The thesis investigates under what conditions the European Employment Strategy (EES) can influence the domestic employment policy of European Union member states. It aims to answer the question by examining two critical or ‘least likely’ cases: Greece and Portugal by focusing on three key areas of employment policy: public employment services, gender equality policies (mainstreaming, reconciliation and pay gaps) and ‘flexicurity’. The thesis employs the ‘Europeanization’ approach and tests the hypothesis that ‘if the EES altered Greek and Portuguese employment policy at all, it did so through one of three main Europeanization pathways: (i) policy learning; (ii) the domestic empowerment of policy entrepreneurs; (iii) financial conditionality.’ In examining the domestic impact of the EES the thesis does not presume an Europeanization effect a priori. Rather, the research begins from the domestic level (in a process-tracing method) and investigates whether, how and to what extent the EES had a role in the Greek and Portuguese domestic policy. The possibility of other variables, either external or internal, being pre-eminent is examined. The empirical study sought to triangulate a wide range of methods and sources. Although Greece and Portugal share a number of characteristics that may inhibit Europeanization in this type of area, empirical evidence largely supported the research hypothesis and suggested that two key conditions were conducive to the EES having a domestic impact in these cases: the existence of successful policy entrepreneurs who would actively use the EES as a policy window to promote their agenda and -when these were absent or lacked access to power and resources- the existence of the European Social Fund financial conditionality. Thus, soft power can be wielded in the world of neglect without policy learning which is considered the main ‘soft’ mechanism of domestic change in the literature.

The thesis analyses the phenomenon of party-based Euroscepticism with specific reference to radical right parties. It provides a bridge between the literatures on party behaviour, radical right parties and the study of Euroscepticism. Challenging the notion that parties belonging to the same party family display similar positions on European integration, it argues that radical right parties do not adopt a uniform EU stance. By putting forward a typology of radical right Euroscepticism, the thesis establishes that radical right European positions differ in terms of content, strength and motivation. In explaining this divergence, the thesis adopts a framework of party strategic behaviour and argues that party positions on Europe are related to the endogeneity of the party system and the dynamics of inter party competition. In particular, the thesis shows that a radical right party’s position on European integration as well as the way in which it accommodates the European issue in its discourse is a function of the party’s wider agenda in the national party system. The latter is developed with reference to (1) party type and (2) its predominant aims and objectives at the domestic level. The thesis demonstrates that the European issue is integral to the radical right’s discursive toolkit but the ways in which the party chooses to debate the issue and/or politicise it largely depend on the national context. This thesis employs a nested research design as a mixed methods strategy joining the study of the wider universe of European radical right parties with intensive case study qualitative analysis. It commences with an overview of the general patterns and dynamics of radical right Euroscepticism both across Europe and within the political arenas where the three party case studies operate. It proceeds by providing an in depth study of three radical right parties during the period 1999-2009, including the French National Front, the Greek Popular Orthodox Rally and the Italian National Alliance.

Germany’s support for the Eastern enlargement of the European Union was a key factor in the successful completion of this idea in 2004. Germany’s policy towards the enlargement was, however, ambivalent and for this reason perceived as controversial. This thesis examines and explains the reasons of this paradox. German policy makers endorsed the idea of the Eastern enlargement of the EU for the reasons deriving from the national identity, based on a history-related narrative, and from the fact of the successful unification of Germany. As Chancellor Helmut Kohl captured it — the unification of Germany and the unification of Europe were two sides of the same coin. Eastern enlargement was, however, a novel idea and was changing the existing European order and concepts of the European integration. It faced therefore powerful constraints both in the shape of still existing, though declining, Cold War structural grip, as well as of the conflicting with the enlargement interests of other member state of the EU and domestic economic preferences and interests. It caught German policy makers between powerful and mutually conflicting challenges and faced them with a need to choose strategic priorities for the foreign policy. The choice was continuity of multilateralism, the principle of the foreign policy of the West Germany. This choice turned the enlargement policy into one of the premises of the grand strategy of the German Europapolitik. Examining the ambivalence in the enlargement policy allows not only to explain its causes but also to observe a process of changing the concept of the European integration. This doctoral thesis is a result of the research conducted at the London School of Economics and Political Science under the supervision of Prof. William Wallace and Dr. Ulrich Sedelmeier.

When the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was launched in 2004 expectations of its potential were low because it lacks the ability to offer EU membership as an incentive, which was found to be pivotal for the EU to have influence in the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs). Nevertheless, progress reports have demonstrated that some convergence toward the EU standards has taken place in the neighbouring countries. This research seeks to understand under which conditions compliance takes place, what explains the variation in (non)compliance with the EU standards in the area of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and what influence does the EU have. It examines formal and behavioural compliance with the EU action plan recommendations in the area of border guard reform, readmission agreement, asylum and refugee protection, and criminalisation of human trafficking in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The three states have all expressed interest in EU membership, but they vary in their potential to be considered as candidates and in their identification with the EU. Rather than assuming that the EU’s influence is low in the neighbourhood because it cannot offer a certain membership incentive, this research studies the problem by focusing on a combination of explanatory factors drawn from rational choice and sociological/constructivist institutionalism both at the macro level (strength of membership prospect and identification with the EU) and at the issue-specific levels. The research demonstrates that the EU’s influence is differential and dependent on domestic, external and issue-specific conditions. The results indicate that the EU is capable of eliciting influence in the JHA area without a certain EU membership prospect. However, when the country perceives that there is a possibility to accede to the EU, compliance with the EU standards has been more even across the four issue areas and at the formal and behavioural levels.

Impact assessment (IA) has attracted considerable attention in the worlds of research and practice. IA is discussed extensively and promoted widely as a means to enhance the rationalisation, control and coordination of policy-making. However, at the same time, there has also been disagreement based on whether IL is seen to reflect one single, or multiple rationales. This has, in turn, led to debates about whether particular IA experiences reflect one or a mixture of motives. This thesis therefore explores whether the different ambitions or logics that IA intends to promote can be seen as complementary, whether one dominates, or whether they are contradictory. By looking at the European Union’s IA system — through an in-depth study of five IAS — this thesis finds that while the logic of enhanced control plays a dominant role throughout the policy-making process — particularly during the later policy-making stages — the ambitions or logics of enhanced rationalisation and coordination also play distinct roles. This thesis thereby contributes to the debates about the use of 'meta-instruments' to address the three policy challenges of how to choose the 'best' policy option; how to steer public administrations; and how to coordinate policies across institutional sub-units. In doing so, the thesis departs from earlier studies on IA two significant ways. First, it examines IA as a set of procedural rules, therefore moving away from a focus on the role of the IA report in advancing (or failing to advance) the ambitions of enhanced control, rationalisation or coordination. Second, instead of examining each IA ambition or logic in isolation, this thesis acknowledges a multiplicity of ambitions. This multiplicity is not an aspect of diffusion across jurisdictions or because of policy 'context'; rather, it is a feature of the motives and ambitions of actors interacting and changing at different stages in the policy-making process.

The thesis examines British and French state action, that is to say both the characteristic practices of central governments and their underpinning, the working conceptions of public policymaking in technical, political and administrative circles. Taken together, practices and conceptions make up a `referential framework' of public action with distinctive, deep-seated and enduring features in each country. The British and French referential frameworks are deducted from two empirical, comparative case studies of passenger rail transport policy in Britain and France in the years 1965-1993. Use is made of published, archival and interview material, comprising both quantitative and qualitative data, relating to the British and French experiences in the research and development of high speed rolling stock technology (APT and TGV trains) and the planning of new high speed rail infrastructure (Paris-Lyon TGV line and Channel Tunnel Rail Link schemes). The case studies thus constitute windows into the realities of the British and French policy processes. The empirical findings of the case studies point to highly contrasted British and French referential frameworks, of which traditional models of state action cannot adequately take account. For instance, the dominance of often contradictory political and financial imperatives in the British case studies cannot be explained solely in terms of limited government intervention, whilst the prevailing technico-economic rationale in the French case studies does not fully accord with received ideas about the propensity of the French State to intervene in economic life.

What are the determinants of the formation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC)? This is the question around which this dissertation evolves. Simple it might be as a question, preoccupation with it aims at disclosing the substance and nature of contemporary subregional cooperation which takes place at the borderlands of Europe. This dissertation is above all a case study based on empirical research. The object of analysis is the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), a cooperative structure that emerged in Europe in the early 1990s. Here we do not claim to undertake an area research rather we aim at examining an international political economy phenomenon. The main conceptual element of this dissertation is that it brings forward the notion of subregionalism. To examine the formation of Black Sea subregionalism we embark on an eclectic theoretical approach and apply an analytical framework of five variables which come both from within the subregional level and outside of it: economic difficulties, transnational demands, leadership, security dilemma and the European Union. What this dissertation concludes is that BSEC is an intergovernmental mode of cooperation representing more a foreign policy tool and less an integration process. We show that the Black Sea has witnessed a structural or 'instrumental' subregionalism of intergovernmental nature which is shaped by the interplay of the above mentioned variables. The correlation between subregionalism (around the Black Sea) and regionalism (Europe-wide) is thus of great importance. Thus, BSEC is better understood not within the framework of the regionalization-globalization nexus but rather in the framework of the new European order. Furthermore we show how contemporary subregionalism, being a primarily political instrument, is of a flexible nature responding to different needs at different times.

For a long time, the European Parliament (EP) was viewed as a lobbying sideshow mainly to be targeted if interest groups were unsuccessful at getting their demands included in the European Commission’s proposal. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have a reputation for being particularly open to diffuse interests who, due to their limited resources, use ‘friendly’ MEPs to put pressure on the European Commission and the Council. The notion of the EP representing diffuse interests conflicts with the broader political science literature on interest groups, which dwells on business bias. There are, however, good reasons to doubt the EP’s reputation as a defender of diffuse interests. Much of our current knowledge about the EP’s interest group politics stems from a time when the EP’s legislative powers were more limited. Within the last twenty years, the EP has evolved from a ‘multilingual talking shop’ to a genuine co-legislator with the Council. The increased powers of the EP raise the question of whether EP interest group politics has normalised, whereby the assumptions of the interest group literature would seem to reflect the reality of the EP. A common assumption in the interest group literature is that diffuse interests carry limited weight in decision-making because their resources and interests remain subordinate to that of business. However, business influence differs across policy fields depending on how the costs and benefits related to policies are distributed. The aim of my thesis is to investigate how the distribution of costs and benefits of legislative proposals influence interest groups’ likelihood of winning particular conflicts in the EP. This is done by examining four legislative dossiers in the areas of employment, consumer, and environmental policies. The thesis draws on the process-tracing of EU documents, and 144 interviews with MEPs, EP officials, and interest groups.

The underlying theme of this thesis is that to properly understand the process of European integration it is vital to understand the dynamics of the European policymaking process and the crucial role of the European institutions within this process. In this thesis the internal dynamics of the policy-making process within the European Commission in two directorates, DGV(Employment, Industrial Relations and Social Affairs) and DGXIII (Telecommunications, Information Industries and Innovation), are explored. It is argued that a vital characteristic of the Commission's ability to influence any policy sector is its ability to respond rapidly to any 'windows of opportunity' ripe for EU intervention or, indeed, to facilitate the appearance of these windows. Yet, the means required to achieve this end, and the degree of success they meet, vary from sector to sector. It is argued that the Commission has an important role to play in EU policy-making, and ultimately in the integration process, thus it is vital to develop a detailed understanding of the functioning of its constituent parts, of the interrelationships between them, and of the influence of their activities upon the actions of the Commission as a whole.

This thesis develops and tests a model of political representation based on the participation and specialisation decisions of individual MEPs. Political representation is determined by the institutional and party-political incentives that guide legislative behaviour at different stages of the policy process. Proportionality requirements, majority rule and intra-party politics affect whether MEPs engage in different legislative activities in the European Parliament and the extent to which they specialise in the policy areas that their national party stands for. The model can be adapted to a wide range of legislative activities and to different institutional environments. At the decision-making stage, majority rule makes participation most attractive to MEPs from party groups that are pivotal under the majority thresholds required to pass legislation. In contrast, minority MEPs limit their participation to the policy areas that are salient to their national party. In other words, minority legislators are more responsive than majority MEPs. In policy formulation, an auction system enforces a proportional allocation of committee reports, which favours the representation of a broad range of values and interests across the political spectrum. However, competition among party groups affects who gets the most desirable reports. Open rule enforces a distribution of salient reports in line with voting coalitions in the plenary and on the committee floor. Within party groups, the leadership distributes reports in an effort to maintain group cohesion. As a result, majority legislators who are loyal to their party groups are more responsive than other MEPs. Finally, in parliamentary oversight at Question-Time, party groups do not have any gate-keeping powers. Also, national parties rather than party groups are the primary actors in legislative-executive relations. MEPs without national party ties to the Commission attribute a greater role to overseeing the executive in a large range of policy areas than 'governing' MEPs. As a result, such 'opposition' MEPs are better represented at this stage of the policy process but they specialise less in salient policy areas.