Political Science

Our research focuses on the development of a parliamentary field in the European Union binding together sub-national, national and supranational legislative assemblies. How do national assemblies adapt to the pooling of sovereignty? Which mechanisms are to what effect employed to maintain a role for national parliaments? Does European integration render national parliaments (more) ineffective in controlling the executive? What is the impact of the new provisions concerning national parliaments introduced by the Lisbon Treaty (e.g. Early Warning System)? How do Parliaments communicate ‘Europe’ and link with their electorates in EU affairs? Which forms of inter-parliamentary cooperation have developed across levels? Furthermore, we also look at the development of the European Union’s policy towards third states in selected policy fields.

Standard theories of democratic political representation focus on the role of regular territorially based elections, which provide a mechanism for citizens to select their officials and entrust them with the running of public affairs, of electoral behaviour and party strategy in elections to the European Parliament and evaluate the quality of democratic representation within the European Union. However, our research also goes beyond the electoral channel: Classical theories which have once been developed for the analysis of national politics do however often neglect the socio-political change which is taking place in the course of and is strengthened by European integration, e.g. the influence of transnational actors, the importance of transnational decision-making arenas, the role of civil society, and the rise of informal structures. These changes suggest a reconfiguration of the relationship between territory, function and identity as the main vectors of democratic policy-making. How has the European integration process impacted on electoral and territorial links? Furthermore, how does the development of non-formal representation modes, which are typical for non-hierarchical systems, change policy-making? Does the emergence of new social actors increase responsiveness?

Our research seeks to develop, and possibly go beyond, the theory of the delegation of powers from national governments to the European Union. Do current models of delegation explain enough of the observed variation in the powers of the Union? Even if they do, does it make sense to conceptualize EU politics in terms of principal-agent relationships and/or transaction cost economics? What is the opportunity cost of current models of delegation in terms of the logical completeness, the internal consistency, and the realism in the assumptions of our theory of EU politics? To answer these questions, we seek to develop an alternative theoretical explanation of the institutions of the EU, based on incomplete contracts theory.

Core political science concepts like sovereignty, accountability and representation, to name but a few, have for a long time not moved very far beyond the eighteenth-century formulations developed during the rise of the nation-state. For the better part of the 20th century, the theoretical debate about those concepts seems to have been characterised by the ‘spicing up’ of a (allegedly clear) core concept with a splendid wealth of adjectives. While there is no doubt that the different conceptualisations have added to our knowledge, they can no longer explain the changed world around us. What are the conceptual changes and how can we understand them?

Regarding these four basic research areas, we seek to communicate our findings to both the scientific community and to public discussions by