states, it is important to analyse how these developments are impacting upon national institutions and processes of democratic representation and legitimacy in the member countries. The authors in this book identifyfour core processes of democratic governance present in any democratic political system that link societal and state processes of decision-making: opinion formation, interestintermediation, national executive decision-making and national parliamentary scrutiny. From a normative perspective they discuss what impacts this process of Europeanizationhas on democracy in the evolving system. They conclude that more changes are seen within the state-centric than in the societal-centred processes of democracy, thus thepublic seems to have been 'left behind? in the process of constructing Europe. The empirical research and normative discussion presented in this book are designed to further our knowledge concerning the Europeanization of social and state processes of democracy and to contribute to the continuing dialogue on democracy in the EuropeanUnion. This book will be of great interest to academics and researchers of political science, public policy and international relations, as well as those interested in European studies andcomparative politics.

This book brings together the study of transnationalization in three institutional fields: civil society, state and the economy. It also extends the research of processes of transnationalization to evolving new democracies and emerging market economies.

This cutting-edge handbook, written by foremost authoritative scholars, presents the main theoretical and empirical issues involved in current Europeanization research. It evaluates the achievements and shortcomings of the growing literature. As an advanced reference book it also sets the parameters for Europeanization research in the coming years.

This book examines new member states’ problems with the absorption of EU funds. Since accession, many new member states from Central and Eastern Europe struggle to access their billions of development funds from Brussels. While existing research mostly emphasizes the role of states’ administrative capacities to account for absorption problems, this study adds the so far neglected role of politics as party politicization to the equation. The argument is tested using a combination of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) with two detailed process tracing case studies. This book will appeal to scholars interested in EU cohesion policy, post-accession compliance, and post-communist politics.

Europeanization as Discursive Practice adopts a poststructuralist reading of Europeanization to study the effects of EU accession in the light of political territoriality and consequent state-building processes in the EU and Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) and the Western Balkans, from 1990-2013. Focusing on how domestic actors have framed Europe/EU norms in the debates on territorial reforms and the implications of this framing on policy reforms, it asks how competing articulations of the EU and its norms construct state territoriality in the given political and policy debates. The book argues that the European Union acted as a discursive force and a challenge to the established structures of understanding of territoriality, statehood, and power. With this, the author proposes a new research model for the study of Europeanization that goes beyond the neo-institutionalist account of the EU's policy/norm transfer to member/non-member states. This text will be of key interest to students, scholars and practitioners of European integration, EU foreign policy, enlargement policy, and regional policy and territoriality in post-socialist spaces.

As the European Union has evolved, it has also begun to address policy questions which are closer to the very heart of the state. From cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs, originally conceived as the third pillar of European cooperation, has emerged the Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice (AFSJ). A unique aspect of policy in this area is the desire to integrate the internal and external dimensions of this policy area. One of the tensions in this policy area has been balancing the protection of fundamental rights and increasing security. The first part of this book focuses on the institutional relations of policymaking in AFSJ, both within member states and between member states, in particular the issues of national executive control, national parliamentary scrutiny and peer review across the member states with regard to AFSJ. The second part focuses on specific policy areas which are part of AFSJ. Two chapters highlight the tension found in this policy area between security and human or fundamental rights, the first related to data retention and the second on policing external borders. The final two chapters are concerned with data exchange among European countries and transatlantically with the US, and the interface between AFSJ and the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The chapters contained in the book were presented at the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations and the Dutch national parliament (Tweede Kamer), making it of interest to scholars and practitioners alike.

In this comprehensive Handbook, international experts examine theoretical and empirical research to analyse a core element of the public policy process: implementation. Traversing numerous sub-disciplines and traditions including top-down and bottom-up approaches to public policy implementation research, the chapters present a synthesis of the state of scholarship and stimulate future thinking in the field.