Human rights protection in international organizations in the era of multi-level governance and legal pluralism

Heupel's chapter explores the emergence of human rights protection provisions in international organizations (IOs). It shows that such provisions can emerge via different pathways, namely hegemonic and judicial lawmaking. It suggests that multi-level governance and legal pluralism have detrimental and beneficial effects for the rule of law, depending on specific scope conditions. States at first exploited the opportunities provided by these phenomena and delegated competences to IOs without attaching effective human rights safeguards. Over time, however, powerful actors, benefitting from established routines and the presence of domestic/international scripts, exploited the access points provided by the multi-level nature of the underlying governance arrangements and their embeddedness in different legal orders and successfully made the World Bank and the European Union to commit to human rights safeguards

European Union issue voting in East and West Europe: The role of political context

Recent research has shown the rise of domestic contention over European integration. This paper examines the extent to which preferences over European integration influence domestic party support in 19 European Union (EU) member states in West and East-Central Europe (ECE). The analysis finds broad evidence of EU issue voting across the countries included in the analysis, but the effect of the EU issue on party preferences is stronger in ECE. These results are consistent with the view that the same underlying causal dynamics explain party and voter behavior in both West and ECE, but the post-communist legacy shapes the political and economic contexts in the ECE states, resulting in predictable differences between the two regions