Against Associate EU Citizenship

UK nationals will lose their EU citizenship status as a result of the Brexit referendum. To prevent this, several commentators, including the European Parliament Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt, proposed to grant associate EU citizenship to UK nationals to safeguard their rights as EU citizens after Brexit. We make the case against associate EU citizenship, dismissing it on three grounds. First, it violates the letter and the spirit of EU law. Second, it violates core EU values, including the EU's promise to respect the constitutional traditions of member states and the values of democracy and the rule of law. Third, it is against EU's interests, as associate EU citizenship fails to respect reciprocity in EU relations with third countries and undermines the coherence of the edifice of EU constitutionalism

The authority of legislation within the EU : an exploration of the connection between legitimate authority, legislative rules and text in the context of EU citizenship law

Defence date: 05 March 2018Examining Board: Prof. Claire Kilpatrick, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof. Richard Bellamy, European University Institute; Prof. Niamh Nic Shuibhne, University of Edinburgh; Prof. Daniel Halberstam, University of MichiganThis thesis studies the authority of legislation within the European Union. I believe that the EU legislature is an institution that does not always receive the attention it deserves, that the value of legislative decision-making remains misunderstood, and that our understanding of what it means for the acts of legislation to be recognised as authoritative still is underdeveloped. Drawing upon political and legal theory, I argue that the EU legislature must have a certain primacy over other sources of authority within the EU in the process of ordinary decision-making. That is, I suggest, primarily because the EU has reasonable legitimacy when subject to the control of the EU legislative process and also because legislation contributes to stability in EU decision-making and gives guidance to those subject to EU law. In addition to explaining the benefits of EU legislative decision-making, this thesis will provide the benchmarks that allow for a determination of whether other institutions recognise legislative acts as authoritative. I establish the connection between authority, legislative rules, and legislative text and argue that the authority of legislation is recognised if the constraints laid down by the rules of legislation and the text that articulates these rules are accepted. The authority of legislation is studied in the context of decision-making in the field of EU citizenship

Citizens in Europe

The book is a collection of essays produced by Offe and Preuß throughout their career. The essays discuss the meaning of and adherence to principles of citizenship, democracy, and constitutionalism within the EU

Catecholamine-mediated increases in neural gain improve the precision of cortical representations

Neurophysiological evidence suggests that neuromodulators, such as norepinephrine and dopamine, increase neural gain in target brain areas. Computational models and prominent theoretical frameworks indicate that this should enhance the precision of neural representations, but direct empirical evidence for this hypothesis is lacking. In two functional MRI studies, we examine the effect of baseline catecholamine levels (as indexed by pupil diameter and manipulated pharmacologically) on the precision of object representations in the human ventral temporal cortex using angular dispersion, a powerful, multivariate metric of representational similarity (precision). We first report the results of computational model simulations indicating that increasing catecholaminergic gain should reduce the angular dispersion, and thus increase the precision, of object representations from the same category, as well as reduce the angular dispersion of object representations from distinct categories when distinct-category representations overlap. In Study 1 (N = 24), we show that angular dispersion covaries with pupil diameter, an index of baseline catecholamine levels. In Study 2 (N = 24), we manipulate catecholamine levels and neural gain using the norepinephrine transporter blocker atomoxetine and demonstrate consistent, causal effects on angular dispersion and brain-wide functional connectivity. Despite the use of very different methods of examining the effect of baseline catecholamine levels, our results show a striking convergence and demonstrate that catecholamines increase the precision of neural representations