Foundations of European Politics: A Comparative Approach offers an accessible introduction to European politics using a coherent comparative and analytical framework. It presents students with the basic theoretical and empirical toolkit of social scientific researchers, and explains how ananalytic approach can be used to understand both domestic and EU-level policy-making in Europe.The book draws on cutting edge research from all areas of European politics - from national and EU institutions, to political behaviour and policy-making - and uses case studies and examples throughout to help students compare different electoral systems, parties and governments across Europe.The book is structured thematically in five parts, beginning with theoretical foundations; moving on to examine citizens and voters, elections and parties, governments and policy; and finally covering the rule of law, democracy and backsliding.Digital formats and resourcesFoundations of European Politics: A Comparative Approach is available for students and institutions to purchase in a variety of formats, and is supported by online resources.DT The e-book offers a mobile experience and convenient access along with functionality tools, navigation features and links that offer extra learning support: www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/ebooks http://www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/ebooksDT Online resources for students include: multiple choice questions, web links, essay questions, and data descriptions and data exercises.DT Online resources for lecturers include: adaptable PowerPoint slides, test bank questions, figures and tables from the book.

Vexing issues concerning internal and external change challenge Europe as it tries hard to regroup, reform and refocus. This series is intended to present an ongoing forum to stimulate discussion of these issues. Political Bailout in Germany; Integrating European Financial Services: Developing Substantive Theory; The External and Internal Balance of the Convergence Process of Transformation Economies to the EU; Economic Effects of Nuclear Phase-Out in Germany; The Asymmetric Adjustment of Prices: Theory and Evidence from UK Manufacturing; European Union: Deeper Integration or Wider Membership? A Multivariate Statistical Analysis: Introduction; Research Design; The European Community on an Uncertain Path; Active Citizenship in the Changing Society -- Evidence from Six European Countries; European Union Media Policy: Finding a Path Between Commercial and Public Broadcasting in a Dual System; Index.

Vexing issues concerning internal and external change challenge Europe as it tries hard to regroup, reform and refocus. This series is intended to present an ongoing forum to stimulate discussion of these issues. Table of Contents: Preface; Broadband Communications in the European Union: Myths and Realities; Important but not Pervasive: The Shared Limits of Secondary Law in the Common Markets of Europe and South America; Democracy in the European Union; Can Mainstreaming Save EU Social Policy?; The Cases of Gender, Disability and Elderly Policy; Constructing Equality in Europe: The Case of Women's Rights in Italy and the UK; On the Problems of Home Country Control; Measuring the Cost of Increasing Inequality; Approaching the Endgame: Polish Public Opinion and the Changing Euro-Debate in the Run up to the 2003 EU Accession Referendum; Austria: Exceptionalism, Myth and Pariah; The Amsterdam CFSP Components: A Lowest Common Denominator Agreement?; Index.

EU Lobbying: Empirical and Theoretical studies offers an analysis of large empirical studies of interest group politics and Lobbying in Europe. Recognising the continued European economic integration, globalisation and the changing role of the state, it observs significant adaptations in interest mobilisation and strategic behavour. This book assesses the logic of collective and direct action, the logic of access and influence, the logic of venue-shopping and alliance building. It addresses specific issues such as: the emergence of elite pluralism in EU institutions, the pump priming of political action by EU institutions, and the growing political sophistication of private and public interests in Brussels. Through these issues the book explores how interest groups lobby different European institutions along the policy process and how the nature of policy dictates the style and level of lobbying. This book was previously published as a special issue of Jounal of European Public Policy

Europe remains divided between east and west, with differences caused and worsened by uneven economic and political development. Amid these divisions, the environment has become a key battleground. The condition and sustainability of environmental resources are interlinked with systems of governance and power, from local to EU levels. Key challenges in the eastern European region today include increasingly authoritarian forms of government that threaten the operations and very existence of civil society groups; the importation of locally-contested conservation and environmental programmes that were designed elsewhere; and a resurgence in cultural nationalism that prescribes and normalises exclusionary nation-building myths. This volume draws together essays by early-career academic researchers from across eastern Europe. Engaging with the critical tools of political ecology, its contributors provide a hitherto overlooked perspective on the current fate and reception of ‘environmentalism’ in the region. It asks how emergent forms of environmentalism have been received, how these movements and perspectives have redefined landscapes, and what the subtler effects of new regulatory regimes on communities and environment-dependent livelihoods have been. Arranged in three sections, with case studies from Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Serbia, this collection develops anthropological views on the processes and consequences of the politicisation of the environment. It is valuable reading for human geographers, social and cultural historians, political ecologists, social movement and government scholars, political scientists, and specialists on Europe and European Union politics.

This collective volume shows how Ukraine can best be understood through its regions and how the regions must be considered against the background of the nation. The overarching objective of the book is to challenge the dominance of the nation-state paradigm in the analyses of Ukraine by illustrating the interrelationship between national and regional dynamics of change. The authors—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, literary critics and linguists from Ukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Germany and the USA—explicitly go beyond the perspective of an entity defined by traditional political borders and cultural, economic, historical or religious stereotypes. The research project that led to the composition of the book combined quantitative (statistical surveys conducted across Ukraine) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus-group discussion) methods. The authors came to the conclusion that regionalism as a defining phenomenon of Ukraine is more prominent than the regions themselves. This approach regards Ukraine as a construct in flux where different discourses intersect, concur and eventually merge through the lenses of various disciplines and methodologies.