Encounters with Europe: concepts, definitions, and research design

This text is based on the talk given by Claudio Radaelli at the political science department, University of Copenhagen, 16 February 2006, in the context of the seminar on Europeanization: Theorizing and Researching on the Impact of Europe.This article examines the issues of research design raised by research on Europeanization. Specifically, we briefly introduce the basic concepts and the classic approach of integration theorists, and move on to discuss two more recent proposals made by scholars working on Europeanization. We compare the baseline model and the bottom-up approach to research design. As the latter is less known than the former, we explain how it works and its advantages. We also show how Europeanization research can contribute to major questions at the core of comparative politics by taking a bottom-up perspective. However, we do not conclude that the choice is a dichotomy. Although in this article we make the case for bottom-up analysis, future research could usefully combine baseline and bottom-up designs to produce and compare empirical findings on Europeanization.Claudio Radaelli gratefully acknowledges the support of the European Commission’s Integrated Project on New Modes of Governance, Project no. CIT1-CT-2004-506392