Power, money and reversion points:the European Union's annual budgets since 2010

<p>At the close of 2010, an immediate effect of the rule changes to the European Union’s budgetary powers brought in by the Lisbon Treaty was a non-agreement of the annual budget for 2011, which was repeated for the budgets of 2013 and 2015. Interviews and documents show that the European Parliament lost and the Council won in determining spending outcomes for 2011 and immediate payments for the subsequent years; whether this also resulted in lower budgets overall is ambiguous. When spending increased, this was in line with the will of the Council. The most significant variable was the change in the rules, which shifted the location of the default budget or reversion point to Council’s advantage if there were no agreement.</p

The CAP fits: why farmers want to stay in the EU

What would leaving the EU mean for British farmers? For most, says Giacomo Benedetto, the risk of losing funding, free trade, seasonal labour and agricultural standards is almost unthinkable

How rising Euroscepticism could affect future EU budget revenue negotiations

A number of Eurosceptic parties across the continent have called for the EU budget to be reduced. Giacomo Benedetto writes that although Euroscepticism does not always coincide with support for cutting the budget, the existence of Eurosceptic parties in several states could pose a serious problem for future budget negotiations. He highlights that based on the outcomes of previous negotiations, Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, and possibly Finland and the Netherlands, is likely to have a particularly significant impact on proposed reforms to the revenue side of the EU budget

UK influence series: do British MEPs win key positions of power in the European Parliament?

The extent to which British MEPs are appointed to key positions in the European Parliament can be expected to have an impact on their influence over the EU’s legislative process. In the latest article in our UK influence series, Simon Hix and Giacomo Benedetto assess how successful British MEPs have been in this respect since 2004. They note that despite a growing number of UKIP MEPs, who have not competed for many key offices, British MEPs have managed to capture a number of powerful agenda setting positions

Transparency and Oversight of the Council’s Budget: Council executive powers. CEPS Research Report No. 2017/11, July 2017

This briefing introduces the challenges that have been faced in delivering a discharge of the Council’s budget over the last decade, with particular regard to the Council’s executive activities. The authors analyse the institutional and legal constraints and put forward a number of recommendations aimed at achieving more accountability regarding the Council’s budget and executive expenditure without resorting to treaty reform

The Rise and Fall of Social Democracy, 1918-2017

We describe the electoral history of one of Europe’s most successful party families over the past 100 years in 31 countries. With a unique and newly collected dataset of national election results, and a large number of economic and social variables mea- sured for each country-election observation, we find that two main factors drive the electoral performance of social democratic parties: public sector spending, and the size of the manufacturing sector. Our findings suggest that most of the fall in support for social democratic parties in recent years is correlated with a decline in the number of industrial workers as well as a reduction in the propensity of social democratic parties’ core supporters (industrial workers and public sector employees) to vote for them

An experimental investigation on the poor hydrogen sorption properties of nano-structured LaNi5 prepared by ball-milling

Nano-structured LaNi5 hydrogen storage materials prepared by ball-milling is analysed using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). DSC results indicate a partial elimination of defects at 500 °C in a more efficient way for the short-time ball-milled powders compared to the long-time ball-milled ones. XPS results show almost no change in the core-level electronic structure for La and Ni of LaNi5 in the bulk and the nano-structured forms, but gives an indication that the self-restoring mechanism of the active surface observed in the bulk sample (Siegmann et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 40, 972) may not be occurring in the nano-powders. Results from the X-ray diffraction and the local structural studies together with the above observations suggest that the reduced unit-cell volume and the enhanced atomic disorder in the nano-structured LaNi5 cause a larger energy barrier for the hydrogen sorption reactions of the long-time ball-milled samples