Article by Kirsty Hughes published on OpenDemocracy, 31  January 2012
The new ‘fiscal compact’ treaty agreed at Monday’s summit aims to take vital economic policy choices out of the reach of democratic decision-making. Beyond that, there is no new thinking, nothing to stimulate growth, nothing to give some hope to the 23 million unemployed – and [...]

EUDO Working Paper 2012/01 by Takis S.Pappas
This paper, based on cross-regional empirical research, provides an integrated analytical framework for understanding the emergence of populism in seemingly different political contexts in both Europe (including Greece, France and the Netherlands) and Latin America (including Peru and Venezuela). It is found that, given an appropriate context, political leadership is [...]

Article by Honor Mahony published on the EUObserver, 28 January 2012
With just weeks until to go until the EU dips its toe into the unpredictable world of participatory democracy, internet giants are warning the European Commission it had better be prepared for scrutiny by a critical and highly-wired public.
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David Farrell

David Farrell summarizes for EUDO Café the core argument of his recent book: Russell J. Dalton, David M. Farrell and Ian McAllister, Political Parties and Democratic Linkage: How Parties Organize Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2011)
In the academic literature on political parties (including important contributions by the late Peter Mair), which argues that political [...]

Article by Harry McGee , published on The Irish Times,24 January 2012
Former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer has said there would be “extreme consequences” for Ireland should it reject a referendum on the fiscal compact.
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Roundtable, 1st February 2012, 17:00 – 19:00
Location: Committee Rooms, Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University
Since late 2009 the global financial and economic crisis, with its roots in the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, has mutated into a sovereign debt crisis centred on the European Union and its Member States. Concerns regarding the levels of national debt across states [...]

Edited by Sandra Kröger and Dawid Friedrich, Palgrave Macmillan, 30 November 2011

The present book is highly topical and contributes to what may be perceived as the ‘representative turn’ in EU studies.What does political representation in the European Union look like? Which actors claim to act as representatives of which constituency? What role does the EU play in (re)shaping [...]

Book edited by Grainne de Burca and Joseph H. Weiler, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012
The idea of the EU as a constitutional order has recently taken on renewed life, as the Court of Justice declared the primacy of EU law not just over national constitutions but also over the international legal order, including the UN [...]

The Lisbon Treaty delivered substantial institutional changes to the EU’s institutional set-up. It decapitated the rotating Council Presidency but at the same time strengthened the legislative role of the Council of Ministers. Two years after its coming into force the time has come to take stock and to evaluate the impact of the EU’s new [...]

Article by Stephen Castle published on The New York Times, 17 January 2012
Reawakening a debate on what the European Union should do when one of its members threatens its democratic principles, the bloc’s executive arm opened legal proceedings on Tuesday against Hungary, which critics contend is sliding toward authoritarianism.
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