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The Demise of Statism? Associations and the Transformation of Interest Intermediation in France
(2009)
What role do firms play in the making of EU trade policy? This chapter surveys the policy domain and lays out the instruments firms can employ to influence decisions on trade. It underlines that European trade policy is characterized by a high degree of institutional complexity, which firms have to manage in order to be successful. In particular, the European Commission works intensively to solicit business input in order to gain bargaining leverage vis-à-vis third countries and the EU member states. This reverse lobbying creates a two-channel logic of trade policy lobbying in the EU. Corporate actors have a very good chance of working closely with the European Commission if they can propose pan-European trade policy solutions. This can be either trade liberalization or EU-wide regulatory restrictions on trade. Demands for traditional protectionist measures, especially those that reveal national interest divergences, are difficult to defend at the supranational level. Protectionist lobbying therefore goes through the national route, with corporate actors working to block liberalization by affecting the consensus in the Council of Ministers. The chapter illustrates this two-channel logic by studying business–government interactions in agricultural trade, textiles and clothing, financial services, and telecommunication services.
La politique de concurrence
(2009)
POLITIQUES EUROPEENNES offre une vue d'ensemble du système institutionnel, des acteurs, du jeu politique et des modes d'action de l’Union, à la fois dans les domaines où son intervention est ancienne et dans ceux où son influence est plus récente. Agriculture, monnaie, concurrence, mais aussi commerce, enseignement supérieur, social, environnement ou même politique étrangère : l’influence de l’Europe se fait sentir dans un grand nombre de domaines, et pourtant son action reste largement méconnue. Fruit d’une coopération entre politistes, juristes, économistes et sociologues, tous enseignants à Sciences Po, ce manuel sans équivalent en langue française donne les clés pour mettre en perspective les dynamiques de la construction européenne depuis ses origines et pour comprendre les défis auxquels elle fait face aujourd’hui. Conçu comme un support pour des enseignements d’introduction à l’intégration européenne, il propose un panorama clair et synthétique des politiques européennes et de leur développement. Enrichi de nombreux encadrés, zooms, documents et références bibliographiques, il s’adresse aux étudiants, chercheurs et enseignants des premiers et deuxièmes cycles en science politique, droit, économie, administration publique et administration économique et sociale.
There are important shortcomings in terms of quality and consistency of the asylum decisions taken in the Council of Europe member states. As evidence of this, in 2007 acceptance rates varied considerably between 1% and 39% in countries receiving significant numbers of asylum seekers. The situation was even more dramatic when looking at certain specific groups of asylum seekers. For example, again in 2007, the acceptance rates for Iraqis seeking protection in Europe varied between 0 and 81%. The very low recognition rates in certain countries, or for certain groups of asylum seekers, may be due to difficulties in accessing the asylum process, poor procedural safeguards in the asylum proceedings, restrictive and divergent interpretation of eligibility criteria, lack of objective and reliable country of origin information, poor evidential assessment, in particular the culture of disbelief in asylum adjudication, political pressure, lack of training of the relevant authorities and their personnel, or a combination of these factors. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe should be invited to prepare guidelines to address the difficulties outlined above. These guidelines should encourage Council of Europe member states to develop higher standards of protection, based on their own domestic standards of human rights or humanitarian impulse, reflecting the nature of the European Convention on Human Rights as a pan-European minimum standard. Furthermore the Committee of Ministers should consider a mechanism for monitoring the quality and consistency of asylum decisions, and to facilitate this task, consider guidelines on harmonisation of asylum data across Council of Europe member states, taking into account work already carried out at by the European Union. The Committee of Ministers should also review the asylum curriculum in member states and develop training programmes, tools and data-bases of jurisprudence of asylum decisions across Europe. Finally, there is a pressing need for the Committee of Ministers to establish a new inter-governmentalCommittee with a permanent mandate to examine asylum and refugee issues to replace the work formerly carried out by the Ad hoc Committee of experts on the legal aspects of territorial asylum, refugees and stateless persons (CAHAR).
This article examines the ECJ’s ruling, following an exceptional accelerated procedure, in Case C–127/08 Metock, of 25 July 2008. The article praises the Court’s boldness in abandoning the “prior lawful residence” requirement for residence rights of third–country national (TCN) family members of migrant EU Citizens, explicitly overruling Akrich on this issue. Its reasoning is bold, yet economical, grounded in the 2004 Citizenship Directive and right to free movement of EU citizens. However, the article is critical of the failure to publish the Opinion of AG Maduro and the sparse reasoning in the case. The ECJ’s fundamental rights reticence is particularly striking, in particular as its conception of the residence rights inherent in “normal family life” diverges from the analogous protections under Article 8 ECHR. Although Metock was an easy transborder case concerning migrant EU citizens resident in another EU Member State, the article also argues that the denial of the EC dimension to the family reunification claims of static EU citizens against their home Member States is increasingly untenable.
Tobacco companies have jumped on the Corporate social responsibility (CSR) bandwagon as a tentative to be societally accepted as responsible actors and good corporate citizens. This is however not possible for two reasons. First, the product they sell is lethal and thus not compatible with the precondition of doing no harm to be a good corporate citizen. Second, the behavior of tobacco firms is not responsible, being illustrated by four examples: junk science versus sound science strategy, seducing young smokers, political lobbying and getting customers on new markets. To conclude, three implications for regulating the activities of the tobacco industry are given.
Treating Words as Data with Error: Estimating Uncertainty in Text Statements of Policy Positions
(2009)
Political text offers extraordinary potential as a source of information about the policy positions of political actors. Despite recent advances in computational text analysis, human interpretative coding of text remains an important source of text-based data, ultimately required to validate more automatic techniques. The profession’s main source of cross-national, time-series data on party policy positions comes from the human interpretative coding of party manifestos by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). Despite widespread use of these data, the uncertainty associated with each point estimate has never been available, undermining the value of the dataset as a scientific resource. We propose a remedy. First, we characterize processes by which CMP data are generated. These include inherently stochastic processes of text authorship, as well as of the parsing and coding of observed text by humans. Second, we simulate these error-generating processes by bootstrapping analyses of coded quasi-sentences. This allows us to estimate precise levels of nonsystematic error for every category and scale reported by the CMP for its entire set of 3,000-plus manifestos. Using our estimates of these errors, we show how to correct biased inferences, in recent prominently published work, derived from statistical analyses of error-contaminated CMP data.
Following Easton’s conceptual framework discussed in the introductory chapter, a hierarchical relationship exists between three objects of support: output support, support for institutions, and support for the community. The latter two objects of support are examined in turn in two subsequent chapters on trust in European political institutions and the relationship between citizenship and identity in the European Community. This chapter focuses on the first object of support – support derived from the accrued material benefits of EU membership.