Giandomenico Majone | |
---|---|
Born | Italy | 27 March 1932
Occupation | Academic |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
Thesis | Asymptotic behavior of Bayes' estimates in Borel sets (1966) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Political science |
Institutions | European University Institute |
Doctoral students | Simon Hix |
Giandomenico Majone (born 27 March 1932) is an Italian scholar of political science whose expertise was regulatory governance within the European Union (EU) as well as theories of delegation and their effect on the perceived democratic deficit of the EU. He was an Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at the European University Institute in Florence,Italy. [1]
Majone studied at the University of Padua in the early 1950s acquiring a Master of Arts in political economy in 1956,before enrolling at the Carnegie Institute of Technology,where he received a Master of Science degree in mathematics in 1960. In the early 1960s he studied at the University of California,where he earned a doctorate in statistics in 1965. In 1986 he was appointed professor of public policy analysis at the European University Institute (EUI),a post he held until 1995. Following this,he held a position as an external professor at the EUI in addition to that of visiting distinguished professor at the EU Center and Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. [2]
Majone has written on a wide variety of subjects,but his most notable contribution concerns the EU's delegation of regulatory powers. In brief,Majone conceives of the delegation of regulatory powers to supranational institutions such as the European Commission as a means for member states to credibly commit to integration and implementing EU policies. Majone asserts that the scope of EU powers are primarily regulatory and contrasts delegation to the commission with national forms of delegation such as that to an independent central bank.
According to Majone,member states delegate certain regulatory powers to the Commission in order to insulate themselves from democratic pressures that would inhibit optimal policy outcomes,such as "shifting political property rights",whereby the commitments made by one government can be undone by a newly elected one,and "time inconsistency",where the optimal short-term policy may run counter to the optimal long-term policy. These problems indicate that decisions about purely regulatory matters should be made by institutions that are not democratically accountable. For example,although a policy of maintaining low inflation may be the best long-term policy,governments facing elections are motivated to lower interest rates and manufacture short-term economic "booms".
In the context of the EU,Majone interprets this as a defence of the perceived undemocratic nature of institutions like the European Commission and a warning against the introducing democratic reforms like a directly elected Commission President as it could undermine the functions of the supranational institutions. [3]
The Giandomenico Majone Prize was in honour of Giandomenico Majone for his outstanding contribution for the study of regulatory governance in the EU or beyond. This award recognises outstanding research by scholars in early stages of her or his career in the field of regulatory governance from all relevant disciplinary backgrounds. The Prize was limited to scholars having completed their PhD no more than seven years before the deadline for submission. The prize was awarded by the European Consortium for Political Research's Standing Group on Regulatory Governance.
The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was a European organization created after World War II to integrate Europe's coal and steel industries into a single common market based on the principle of supranationalism. It was formally established in 1951 by the Treaty of Paris, signed by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. The organization's subsequent enlargement of both members and duties ultimately led to the creation of the European Union.
The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organisation created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957, aiming to foster economic integration among its member states. It was subsequently renamed the European Community (EC) upon becoming integrated into the first pillar of the newly formed European Union in 1993. In the popular language, however, the singular European Community was sometimes inaccurately used in the wider sense of the plural European Communities, in spite of the latter designation covering all the three constituent entities of the first pillar.
The European Commission (EC) is part of the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission headed by a President. It includes an administrative body of about 32,000 European civil servants. The commission is divided into departments known as Directorates-General (DGs) that can be likened to departments or ministries each headed by a Director-General who is responsible to a Commissioner.
In international relations, intergovernmentalism treats states as the primary actors in the integration process. Intergovernmentalist approaches claim to be able to explain both periods of radical change in the European Union because of converging governmental preferences and periods of inertia because of diverging national interests.
Neofunctionalism is a theory of regional integration which downplays globalisation and reintroduces territory into its governance. Neofunctionalism is often regarded as the first European integration theory developed by Ernst B. Haas in 1958 as part of his Ph.D. research on the European Coal and Steel Community. Neofunctionalism seeks to explain the European integration process and why states accept to become a part of supranational organization. Jean Monnet's approach to European integration, which aimed at integrating individual sectors in hopes of achieving spillover effects to further the process of integration, is said to have followed the neofunctional school's tack.
A supranational union is a type of international organization that is empowered to directly exercise some of the powers and functions otherwise reserved to states. A supranational organization involves a greater transfer of or limitation of state sovereignty than other kinds of international organizations.
The institutions of the European Union are the seven principal decision-making bodies of the European Union and the Euratom. They are, as listed in Article 13 of the Treaty on European Union:
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Multi-level governance is a term used to describe the way power is spread vertically between many levels of government and horizontally across multiple quasi-government and non-governmental organizations and actors. This situation develops because many countries have multiple levels of government including local, regional, state, national or federal, and many other organisations with interests in policy decisions and outcomes. International governance also operates based on multi-level governance principles. Multi-level governance can be distinguished from multi-level government which is when different levels of government share or transfer responsibility amongst each other. Whereas multi-level governance analyses the relationship of different state levels and interaction with different types of actors.'
The European University Institute (EUI) is an international postgraduate and post-doctoral research-intensive university and an intergovernmental organisation with juridical personality, established by its founding member states to contribute to cultural and scientific development in the social sciences, in a European perspective. Its main campus is located in the hills above Florence in Fiesole, Italy.
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Fiscal union is the integration of the fiscal policy of nations or states. In a fiscal union, decisions about the collection and expenditure of taxes are taken by common institutions, shared by the participating governments. A fiscal union does not imply the centralisation of spending and tax decisions at the supranational level. Centralisation of these decisions would open up not only the possibility of inherent risk sharing through the supranational tax and transfer system but also economic stabilisation through debt management at the supranational level. Proper management would reduce the effects of asymmetric shocks that would be shared both with other countries and with future generations. Fiscal union also implies that the debt would be financed not by individual countries but by a common bond.
Tanja A. Börzel is a German political scientist. Her research and teaching focus on the fields of European Integration, Governance, and Diffusion. She is professor of Political Science at the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science of Freie Universität Berlin, director of the Center for European Integration, and holder of the Jean Monnet Chair for European Integration from 2006 until 2009. Currently, she is department chair of the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science.
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Renaud Dehousse is a Belgian lawyer and professor, born on the 2 June 1960 in Liège, Belgium. He is currently President of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy.
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