Research Projects

Through his three-year Nuffield Trust-supported study of EU health lawmaking and National Science Foundation-supported research on the effects of EU law on the health systems of France, Germany, Spain, and the UK, Scott L. Greer, assistant professor of health management and policy at U-M’s School of Public Health, has come to appreciate the remarkable and remarkably unreported emergence of the EU as a major force in international public health policy, in general, and in communicable disease control, in particular. 

EUCE-MI hosted the conference “Bacteria without Borders: The European Governance of Communicable Disease Control” on May 7-8 in Ann Arbor. Communicable disease control might be one of the oldest and most central functions of government, but it is also one in transition. The European Union has become a major part of the public health infrastructure of the continent, influencing the chances and courses of illness with its policies and agencies. Like much of EU policy, this happened with few specific decisions and only a weak legal basis. But its influence is dramatic, and little-studied or even noted. This conference brought together academics and practitioners from the EU and U.S. to discuss how communicable disease control is becoming a strength of the EU and what its consequences might be.

The conference convenor was Scott Greer, and conference participants included: Bernard Merkel, European Union Delegation, Washington, D.C.; Jacques Drucker, Embassy of France, Washington D.C.; Scott Greer, Heather Elliott, David Kline Jones, and Howard Markel, U-M; Marco Liverani, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London, UK; Margitta Mätzke, University of Göttingen, Germany; Tamara Hervey, Sheffield University, UK; Monika Steffen, IEP Grenoble, France; Louise Trubek and Thomas Oliver, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Wyn Grant, Warwick University, UK; and Daniel Fox, Milbank Memorial Fund; and Rosemary Taylor, Tufts University. Contributors to the conference were: Robyn Martin, Professor of Public Health Law, Centre for Research in Primary and Community Care, University of Hertfordshire, UK; Adjunct Professor, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Honorary Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Director, European Public Health Law Network; and Ralf Reintjes, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Preceding event, included the Conversations on Europe lecture titled, "What Do America and Europe Owe to the World's Least Healthy People? International Development Assistance for Health: The Role of the EU and the US," by Lawrence Gostin, Associate Dean and Professor, Law and Global Health, Georgetown University Law School.

The topics that were discussed included: Europe and Communicable Disease Control; Mapping Communicable Disease Control in EU Member States; The Role of the European Court of Justice; The ECDC: Hub or Hollow Core?; Communicable Disease Politics in the EU: Lessons from HIV/AIDS; Agricultural Policy, Food Policy, and Communicable Disease Policy. Jacques Drucker, Bernard Merkel, and Howard Markel presented the opening discussion with presentations on: “From the Charter Group to ECDC: The Construction of Surveillance and Control of Communicable Diseases in Europe,” and "The European Union's Response to Communicable Diseases  and other Threats to Health.”

iTunesU Podcasts: “Bacteria without Borders: The European Governance of Communicable Disease Control”

Publications that have already emerged from this project:

Greer, Scott L., ed., Special Issue. “Bacteria without Borders: The Europeanization of Communicable Disease Control,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 37(1), 2012 (provisional scheduling).

Costa, Joan, and Scott L. Greer, eds. Federalism and Decentralization in European Health and Social Care: Policy Innovation, Competition and Cohesion. (Under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for 2012 publication.)

How have attitudes of Poles towards the EU evolved? What are the consequences of these attitudes for Polish and European politics? John E. Jackson, professor of political science at U-M, and Bogdan W. Mach, professor at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, addressed these questions using two survey data sets. 

Eastward expansion of the EU in 2004 contributed greatly to Poland’s growth. The research examined how the Polish economy changed and how these changes relate to attitudes about European integration.

The EU grant funds supported a collaborative project examining the dramatic increase in positive attitudes among Poles about the collective and personal benefits of EU membership. The project is based on panel data collected in 2003 and 2008, which documents clearly this increased support for the EU.  The panel data enabled project leaders to measure the change in attitudes at the individual level, and to relate these changes to changes in personal and local characteristics. Examples of these changes are changes in income and employment, changes in regional unemployment, and the amount of money going to regions through the various EU transfer programs. The basic proposition was that the benefits from accession would be associated with the changes in attitudes. The second part of the project intended to examine if these more favourable EU attitudes are associated with the votes reported in the 2007 parliamentary election that replaced the euro-skeptic government led by PiS by a far more euro-friendly government headed by the PO. Lastly the project leaders hoped to begin making some comparisons between the changes in Pole’s attitudes with changes in attitudes in other EU countries.

Jackson, Mach and Jennifer Miller-Gonzalez (Department of Political Science), produced a paper (currently under review) that uses Polish panel data to argue that the direct and indirect economic benefits of accession are strongly associated with the large increase in Poles’ assessments that entry had been good for Poland and for themselves. This paper also shows a strong association between these more favourable EU attitudes and vote switches between the 2005 and 2007 parliamentary elections that replaced a Euro-skeptic government with a very Euro-friendly one.

An initial draft of the paper examining Polish attitudes and votes was presented at a conference, “Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Overcoming ‘East’ and ‘West’”  held at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, 3-4 November 2009 and sponsored by the EU Center jointly at Christchurch and Wellington. A greatly revised version of the paper, titled “Buying Support and Regime Change: The Evolution of Polish Attitudes Towards the EU and Voting Between Accession and 2008,” is now under review at the journal European Union Politics.

The next question is whether older members of the EU, whose economies declined after 2004 associate this decline with decreased support for further European integration. Is expansion and further integration perceived as a zero sum game even though the vastly expanded markets and trading zones should boost all economies?

Preliminary analysis and a brief description of the results has been done on an extension of the work with the Polish data to examine changes in attitudes among Irish citizens during this same time period. There are two advantages to the extension to Ireland. The substantive advantage is that Ireland’s economy has declined sharply in the past two years, there has been a large in-migration of foreign workers, many from Poland during this period, and there have been some notable industrial relocations from Ireland to Poland and other accession countries. Thus, if EU expansion has elements of an economic zero sum game there is likely to be evidence of this in the Irish data. A practical reason for studying Ireland is that panel data comparable to the Polish data are available for the period 2002 to 2007. The project leaders intention is to expand on this analysis and to sharpen the contrasts between support for EU expansion in Poland and in Ireland. Economic fortunes have moved in opposite directions for these countries since the enlargement of the EU in 2004. The enlargement contributed greatly to Poland’s growth and possibly to some of Ireland’s difficulties. The research will extend existing work examining two countries and how their economies are changing, and how these changes are related to attitudes about European integration.

Publications that have already emerged from this project:

Jackson, John E., Bogdan W. Mach, and Jennifer Miller-Gonzalez. “Buying Support and Regime Change: The Evolution of Polish Attitudes towards the EU and Voting between Accession and 2008,” European Union Politics (forthcoming 2011).

Jackson, John E., Bogdan W. Mach, and Radosław Markowski. “Party Strategy and Electoral Competition in Post-Communist Countries: Evidence from Poland,” Journal of Electoral Studies29(2): 199-209, 2010.

Anna Grzymala-Busse, professor of political science at U-M, compiled a database of sacralization in Europe. This includes data on church efforts to recast political debates, the political response, and policy outcomes in several critical domains: abortion, divorce, education, stem-cell research, same sex marriage, environmental concerns, prostitution, poverty, and immigration/asylum rights.The project will advance an important and flourishing research agenda in the study of religion and politics at U-M, making three contributions to the scholarly community.

Anna Grzymala-Busse and David Smith, (Department of Political Science), continued to gather data on the sacralization of politics in eleven countries: the United States, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia and Lithuania. For this part of the project, they are looking at levels of sacralization—the pervasiveness of religious language, the involvement of churches, and the amount of religious influence on legislators and other politicians—on issue areas of abortion, divorce, same sex marriage, religious education and stem cell research. They are interested in variance on several dimensions—why in one country, churches may become very involved in political debates over some of these issues, but remain silent on others; why the same church may be vocal about one of these issues in one country but not in another; why politicians sometimes embrace sacral language and perspectives and enact legislation in accordance with church teachings, and why they sometimes ignore the churches altogether. Thus, for each issue and each country, they have collected data on (1) whether churches had become involved in the debate; (2) whether churches recast the debate in religious terms; (3) whether politicians used religious language in the debate; (4) whether legislators used religious arguments to justify legislation; (5) whether legislation was consonant with church teachings. This part of the project is largely complete.

This data-gathering process primarily involved extensive searches on Lexis Nexis for news reports on political debates and ecclesiastical statements. In some cases secondary sources were available, but for most of the East-Central European countries there was nothing available in English, and the dataset had to be built from the ground up. It is intended to be a fully replicable dataset, and meticulously documented. The complete dataset is 40,000 words long and contains around 500 footnoted sources. The results are often surprising. In Croatia, for example, a heavily Catholic country, the Catholic Church is very involved in all of these debates and politicians frequently pay lip–service to it, yet in actual policy terms the Church has made little headway, and it still has one of the most permissive abortion laws in Europe. Hungary, on the other hand, which has fewer Catholic adherents, quieter churches and more secular politicians, has a more restrictive abortion law, and has entrenched extensive privileges for the Catholic Church. Since completing data collection, the researchers have concentrated their efforts on developing and testing various competing theories to explain these puzzling outcomes.

A major component of this year was completing data collection on Christian Democratic Parties in applicable cases. Many parties in Europe call themselves “Christian Democratic,” but there is great variance in how closely they are associated with churches and how much they support church positions on social and economic issues. Many East European Christian Democratic parties started out as something else—as nationalist or libertarian parties, for example—and only gradually assumed a Christian Democratic stance in response to domestic pressure, such as the need to carve out a viable political niche on the right, or international pressure, such as guidance from the German CDU/CSU and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, or from the Vatican. In this part of the project Grzymala-Busse and Smith  examined four cases in great depth—Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland—tracing changes in Christian Democratic party policies, organization and rhetoric in response to changing electoral pressures and the new strategic environment brought about by the prospect of admission into the EU. In all four cases, parties changed basic elements of their platforms (e.g. disavowing nationalism in the case of Croatia’s HDZ, adopting “social market principles” in the case of Hungary’s Fidesz) in order to conform to the expectations and demands of western Europeans, especially Germans, about what constituted acceptable right-wing politics in the European Union. Eastern Europe’s Christian Democrats sought both entry for their countries into the EU and Christian Democratic allies for their parties in the European parliament, both of which involved convincing often-skeptical EU members that they had jettisoned the chauvinism and authoritarianism that had always seemed to pervade right-wing politics in Eastern and East Central Europe. However, some parties such as Poland’s Law and Justice were unwilling to make the concessions necessary to join the Christian Democratic fold.  They also collected data on the volatility of Christian Democrats’ electoral fortunes compared to other parties in post-communist Europe.

See also: Conversations on Europe. "The Sacralization of Politics in Europe and Beyond." Anna Grzymala-Busse, Professor of Political Science. The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professorship in European and Eurasian Studies Inaugural Lecture. Dec 2, 2010.  audio | video 

Conference presentations based on the research: “Lessons from Church: How Religions Expand without Diluting Doctrine,” American Political Science Association (APSA), Washington, DC (September 2-5, 2010); “Why are There are (Almost) No Post-Communist Christian Democratic Parties?,” Conference on Developing Party Systems, Princeton University (April 29-May 1, 2010), and in Party Politics (forthcoming 2011); “The Devil’s Advocate: Post-Communist Religion and Politics,” APSA, Toronto, Ontario (September 3-6, 2009).

This project builds on a previous collaborative project involving American and European researchers that included a 2004 pilot survey of three relatively specific Muslim population groups: Bangladeshis in London and Manchester, Turks in Berlin, and Moroccans in Madrid. Nearly 600 individuals were surveyed across all the sites, with virtually identical questions asked in each location. The goals were to enable researchers to quantify population characteristics and to make comparisons across the three countries and of different age, gender, and length-of-stay cohorts within countries. Some questions were identical to those asked of Arab-Americans in a Detroit Arab-American survey, thus enabling transatlantic comparisons, too. In collaboration with colleague Berta Álvarez-Miranda Navarro, at Complutense University, Madrid, U-M Professors of Political Science Ken Kollman and Mark Tessler  implemented a follow-up to a 2004 survey of Moroccans in Madrid. In the 2004 survey, respondents were selected from city register of immigrants, and asked questions on a variety of subjects, including immigration status, work status, political attitudes, cultural and religious practices, their identities as immigrants and new residents of Spain, and opinions of their local neighborhoods. In this 2010 survey, there was by necessity a different sampling scheme (no access to city registers), and the scope of the questions was smaller, due to a limited budget. 

The investigators selected group of questions, focusing mostly on immigration status, identities, work status, and religious practices and beliefs. It is important to note that this is not a panel study—the investigators were not interviewing the same people again. And it is not a study that attempts to replicate the same study as in 2004. Using a different sampling scheme, investigators are trying to learn once again about the population of Moroccans immigrants in Madrid, to discover the patterns that currently exist and compare them to the patterns that existed in 2004, understanding the limits of comparison over time given the differences in the studies. 

The purposes of the study are threefold: to understand the current state of affairs among Moroccans in Madrid in their religious practices and their attitudes toward being in Spain; to understand how those religious practices relate to other aspects of their lives, especially their identities and their civic behavior; and to the extent possible, to compare over the relationships among religious practices and beliefs and their work lives, their civic behavior, and their identities over (that is, to compare over time the relationships among variables--what has changed since 2004 in how religion affects or affected by other behavioral or fixed attributes?).

The data gathered are rich enough to be used by a variety of scholars studying different research questions. But the primary motivation is in using data to learn the weight of the role of religion (versus other things like economic or immigrant status) on the decisions and identities of these people.

The sample of Madrid residents of Moroccan origin was selected following random routes within those city districts with the highest concentration of this population. The survey was conducted by the same agency as in 2004, Instituto de Marketing y Opinión Pública, S.A. (IMOP) in late summer of 2010. The survey firm is now organizing the data into a useable dataset and ensuring confidentiality of respondents. The principal investigators will be receiving the data during 2010-11 and to complete the analysis.

This three-year project included a set of interrelated instructional and research activities centered on the creation of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by the EU. Three international seminars were: one in Ann Arbor in March 2009: “Toward a European Higher Education Area: Bologna Process and Beyond”; one in Oslo in May 2010, and a final one in Ann Arbor in May 2011. Each seminar was linked to graduate courses offered by U-M's Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE). The lead U-M unit, CSHPE, has been the top-ranked U.S. higher education research and graduate education center for over 50 years. Located at U-M's School of Education, CSHPE is comprised of faculty and graduate students interested in higher education as a social institution and as an area of professional practice. Although the predominant emphasis within CSHPE has been on U.S. higher education, faculty and students have continuously engaged abroad in a variety of professional development and research activities. Given the Council of Europe's 2010 deadline for establishing EHEA, 2008-11 were an optimal time to concentrate on the university dimension of the EU. Of particular interest was how accountability is achieved at the federal level while national and institutional autonomy are maintained, and how shifts in ethnic, racial and religious diversity are reflected in EHEA as well as policies and practices at the national and university levels. Principal investigators for this project were Janet Lawrence, associate professor, and Michael Bastedo, associate professor, U-M School of Education; and Peter Maassen, professor and director of Higher Education Development Association (HEDDA), University of Oslo, Norway.

iTunesU Podcasts. “School of Education: Towards European Higher Education Area" 

This is a research initiative developed by a Working Group chaired by Cindy A. Schipani, professor of business law at U-M's Stephen M. Ross School of Business; other members include Terry Dworkin, Indiana University; Virginia Maurer, University of Florida; Angel Kwolek-Folland, University of Florida; Marina v.N. Whitman, Ross School of Business and Ford School of Public Policy, U-M; and Mary Hinesly, Women's Initiative, Ross School of Business, U-M. The multi-phase project resulted in survey collection of comparable data among the countries of North America and Western Europe to determine which factors enable women to obtain and remain in positions of leadership in business organizations.

In the final phase of the Pathways project, partially funded by the European Union Center for Excellence, the principal investigator Cindy Schipani and her collaborators executed their survey and held a workshop in Rome, Italy with other invited scholars, to begin analysis of the survey responses. The workshop participants included: Cindy Schipani,(University of Michigan); Mary Hinesly, (University of Michigan); Terry Morehead Dworkin, (Indiana University); Virginia Maurer, Director, (University of Florida); Angel Kwolek-Folland, (University of Florida); Chizu Nakajima, (City University, London); Agnes Hubert, (European Commission, Brussels); Anina Mischau, (Bielefeld University); Gina Gaio Santos, (Minho University, Portugal); Diana Schimke, (Regensburg University); Grazia Francescato, (President of the Green Party, Italy); and Donato Francescato, Roma University La Spienza.

An article entitled "Pathways for Women to Obtain Positions of Organizational Leadership: The Significance of Mentoring and Networking," was published in volume 16 of the Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 89-136 (2009). Future plans include further detailed analysis of the survey, publication of results and a major European conference to disseminate the results to solicit further research on these issues. The working group hopes to ultimately recommend action steps impacting business practices to identify pathways for women to obtain positions organizational leadership.

In this project carried out in association with the Aleksanteri Institute's Eurasia Energy Group at the University of Helsinki, Michael Kennedy (formerly of U-M, now Brown University) identified how various actors influence and transform the meanings, identities, values, and representations accompanying the exercise of power and influence around the definition and address of energy security, with special focus on the European Union and its relationship to energy coming from Russia and the Caspian Sea. 

In May 2008, EUCE-MI and CREES, in cooperation with the University of Helsinki, hosted a two-day a workshop aimed at understanding how, and with what consequence, various actors influence and transform the meanings, identities, values, and representations accompanying the articulation of European energy security. In particular, workshop participants focused on how the risk associated with Europe's relationship to Russian energy resources is accentuated or diminished. By analyzing accounts of energy exploration and investment, alternative supply routes, economic/legal frameworks for trade, technological innovations, environmental regulation, and consumption patterns in the provision of European energy security, the workshop identified the principal axes of scientific uncertainty and ideological difference that publics and policy makers might distinguish in their debates over investment and regulatory priorities. The following scholars, experts in energy studies, as well as more general theorists in international relations and global transformations participated. From University of Michigan: Michael Kennedy, Irving Salmeen, Carl Simon, Fatma Muge Gocek, Gerard Libaridian, Ronald Suny, Ryan Aiken, and Melvyn Levitsky; Margarita M. Balmaceda, Seton Hall University. From Europe: Andrew Barry, Oxford University; Susanne Nies, IFRI, Brussels and Sciences Po, Paris (paper presented); David Dusseault and Mikko Palonkorpi, University of Helsinki; and Pami Aalto, University of Tampere.

Several papers were discussed at this workshop (among them also those that have emerged from EUCE grant research over the 2005-7 period). Workshop also included U-M experts in alternative technologies, to understand better how alternative futures, established by technological innovations, might fit or not fit into this matrix of estimation and expectation. Topics discussed were: Technological Challenges; Technological Infrastructure; Theorizing Russian Energy Power; Figuring European-Eurasian Energy Relations; and Theorizing Energy Alternativity. More information on this workshop see Past Conferences.

See also: Michael D. Kennedy. “From Transition to Hegemony: Extending the Cultural Politics of Military Alliances and Energy Security."

“How Are Russian Energy Policies Formulated? Linking the Actors and Structures of Energy Policy” (Pami Aalto, David Dusseault, Markku Kivinen and Michael D. Kennedy) pp. 20-42 in Pami Aalto (ed.) Russia’s Energy Policy: National, Interregional and Global Levels. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,2012.  http://www.e-elgar.com/bookentry_main.lasso?id=13885

This project involved a collaboration initiated when Professor Traugott was a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Central European University in Budapest.  Professor Miklós Sükösd and Traugott worked on a project looking at the role of public opinion specialists, and the growth of the public opinion industry in the newly emerging democracies in Eastern Europe.  Since they began collaboration, Sükösd became the principal investigator of an EU COST grant focusing on the development of mass communication theories appropriate to this region.On the U-M part of the project, Professor Traugott has been working with a graduate student, Lauren Guggenheim at the Center for Political Studies at U-M's renowned Institute for Social Research (ISR). They have been doing background research, developing a bibliography of polling based research, as well as research on the development of the public opinion industry in the Eastern European countries that are "rising" members of the EU. They were invited to attend the COST meeting in Milan in June 2007, to present on their research. While they discussed the results of their work in informal sessions, Professor Traugott also presented on research in which he is developing a model of the role of public opinion in the support of democratic government. 

This five-phase project started in November, 2005 at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. The Working Group professors Cindy Schipani (University of Michigan), Marina Whitman (University of Michigan), Virginia Maurer (University of Florida), Terry Dworkin (Indiana University), and Angel Kwolek-Folland (University of Florida) invited a group of approximately twenty-five women, including academics, prominent business women, and policy makers, from throughout the US, Canada, and Europe to Ann Arbor for two days to discuss the types of questions that should be included in the interviews and survey. The Working Group identified a number of topics to be included the survey, and published an article entitled "Women and the New Corporate Governance: Pathways for Obtaining Positions of Corporate Leadership" in the University of Maryland Law Review.The second phase involved analyzing the data gathered in Phase I, and hiring a statistician and research assistants to also help with survey design. Phase II took place from January-December, 2006. The initial survey was drafted in this phase, after extensive meetings. In addition, members of the Working Group presented our findings to date at the Second International Conference on Women's Studies, held at Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus in April, 2006.The third phase, involved a Workshop, convened in Paris, France in September, 2006, to gather a comparative perspective among the North Americans and Europeans. This meeting included approximately 20 participants. The purpose of this meeting was to further refine the survey instrument and discuss how best to disseminate it and collect the country-by-country data sets. This meeting was highly successful, and  the working group continued to study the transcripts from the sessions. The Group met in Ann Arbor on December 2, 2006 to revise the survey in accordance with the recommendations gleaned from the meeting in Europe. This phase was completed in early 2007. A second law review article entitled "Pathways for Women to Obtain Positions of Organizational Leadership: The Significance of Mentoring and Networking," was initiated. 

Phase IV will involved refinement and execution of the survey. In the fourth phase of the Pathways project, EC funding was used to support the execution of the survey with international participants and to partially support of the work of research assistant, Ryan Elder. Elder assisted with completion of the survey, formatting the survey for electronic execution, and initial execution of the survey. The survey firm, Resolution Research & Marketing Inc. was hired to conduct the survey with international respondents. This phase also involved a meeting in London with Dr. Chizu Nakajima of Cass Business School, City University in London, to assist with gathering further European data and analysis. A report of this project was presented at the annual Business History Conference in Sacramento in April, 2008. 

Next phase, phase V involved completion of the survey, analysis of the results, and meeting in Europe involving the Working Group and other invited scholars and practitioners to discuss the results and possible further phases of the project. Literature review culminated in a manuscript entitled "Pathways for Women to Obtain Positions of Organizational Leadership: The Significance of Mentoring and Networking," was accepted for publication in the Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy. For more information see Research Projects.