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Fellow Euroblogger Jon Worth* this morning published a commentary on Politico Europe, the news outlet I let my European Studies summer school students read every morning this August. What followed needs some serious academic attention, and serious attention is what you are going to get in this blog post. Having seen Jon blog for years […]
Last year, we saw the very first European elections with Spitzenkandidaten (‘lead candidates’) put forward by five major European Political Parties as future president of the European Commission. But how can it be that the Juncker’s EPP reports ~€ 1.75 million in “Election campaigns” expenditure while Schulz’ PES reports only ~€ 0.2 million? Jean-Claude Juncker, is […]
Starting Monday, I’ll be a teaching, for the second time, a two-week intensive course European Studies here in Munich, with students from Europe (including Russia), North America, South Korea and Australia. The course is covering mostly current European politics (elections, lobbying etc.) and European policies (the crisis, migration, climate change etc.), trying to convey what […]
Tomorrow, on 24 June 2015, the European Parliament is expected to approve the legal details of Jean-Claude Juncker’s investment plan and the related European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI). This plan has been sold as a major innovation, but our research has shown that it is actually the continuation of existing EU policies, just at […]
Over on my new Tumblr, I am covering the selection of Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen as the next Secretary General of the Council and European Council. I initially stumbled over this issue three weeks ago when doing political science research on the Council, so I thought I’d follow-up a little bit more.
While this blog is clearly my long-form and research-focused online outlet, and while on Twitter I publish a mix of everything short that comes to my mind every day (polsci and non-polsci stuff), I decided I need something EU-focused that is shorter than PolSciEU but also longer and easier to link than Twitter. This is […]
In its International Women’s Day message, the European Commission claims today that “Europe has been promoting gender equality since 1957 – it is part of the European Union’s DNA“. The problem with DNA is that it also needs activating, and EU reality shows that activating the gender equality genes at EU-level doesn’t really work: No […]
History and politics are mostly tales of men on the battlefield or men in dark suits, white shirts and a tie. And as Ewa Widlak showed in “2015, Women and Political Leadership“, only 7.3% of heads of state and 6.5% of heads of government are women right now, so the present doesn’t look much different. […]
There are many ways to study the European Parliament. Votewatch.eu analyses roll call votes. Integritywatch.eu looks into side activities and side incomes of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). And political scientists study the European Parliament’s gender balance and many other topics that are of interest to wider or more limited audiences. Anybody who spends time researching, lobbying or […]
Heather Grabbe and Stefan Lehne claim in a new Carnegie Europe report and a shorter op-ed that all it needs to save EU democracy is ’emotional intelligence’. I doubt that this is what we need, even if ’emotional intelligence’ sounds nice. The idea sounds nice, because the opposite of ’emotional intelligence’ is probably ‘cold stupidity’, and […]
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