Recent research has tried to uncover the political space in which the Council of Ministers of the European Union decides. Rather than the left-right conflict or a cleavage between governments with national and supranational attitudes, this article shows that a redistributive dimension, decisively shapes the interactions in this most important legislative body of the European Union. In contrast to extant studies, we employ ex ante rather than ex post preference data and rely on correspondence analysis as a means to identify the underlying dimensions of contestation. The article concludes with an empirical investigation of how enlargement will affect the emerging political space within the European Union. Our quantitative analysis suggests that the gulf between net-contributors and net-receivers will further deepen.

This article discusses the patterns of subnational democracy within the context of German federalism and local government. The first section discusses the distinctive institutional expression of democracy and the evolution of state in Germany. The second section focuses on the interplay and the relationship between federalism and the political organization of society. This structural framework elucidates on the mechanisms of subnational democracy, in German Länder, and at the local level. The last section of this article collates the changes in society and state and their implications on the subnational democracy of Germany.

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 reviews normative reasons justifying 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. Moreover, we include empirical studies on the effective vertical allocation of powers in the EU.Normative and empirical theories reveal that most powers are sharing rather than separated between levels. Therefore, article therefore concludes that politics and policy-making in the EU have to be regarded as multilevel governance. In Section 4, we summarise the main theoretical approaches and findings from empirical research on European multilevel governance. In the conclusion, we sketch some suggestions for further discussion and research in the field (Section 5).