Politics & Public Policy

Ace BBC journalist John Humphrys broadcast classic myths about the European Union’s budget on Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme yesterday. If he can get it wrong, is it any wonder that the British public is so confused? At 8:35am on Friday 7 November, John interviewed European Commission spokesman, Jakub Adamowicz, about the EU’s demand for an […]

The combined effects of the financial and economic crisis starting in 2008 and the fiasco of the 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiation have led to a gradual re-framing of climate change from an environmental to an energy issue. As I detail below, this re-framing has happened in subtle, and not-so-subtle ways, from changes in political rhetoric […]

This week I’m in Oslo, to attend a small part of the celebrations of Norway’s bicentennial for its constitution, with a conference on democratic constitutionalism in the EU run by ARENA. Despite finding myself in a room with lots of constitutional lawyers, the experience the first day has been very positive and given much food for thought. The […]

Lorna Ryan In a recent paper, ‘Governance of EU research policy: Charting forms of scientific democracy in the European Research Area’ (Science and Public Policy 2014), I explore, prompted by Alan Irwin’s work (2001), how the ‘scientific citizen’ is constructed within current policy and decision making processes’.  The paper is based on my efforts to […]

How to achieve accountability at MS level for shared management? What should the remit for auditors at EU and national level be? How to account for EU policy’s effectiveness and measure impact? How should the European Central Bank (ECB) be held to account? Why is the ESM/ESFS a special case, and challenge, for public audit? How to democratically […]

Two special reports published this month by the European Court of Auditors question the added value of the EU budget when channelled through fisheries and regional development programmes, to projects aiming to protect and improve aquaculture, and biodiversity more generally. ‘Each year the EU produces about 1,3 million tonnes of fish from aquaculture, and the sector has a turnover […]

How much would you trust EU institutions if you suspected that they were badly governed? Not too much, I guess. Then why is it that arguments around EU democratic legitimacy tend to focus on better results (output legitimacy) or improved citizen participation (intput legitimacy)? This is likely because reforms aimed at improving public administration do not actually pay […]

On 3 September 2014, Maria-Luisa Sanchez-Barrueco (Universidad de Deusto), Paul Stephenson (SciencesPo Paris/Maastricht University), Hartmut Aden (Berlin School of Economics and Law) and Jacques Sciberras (European Court of Auditors) presented four papers in their panel ‘Financial Accountability in the European Union: Building the Cathedral of EU Legitimacy?’ at the 44th UACES conference in Cork, Ireland.   While […]

As we enter the last 200 days of this current Parliament, it’s perhaps useful to spend a moment thinking about where the UK finds itself in relation to the EU. But this is a very reductive reading of the situation. Let’s start by considering UKIP, seeming standard-bearer that it is of the anti-EU movement. Carswell’s […]

UKIP, a political party whose polices are based on a profound fear of immigrants, has just had their first  MP elected by the people of Clacton, a town which is over 90% white British, with hardly any immigrants.  Yet in London – one of the world’s most diverse ethnic cities, where less than 50% are white British […]