Cheap dates and the delusion of gratification: are votes sold or traded in the EU Council of Ministers?

Each year, small Member States receive a disproportionate share of the European Union's (EU's) budget. A prominent explanation for this is that Council decision-making involves a healthy dose of vote selling, whereby large Member States offer small states generous fiscal transfers in exchange for influence over policy. But nobody has investigated whether net budget contributors actually get anything for their money. In this paper I identify the vote selling model's observable implications and find virtually no evidence consistent with Council cash-for-votes exchanges. I also show that a compromise model – the leading model of EU decision-making to date – modified to incorporate vote selling does not outperform a standard one that assumes votes are traded rather than sold. Taken together, the results suggest that Council decision-making operates with little or no vote selling, and that regardless of whatever they think they might be buying, net budget contributors get little or nothing in return for their money. These findings call for further investigation into how Member States approach the issue of fiscal transfers, and into the factors other than formal voting weight that affect the power of actors engaged in EU decision-making.

How the European Union does not work: national bargaining success in the Council of Ministers

We know surprisingly little about whether the content of European Union legislation reflects the preferences of some Member States more than others. The few studies that have examined national bargaining success rates for EU legislation have conceptual and methodological weaknesses. To redress these problems I use a salience-weighted measure to gauge the relative success of Member States in translating their national preferences into legislation, and test two plausible, competing hypotheses about how the EU works: that no state consistently achieves more of what it really wants than any other, and that large Member States tend to beat small ones. Neither hypothesis receives empirical support. Not only do states differ far more significantly in their respective levels of bargaining success than previously recognised, but some of the smaller states are the ones that do especially well. The paper‟s main contribution -- demonstrating that the EU does not work as most people think it does -- sets the stage for new research questions, both positive and normative. In the last section I make a tentative start answering two of the most important: which factors explain the surprising empirical results, and whether differential national bargaining success might undermine the legitimacy of the integration process.

A multidisciplinary literature review of low and zero carbon technologies into new housing

The UK Government is committed to all new homes being zero-carbon from 2016. The use of low and zero carbon (LZC) technologies is recognised by housing developers as being a key part of the solution to deliver against this zero-carbon target. The paper takes as its starting point that the selection of new technologies by firms is not a phenomenon which takes place within a rigid sphere of technical rationality (for example, Rip and Kemp, 1998). Rather, technology forms and diffusion trajectories are driven and shaped by myriad socio-technical structures, interests and logics. A literature review is offered to contribute to a more critical and systemic foundation for understanding the socio-technical features of the selection of LZC technologies in new housing. The problem is investigated through a multidisciplinary lens consisting of two perspectives: technological and institutional. The synthesis of the perspectives crystallises the need to understand that the selection of LZC technologies by housing developers is not solely dependent on technical or economic efficiency, but on the emergent ‘fit’ between the intrinsic properties of the technologies, institutional logics and the interests and beliefs of various actors in the housing development process.

Integration of chaos theory and mathematical models in building simulation: Part I: Literature review

Current mathematical models in building research have been limited in most studies to linear dynamics systems. A literature review of past studies investigating chaos theory approaches in building simulation models suggests that as a basis chaos model is valid and can handle the increasingly complexity of building systems that have dynamic interactions among all the distributed and hierarchical systems on the one hand, and the environment and occupants on the other. The review also identifies the paucity of literature and the need for a suitable methodology of linking chaos theory to mathematical models in building design and management studies. This study is broadly divided into two parts and presented in two companion papers. Part (I) reviews the current state of the chaos theory models as a starting point for establishing theories that can be effectively applied to building simulation models. Part (II) develops conceptual frameworks that approach current model methodologies from the theoretical perspective provided by chaos theory, with a focus on the key concepts and their potential to help to better understand the nonlinear dynamic nature of built environment systems. Case studies are also presented which demonstrate the potential usefulness of chaos theory driven models in a wide variety of leading areas of building research. This study distills the fundamental properties and the most relevant characteristics of chaos theory essential to building simulation scientists, initiates a dialogue and builds bridges between scientists and engineers, and stimulates future research about a wide range of issues on building environmental systems.