Irakificering: Vejen mod afgrunden?

Intet resum

Finanspagten og issue-linkage inden for eurosystemet

This article claims that the reform negotiations of the euro can only be understood as a form of issue-linkage, where two groups of states (euro-winners and euro-losers) want either stricter rules for state scal behavior (euro-winners) or increased assistance mechanisms in the form of temporary aid packages or permanent transfers for countries hit by asymmetric economic shocks (euro-losers). e two issues were linked in the negotiations in 2011 and 2012, where a quid pro quo was reached, where Germany got ‘its’ Fiscal Compact that strengthened the rules for behavior in exchange for concessions on the transfer issue both in relation to accepting ECB interventions in the market to aid euro-losers facing high interest rates, and the entry into force of the permanent aid mechanism (ESM) a year ahead of schedule. Euro-losers were however only able to link the two issues when they were able to exploit their economic weakness and the risk that market pressure could result in the collapse of the euro. As this pressure has eased in the fall of 2012, the pace of reforms has slowed down, with few indications that further progress will be made on strengthening the transfer side of Economic and Monetary Union any time soon.

Process tracing og studiet af kausale mekanismer

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The Institutional Ingredients of Polycrisis Management: Unpacking European Council’s Handling of the Energy Crisis

This article analyses how the European Council and the institutional infrastructure that supports it have been managing the early stages of the energy crisis. This was the time when the European Council, as the “control room” of EU crisis management, was unable to come up with any solutions to high energy prices. It makes a methodological and empirical contribution to the debate on how the European Council system manages (poly)crises. Methodologically, we introduce the method of embedded process tracing to study EU crisis management from within. Embedded process tracing combines mainstream causal process tracing techniques with elements from interpretivist approaches, to deal with context dependency, case heterogeneity, and empirical density. Empirically, we offer a process-management analysis of the first nine months of the energy crisis. We delineate the roles of various actors and institutions: the president of the European Council, the Council Secretariat, the Commission president, and the Commission Services. We unpack the crucial ingredients of polycrisis management: how to get and keep an issue on the agenda, how to shape and steer European-Council-level debates and conclusions, and how to ensure a proper follow-up by the Commission and the Council. Finally, we re-assess the image of the malfunctioning control room and show the causal relevance of the European Council’s early performance

Referendums on EU matters

This study was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs of the European Parliament. It analyses the political and legal dynamics behind referendums on EU-related matters. It argues that we have entered a period of increasing political uncertainty with regard to the European project and that this new political configuration will both affect and be affected by the politics of EU-related referendums. Such referendums have long been a risky endeavour and this has been accentuated in the wake of the Great Recession with its negative ramifications for public opinion in the European Union. It is clear that referendums on EU matters are here to stay and will continue to be central to the EU’s future as they are deployed to determine the number of Member States within the EU, its geographical reach, its constitutional evolution and adherence to EU policies. Only now they have become an even riskier endeavour

Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain

ience, this issue p. eaap8757 Structured Abstract INTRODUCTION Brain disorders may exhibit shared symptoms and substantial epidemiological comorbidity, inciting debate about their etiologic overlap. However, detailed study of phenotypes with different ages of onset, severity, and presentation poses a considerable challenge. Recently developed heritability methods allow us to accurately measure correlation of genome-wide common variant risk between two phenotypes from pools of different individuals and assess how connected they, or at least their genetic risks, are on the genomic level. We used genome-wide association data for 265,218 patients and 784,643 control participants, as well as 17 phenotypes from a total of 1,191,588 individuals, to quantify the degree of overlap for genetic risk factors of 25 common brain disorders. RATIONALE Over the past century, the classification of brain disorders has evolved to reflect the medical and scientific communities' assessments of the presumed root causes of clinical phenomena such as behavioral change, loss of motor function, or alterations of consciousness. Directly observable phenomena (such as the presence of emboli, protein tangles, or unusual electrical activity patterns) generally define and separate neurological disorders from psychiatric disorders. Understanding the genetic underpinnings and categorical distinctions for brain disorders and related phenotypes may inform the search for their biological mechanisms. RESULTS Common variant risk for psychiatric disorders was shown to correlate significantly, especially among attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder (MDD), and schizophrenia. By contrast, neurological disorders appear more distinct from one another and from the psychiatric disorders, except for migraine, which was significantly correlated to ADHD, MDD, and Tourette syndrome. We demonstrate that, in the general population, the personality trait neuroticism is significantly correlated with almost every psychiatric disorder and migraine. We also identify significant genetic sharing between disorders and early life cognitive measures (e.g., years of education and college attainment) in the general population, demonstrating positive correlation with several psychiatric disorders (e.g., anorexia nervosa and bipolar disorder) and negative correlation with several neurological phenotypes (e.g., Alzheimer's disease and ischemic stroke), even though the latter are considered to result from specific processes that occur later in life. Extensive simulations were also performed to inform how statistical power, diagnostic misclassification, and phenotypic heterogeneity influence genetic correlations. CONCLUSION The high degree of genetic correlation among many of the psychiatric disorders adds further evidence that their current clinical boundaries do not reflect distinct underlying pathogenic processes, at least on the genetic level. This suggests a deeply interconnected nature for psychiatric disorders, in contrast to neurological disorders, and underscores the need to refine psychiatric diagnostics. Genetically informed analyses may provide important "scaffolding" to support such restructuring of psychiatric nosology, which likely requires incorporating many levels of information. By contrast, we find limited evidence for widespread common genetic risk sharing among neurological disorders or across neurological and psychiatric disorders. We show that both psychiatric and neurological disorders have robust correlations with cognitive and personality measures. Further study is needed to evaluate whether overlapping genetic contributions to psychiatric pathology may influence treatment choices. Ultimately, such developments may pave the way toward reduced heterogeneity and improved diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders

"Towards a new method of constitutional bargaining? The role and impact of EU institutions in the IGC and convention method of treaty reform"

This paper looks at the impact of the change from negotiating EU treaty reform within intergovernmental conferences to the new convention method. As most existing studies of treaty reform explain actor influence based exclusively upon relative actor power and preferences prior to negotiation, in effect 'black boxing' the actual negotiation process, a bargaining model is created that theorizes on the impact of the change in negotiating context and conduct of negotiations for the ability of actor to translate bargaining resources into influence. The paper then describes three 'ideal types' of negotiating treaty reform, and the proceeds to investigate the opportunities for influence for EU institutions that each type of negotiating method opens. The paper finds that while the Council Secretariat has traditionally had many possibilities to gain influence in treaty reform negotiations, the new convention method had opened up many opportunities for both the Commission, and especially the European Parliament (EP), to gain influence. Yet to have influence these possibilities must be translated into real influence through the successful use of appropriate strategies in the negotiations. In the present European Convention, while the Commission has had too ambitious and often conflicting positions, central members of the EP delegation have had up to now relative success in building coalitions around their positions, although it is still too early to conclude on whether the MEP's will prove successful in translating their bargaining resources into influence over the final Constitutional Treaty. The conclusions point to the necessity for students of treaty reform of opening up the 'black box' of the actual treaty reform process to investigate how the context and conduct of negotiations matter – enabling us to better explain which actors won in a treaty reform negotiation and why

Choosing Europe? Why Voter Preferences (sometimes) are not Reflected in National Positions in EU Constitutional Negotiations

Why have governments systematically taken positions that are out of synch with what voters want in negotiations on transferring national sovereignty to the EU? Despite the centrality of this question there is little research that has focused explicitly on explaining why governments take positions that are out of synch with their voters. Most existing studies of voter preferences towards European integration have focused either upon the sources of voter preferences or upon party views towards integration. In comparison, there have been almost no studies that have investigated the ‘electoral connection’; in other words the process whereby voter preferences are translated into actual national positions in EU constitutional negotiations. Using data drawn from the 1996-97 negotiation of the Treaty of Amsterdam, this paper attempts to explain why voter preferences are often not reflected in national positions. It is found that the level of ‘disproportionality’ of the electoral system has an impact upon the level of divergence between national positions and voter views

Voter choice in EU referendums – a status quo-oriented issue-voting model of voting behavior

What explains voter behavior in EU referendums? We argue that voters, although not necessarily having full information, are rational and have the ability to make a competent decision on a treaty. Theoretically, we revisit the issue-voting versus second-order election debate by elaborating on the issue-voting conjecture, providing a more comprehensive and coherent analytical model. We develop a status quo-oriented, utility model of voting behavior in EU referenda. After we provide evidence that the assumption of voter competence is plausible, we undertake a comparative case study of five EU referendums utilizing our model. Our findings show that the basic idea of investigating voter perceptions of the benefits of the treaty and costs of no is sound, although further data is needed to be collected in future EU referendums in order to develop better measures of our independent variables so that the model can be tested in a more stringent manner