[ Europa | Europe etc. ]

The study of Europeanization has become a prominent research agenda in theoretical policy analysis, comparative politics, international relations, and European Studies, but raises a number of methodological problems. Among those, two should be particularly addressed by a special Issue of the Journal of Comparative Political Analysis (JCPA): THE EUROPEANIZATION OF PUBLIC POLICIES IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE.

The Editorial Team published a Call for Papers (Guest-Editors of this issue will be Claudio M. Radaelli from the University of Exeter and Sabine Saurugger from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Grenoble.
Deadline for abstracts is July 15th 2005.
Here is the Call:

1. Europeanization is a dynamic and iterative process in which domestic and European Union (EU)-level processes co-evolve. One cannot keep one dimension constant when examining the other. Additionally, the two levels, although interact over time, are not tightly coupled at any given point in time.
2. The second puzzle concerns the measurement of Europeanization. How do we conceptualize and measure the 'impact' of the EU on domestic policies? Empirical evidence shows that impacts can be discursively and politically constructed. There may be an impact of EU ideas on national policies even if EU-level decisions fail to emerge. Further, there is disagreement on the time-dimension and the length of causal chains one should consider to assess whether a domestic policy has been Europeanized or not.

We invite papers on the following topics:

• Theoretical papers addressing the puzzles of co-evolution and measurement
• Country comparisons
• Policy comparisons
• Creative usages of 'Europe' in domestic policy processes
• Methodological approaches to assess, analyse and evaluate Europeanization

All papers should also illustrate how Europeanization contributes to our understanding of comparative policy analysis. We explicitly encourage papers with counter-intuitive conclusions.

Time schedule:

• Deadline for papers abstracts (300 words) to be sent to both guest-editors: 15 July 2005
• Selection of abstracts by the guest editors: 28 July 2005
• Submission of papers to both guest-editors (8000 words): 9 December 2005
• Workshop at the IEP Grenoble: February 2006
• Submission of final papers to editors: 21 July 2006
• Guest editors to send articles to JCPA: September 2006
• Revision process of JCPA (full anonymous review process)
• Special issue scheduled for 2007

Guidelines for Contributors could be found here.

If you want to subscribe the JCPA (edited at Routledge): here is some possibility.