"Europeanization of the core executive in the transition from circumstances of EU accession to full EU membership"

Fink-Hafner, Danica. (2005) "Europeanization of the core executive in the transition from circumstances of EU accession to full EU membership". In: UNSPECIFIED, Austin, Texas. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Only recently have the direct and indirect ‘European’ impacts (of political outcomes at the European level) on domestic political systems started to be studied (i.e. Spanou, 1998; Bulmer and Burch, 1998 and 2001; Kassim, Peters and Wright, eds. 2000; Goetz and Hix, eds. 2001; Knill, 2001; Schneider and Aspinwall, eds. 2001; Goetz, ed., 2001; Laffan, 2001b). For the purpose of our paper, we understand Europeanization processes as the impacts of EU integration on specific countries' political institution-building and institutional adjustments including constitutional and administrative law, as well as on how the political system is organized and operated. This paper focuses on one of the three alternative perspectives of the ‘top-down’ approach to studying the processes of Europeanization as defined by Goetz (2001), namely the linkage perspective. Obviously, for recent new EU member states it is the national administrative adjustments for negotiating accession with the EU that have so far prevailed over national administrative adjustments made in the circumstances of (very recent) full EU membership. Our comparative research of three EU accession states/recent new EU member states, in line with a dynamic view, include Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia. While taking some key common features of the selected countries into account, the countries’ idiosyncrasies including variations in the institutional adaptation of their core executives relying on research findings in the framework of the European project ‘Organizing for Enlargement’ are investigated. Preliminary comparative research findings and tentative conclusions on variables that may cause variations in the adaptation of national administrations to the European integration challenges in the three (otherwise in some respects) relatively similar countries are presented.

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