European Governance and Democracy: Power and Protest in the EU [Paperback]

This is a very timely book that examines governance and democracy in the European Union. . . . This study is valuable for students and observers of EU politics, as well as for those interested in social justice, democratization, and the civil society movements. Recommended.This is a book well worth reading both for its contributions to EU studies and research on contentious activity. It raises important questions of political action in systems of complex governance. . . . European Governance and Democracy represents the fusion of two distinct research areas: the politics of the European Union (EU) and how social movements/interest groups attempt to influence the political process. This fusion offers new opportunities to study processes of political mobilization in a multilevel, complex system of governance. It also illustrates the challenges of studying mobilization processes in such an environment. The book is well-rooted in both literatures.This book, by two leading French scholars of collective political action, offers a bold and comprehensive study of interest group and protest politics at the European level. The combination of a cross-national structural analysis with a longitudinal comparison of a selected set of policymaking processes allows the authors to uncover the fundamental dynamics of European decision making. They show the complex multilevel mix of these processes, their sectoral compartmentalization, and, most importantly, their politicization. If European decision making now reaches beyond the arcane bureaucracies to which it was originally confined, the analysis, however, also points out that it keeps favoring those groups who already have a long-established record of influence at the national level.European institutions and traditional forms of democratic participation have attracted a lot of scholars' attention, while collective action and social movements directed against the EU, with a few exceptions, have suffered from benign neglect. This boolC&