This broad and all-encompassing study focuses on Europe s new policy agendas. It brings together international academic experts on a range of policies to discuss Europe s place in the world and its relationship to the USA and beyond. This book concentrates on two key themes of particular salience for policy makers: the enlargement of the EU and the place of Europe in international politics. An expansive list of important policy areas within these themes is explored, including: enlargement political and constitutional implications and international socialization of central and eastern Europe Europe and the USA: security and defence policy, trade, finance and development institutional development and external relations in justice and home affairs before and after September 11 international terrorism, EU immigration and asylum and borders policy human rights and civil rights agriculture, environmental policy and regional policy pensions and ageing in Europe. This book constitutes a major contribution to achieving a deeper understanding of European integration and the barriers to integration within the context of global and multi-level governance. As such, it will be of enormous interest to an extensive audience including academics, researchers, students, policy makers and practitioners in the fields of political studies, international relations, public policy, European studies, US studies and security studies.

Why does the EU deal with some issues but not others? This is the central question of this book dedicated to agenda-setting processes in the EU. Through a comparison of EU and US policy agendas and the analysis of four case studies in environmental and health policy, this book offers a new understanding of how policy issues come onto the EU agenda.

The sixteenth edition of Social policy in the European Union: state of play has a triple ambition. First, it provides easily accessible information to a wide audience about recent developments in both EU and domestic social policymaking. Second, the volume provides a more analytical reading, embedding the key developments of the year 2014 in the most recent academic discourses. Third, the forward-looking perspective of the book aims to provide stakeholders and policymakers with specific tools that allow them to discern new opportunities to influence policymaking. In this 2015 edition of Social policy in the European Union: state of play, the authors tackle the topics of the state of EU politics after the parliamentary elections, the socialisation of the European Semester, methods of political protest, the Juncker investment plan, the EU’s contradictory education investment, the EU’s contested influence on national healthcare reforms, and the neoliberal Trojan Horse of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The Lisbon Agenda aims to prepare Europe for globalization by updating European policies for research, innovation, competition, trade, employment, education, social protection, environment and energy at both the European and national levels. Designed to inspire the new cycle of the Lisbon Agenda until 2010 and beyond, this timely and significant volume explores the intellectual elaboration of the agenda for the coming years. With contributions from some of Europe s leading scholars, this book explores new developments in the European agenda for globalization, addressing four critical areas: European policies, their adaptation to national diversity in Europe, their implications for the external action of the European Union and, finally, their implications for EU governance. This book presents the outcome of an organized dialogue between the political and research communities. Europe, Globalization and the Lisbon Agenda will undoubtedly prove an outstanding addition to the current literature and will be an invaluable resource for European policy-makers, governments and academics from a wide range of disciplines who are concerned about the future competitiveness of Europe.

This book addresses salient current issues in public administration research. It seeks to suggest where future research may or indeed ought to be focussed. To advocate the future routes for the development of research, this book is divided into themes, with a clear overlap between different approaches. The book has contributions that will assist students of public administration/public sector management and public policy, especially new PhD students, but will also be a useful resource for more established researchers to understand the major emerging issues within the field.

This book summarizes recent advances in the work on agenda-setting in a comparative perspective. The book first presents and explains the data-gathering effort undertaken within the Comparative Agendas Project over the past ten years. Individual country chapters then present the research undertaken within the many national projects. The third section illustrates the possibilities and directions for new research in comparative public policy using the data presented in this book. All the data used and discussed in the book is moreover publicly available. The book represents a significant contribution to the study of comparative public policy. By introducing a unified research infrastructure it opens up new possibilities for both empirical and theoretical research in this area.

A holistic and extensive exploration of both the dynamic and incremental changes in EU public policy and the decision processes surrounding them, this Elgar Encyclopedia is the definitive reference work in the field of EU public policy.