I first stumbled over “La théorie de l’information” by Aurélien Bellanger – published this summer – in a review by Le Soir about a month ago. It was a sunny Saturday morning, a rare occasion here in Brussels, and I was reading the weekend edition of the Belgian newspaper over a breakfast in a café. [...]
Trying to make sense of EU politics is quite difficult. Good story-telling is almost impossible because too many people are involved in too many issues. Convincing analysis is hard because the amount of time you have to invest in research is often not proportionate to the amount of insight you get. Yet, we have to [...]
1.5 years ago, I first covered the planned reform of EUR-Lex, the major platform for EU law and EU institutions’ decisions. One year ago, a set of slides (PDF) published by VÖBBLOG gave hints where things were moving. In a set of blog posts, the EU’s Publication Office talked about the new EUR-Lex itself in October last year. [...]
In a very interesting academic paper titled “Do rapporteurs receive independent expert policy advice? Indirect lobbying via the European Parliament’s committee secretariat“* the author David Marschal concludes on the basis of structured interviews and questionnaires that: “Secretariat officials play an often important role in the legislative process, but, rather than serving as the source of independent policy expertise, they act [...]
The EU Commission, in a radical move towards transparency, has decided to publish one Commission meeting protocol from 1958 on its website. Rumours that one document from 1959 will be published next year cannot be confirmed so far. PS.: A proper Commission document register can be expected for 2015 the earliest if I’m informed correctly.
UPDATE (14 December 2011): The Court website has a new advanced search now and the links to the results actually lead to the exact documents one wants to link; life hacking is no longer necessary. Very good! Last week I’ve started to show how life hacking of EU websites can make your life easier. The [...]
Using a dataset of EU Structural Funds spending between 2000-2006, Lisa Maria Dellmuth in “The cash divide: the allocation of European Union regional grants“* looks at factors explaining why the European Commission and EU member states gave more of this money to some regions of the “old” EU member states (EU-15) rather than to others. [...]
“All the EP press officers considered their services to be of better quality than those of the Commission, which dovetails with the insights provided by the journalists. Nonetheless, the fact that several officials from the EC shared this assumption was a somewhat striking result. […] Between the lines […], one might read the Commissions’ staff dissatisfaction with the strictness [...]
In a study on Rapporteur statistics titled “Report allocation in the European Parliament after eastern enlargement” to be published in the academic Journal of European Public Policy*, Steffen Hurka and Michael Kaeding found that in the parliamentary term 2004-09: MEPs from the 12 accession countries received significantly less reports in co-decision as well as in [...]
[…] Already last year, we at Bloggingportal.eu have made fun of this “State of the European Union” (#SOTEU), and Jon was the first to call for a revival of our Barroso Bullshit Bingo. […]