"Obedient Servant or Runaway Eurocracy? Delegation, Agency, and Agenda Setting in the European Community"

Do supranational institutions matter - do they deserve the status of an independent causal variable - in EC policymaking? Does the Commission matter? Does the European Court of Justice? Does the European Parliament? Is the European Community characterized by continued member state dominance, or by a runaway Commission and an activist Court progressively chipping away at this dominance? These are some of the most important questions for our understanding of the European Community and of European integration, and have divided the two traditional schools of thought in regional integration, with neofunctionalists [Haas 1958; Lindberg & Scheingold 1970] generally asserting, and intergovernmentalists [Hoffmann 1966; Taylor 1983; Moravcsik 1991, 1993] generally denying, any important causal role for supranational institutions in the integration process. By and large, however, neither neofunctionalism nor intergovernmentalism1 has generated testable hypotheses regarding the conditions under which, and the ways in which, supranational institutions exert an independent causal influence on either EC governance or the process of European integration. This paper presents a unified theoretical approach to the problem of supranational influence, based largely on the new institutionalism in rational choice theory. Simplifying only slightly, this new literature can be traced to Shepsle's [1979] pioneering work on the role of institutions in the US Congress. Beginning with the observation by McKelvey [1976], Riker [1980] and others that, in a system of majoritarian decisionmaking, policy choices are inherently unstable, "cycling" among multiple possible equilibria, Shepsle argued that Congressional institutions, and in particular the committee system, could produce structure-induced equilibrium, by ruling some policy alternatives as permissible or impermissible, and by structuring the voting and veto power of the various actors in the decisionmaking process

The New Institutionalisms and European Integration

The European Union is without question the most densely institutionalisedinternational organization in the world, with a welter of intergovernmental andsupranational institutions and a rapidly growing body of primary and secondarylegislation, the so-called acquis communautaire. Small wonder, then, that the body ofliterature known under the rubric of the new institutionalism has been applied withincreasing frequency and with increasing success to the study of the Union as a polityand to European integration as a process. In fact, however, the new institutionalismin social theory has evolved into plural institutionalisms, with rational-choice,sociological and historical variants, each with a distinctive set of hypotheses andinsights about the EU. This chapter examines the new institutionalisms in rationalchoice and historical analysis and their contributions to EU studies, briefly summarizingthe core assumptions of each approach before discussing specific applications to thestudy of the European Union and the question of EU enlargement, and concluding withan analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of institutional approaches to the study ofEuropean integration.

International Judicial Dissent: Causes and Consequences

Introduction: The past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented increase in international adjudication. The increased judicialization of global politics, in turn, has sparked a flurry of research into the politics of judicial appointments, the independence of international tribunals, and the effectiveness and legitimacy of international courts. While this literature has made great strides, it has almost entirely ignored a feature critical to understanding the role and purpose of any court, namely the use, or non-use, of separate dissenting or concurring opinions by individual judges. It is a striking feature of international courts that some allow and make extensive use of dissents (e.g., the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)), while others issue rulings as a court with no, or very few, concurring or dissenting opinions (e.g., the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO)). Yet we know very little about why courts adopt different approaches to this central question, or about the effects of dissent on the independence of international judges and the legitimacy of their courts. Thus far, political scientists have largely ignored these questions, while legal scholars have pursued primarily normative analyses of individual courts and tribunals

International Judicial Practices: Opening the Black Box of International Courts

This paper utilizes “practice theory” to identify and analyze the everyday practices of international judges, with particular focus on practices associated with judicial decision-making. Examining judicial practices illuminates a wide range of otherwise hidden activities that shape international judicial opinions; provides a pathway toward uncovering the subjective understandings that international judges attach to their own behaviors; and reveals underlying causal processes and mechanisms that influence tribunal decisions. By opening the “black box” of international courts, the practice turn permits us to shed light on their inner workings, and thereby enrich our understanding of these increasingly important bodies

Enhancement of psychosocial treatment with D-cycloserine: models, moderators, and future directions

Advances in the understanding of the neurobiology of fear extinction have resulted in the development of d-cycloserine (DCS), a partial glutamatergic N-methyl-D-aspartate agonist, as an augmentation strategy for exposure treatment. We review a decade of research that has focused on the efficacy of DCS for augmenting the mechanisms (e.g., fear extinction) and outcome of exposure treatment across the anxiety disorders. Following a series of small-scale studies offering strong support for this clinical application, more recent larger-scale studies have yielded mixed results, with some showing weak or no effects. We discuss possible explanations for the mixed findings, pointing to both patient and session (i.e., learning experiences) characteristics as possible moderators of efficacy, and offer directions for future research in this area. We also review recent studies that have aimed to extend the work on DCS augmentation of exposure therapy for the anxiety disorders to DCS enhancement of learning-based interventions for addiction, anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia, and depression. Here, we attend to both DCS effects on facilitating therapeutic outcomes and additional therapeutic mechanisms beyond fear extinction (e.g., appetitive extinction, hippocampal-dependent learning).F31 MH103969 - NIMH NIH HHS; K24 DA030443 - NIDA NIH HHS; R34 MH099309 - NIMH NIH HHS; R34 MH086668 - NIMH NIH HHS; R21 MH102646 - NIMH NIH HHS; R34 MH099318 - NIMH NIH HH

Fishery-independent Bottom Trawl Surveys for Deep-water Fishes and Invertebrates of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, 2002–08

From 2002 through 2008, the Mississippi Laboratories of the NMFS Southeast Fisheries Science Center, NOAA, conducted fishery-independent bottom trawl surveys for continental shelf and outer-continental shelf deep-water fishes and invertebrates of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico (50–500 m bottom depths). Five-hundred and ninety species were captured at 797 bottom trawl locations. Standardized survey gear and randomly selected survey sites have facilitated development of a fishery-independent time series that characterizes species diversity, distributions, and catch per unit effort. The fishery-independent surveys provide synoptic descriptions of deep-water fauna potentially impacted by various anthropogenic factors