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From the outset, European integration was about the transfer of powers from the national to the European level, which evolved as explicit bargaining among governments or as an incremental drift. This process was reframed with the competence issue entering the agenda of constitutional policy. It now concerns the shape of the European multilevel polity as a whole, in particular the way in which powers are allocated, delimited and linked between the different levels. This Living Review article summarises research on the relations between the EU and the national and sub-national levels of the member states, in particular on the evolution and division of competences in a multilevel political system. It provides an overview on normative reasonings on an appropriate allocation of competences, empirical theories explaining effective structures of powers and empirical research. The article is structured as follows: First, normative theories of a European federation are discussed. Section 2 deals with legal and political concepts of federalism and presents approaches of the economic theory of federalism in the context of the European polity. These normative considerations conclude with a discussion of the subsidiarity principle and the constitutional allocation of competences in the European Treaties. Section 3 covers the empirical issue of how to explain the actual allocation of competences (scope and type) between levels. Integration theories are presented here in so far as they explain the transfer of competence from the national to the European level or the limits of this centralistic dynamics. Normative and empirical theories indeed provide some general guidelines for evaluation and explanations of the evolution of competences in the EU, but they both contradict the assumption of a separation of power. The article therefore concludes that politics and policy-making in the EU have to be regarded as multilevel governance (Section 4). The main theoretical approaches and r

This Living Reviews article evaluates the most important strains of social science research on the impact of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on integration, EU-level policymaking, and national legal orders. Section 2 defines the concepts of judicialization and governance, and discusses how they are related. As the article demonstrates, the "constitutionalization of the EU," and its effect on EU governance, is one of the most complex and dramatic examples of judicialization in world history. Section 3 discusses the institutional determinants of judicial authority in the EU in light of delegation theory. The European Court, a Trustee of the Treaty system rather than a simple Agent of the Member States, operates in an unusually broad zone of discretion, a situation the Court has exploited in its efforts to enhance the effectiveness of EU law. Section 4 focuses on the extraordinary impact of the European Court of Justice, and of the legal system it manages, on the overall course of market and political integration. Section 5 provides an overview of the process through which the ECJ's case law - its jurisprudence - influences the decision-making of non-judicial EU organs and officials. Section 6 considers the role of the ECJ and the national courts in monitoring and enforcing Member State compliance with EU law, a task that has provoked a steady Europeanization of national law and policymaking.

The once-distinct literatures on European Union politics and negotiation theory are increasingly interlinked, with each drawing upon and contributing to the other. This collection aims to stimulate even more, and more systematic, research on negotiations in the EU. In particular, it presents a state of the art of the literature at the intersection of these two fields by identifying areas of considerable research progress and by proposing a set of questions that require further research. In the introduction, we elaborate the rationale of this volume and introduce the various contributions.

The Europeanisation of candidate countries and new members is a rather recent research area that has grown strongly since the early 2000s. Research in this area has developed primarily in the context of the EU's eastern enlargement. A small number of theoretically informed book-length studies of the EU's influence on the Central and Eastern European candidate countries have provided a generalisable conceptual framework for this research area, drawing on the debate between rationalist institutionalist and constructivist institutionalist approaches in International Relations and Comparative Politics. This framework makes these studies highly compatible with analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, with which they also share one key empirical finding, namely that the impact of the EU on candidate countries is differential across countries and issue areas. At the same time, the theoretical implications of these findings appear more clear-cut than in the case of the Europeanisation of member states: rationalist institutionalism, with its focus on the external incentives underpinning EU conditionality and the material costs incurred by domestic veto players, appears well-suited to explaining variation in the patterns of Europeanisation in candidate countries. A very recent development within this research agenda is the focus on the Europeanisation of new member states. While the study of the EU's impact during the early years of membership was hitherto primarily a subfield of analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, it has now become an extension of studies of candidate countries by analysing the impact of accession on the dynamics of pre-accession Europeanisation and how durable and distinctive the patterns of candidate Europeanisation are in the post-accession stage.