Peter Bursens
Biographic Data
| ID | 1616805 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Bursens |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Bursens |
| SIGNATURE | BURSENS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Antwerp |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2096-6454 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 192 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 34 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Gaining trust through consultation? How intergovernmental interactions influences citizens’ political trust in times of crisis
Keep your principals close, but your stakeholders closer
Regulatory agencies provide input in the policymaking efforts of their executive principals. While doing so, agencies test the political waters for proposed policies and collect insights by consulting with stakeholders in developing their proposals to principals. Engaging with stakeholders may give agencies the tools to improve the input they provide and enhance agencies’ authority in the eyes of the principals that rely on them.This paper assess…
How to explain citizens’ declined political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic gave a new impetus to the study of citizens’ political trust in times of crisis. Especially because trust is seen as an important precondition for citizens’ compliance with crisis measures, research into the determinants of citizens’ political trust became highly relevant. Contrary to trust research during previous crises, existing studies mostly focused on the beginning of the pandemic, when political trust increased in (al…
Studying the influence of interest groups on non-decisionmaking
The political science literature has extensively analyzed the political influence of interest groups in recent years. Despite growing scholarly interest into their role in agenda-setting, a significant blind spot remains in understanding their control over non-decisionmaking. This lack of insight into interest groups’ negative agenda-setting influence is primarily due to three fundamental challenges in research design: conceptualization, sampling…
Understanding bias better
European Union (EU) agencies are known to have a high risk of capture by regulated business interests.To limit this risk, agencies try to involve a diverse set of stakeholders.One way of doing so, is to install advisory councils (ACs): permanent bodies with a fixed number of stakeholders selected by the agency.Current scholarship has mainly studied whether stakeholders' access to ACs is biased towards business interests.However, it remains unknow…
Slow adapters or active players? Belgian regional parliamentarians and European affairs after Lisbon
How do members of regional parliaments engage in EU policymaking? This paper examines how and why members of the Walloon, Flemish and Brussels regional parliaments vary in their EU-contacting activities, by adapting a German survey. Belgium makes a relevant case, as the ‘in foro interno, in foro externo’ principle entitles regions to conduct foreign policy, including EU affairs in those areas they possess internal competency. Our data show that t…
Exploring the Relationship between Federal Reform and the Representation of the People
Federal systems tend to have two venues of representation to ensure that both the people as a whole and the constituent units are represented at the federal level. While this double representation is put forward as a basic (normative) feature of federal systems, little to no empirical research has been conducted on this issue. This contribution therefore studies the representation of the people as a whole and of the constituent units in the Belgi…
The revolving door in Brussels
The staff flow between the public sector and organised interests is metaphorically defined as 'revolving door'. This paper seeks to explain variation in hiring behaviour across interest organisations (IOs). Using data from the Comparative Interest Group-survey project, we show that revolving door practices do not occur systematically across IOs but that, under specific conditions, IOs are more likely to attract employees from the public sector th…
Explaining self-efficacy development in an authentic higher education learning context of role-play simulations
Seizing the moment
Constitutionally, Belgium represents the most extreme case of regional entities wielding power over EU external trade policymaking. Formally, the Flemish, Walloon and Brussels regions can wield veto power over Belgian positions. Yet, only once has a Belgian region actually made use of this capacity, when Wallonia temporarily blocked the conclusion of the EU trade agreement with Canada in 2016 (CETA). We show that political actors – legislative an…
Beyond descriptions and good practices
The introduction of the symposium sets out a possible research agenda on producing systematic empirical evidence of the effect of active learning tools to the discipline of political science, inspired by and drawing from educational research. It discusses the core research questions of such an agenda. Do active learning environments enhance political science students’ learning outcomes? Does the introduction of active learning in political scienc…
Choosing channels. Intra-state and extra-state strategies of Belgian subnational authorities in response to the European Semester
Europeanization literature has found that, in general, subnational authorities prefer to target the EU indirectly via member state channels. This article tests whether these findings hold in the non-legislative domain of the European Semester. With respect to the Belgian case, the article concludes that all Belgian subnational authorities indeed primarily use the cooperative intra-state channels as a response to the domestic division of competenc…
Student Diversity in a Cross-Continental EU-Simulation Exploring Variation in Affective Learning Outcomes Among Political Science Students
Current research struggles to illuminate significant learning outcomes of role-play simulations, such as Model European Union (MEU) and Model United Nations (MUN). In this study, we introduce a model for measuring simulation effects, distinguishing between cognitive, affective and regulative learning outcomes. In particular, we introduce the MISS-model (Motivation, Interest and Self-efficacy in Simulations), which enables measuring affective lear…
Regional parliaments in the EU multilevel parliamentary system
European integration has created a multilevel political system that is dominated by executive actors. Despite the increasing competences of the European Parliament, a growing EU-awareness of national assemblies and an emerging attention of regional parliaments for EU affairs, the EU polity still lacks a sound parliamentary representation. As the EU presents itself as a representative democracy, the current set-up raises questions from the perspec…
You'll Never Lobby Alone. Explaining the Participation of Sub‐national Authorities in the European Commission's Open Consultations
The multi‐level system of the EU (European Union) constrains the institutionalized representation of the regional tier of government. Consequently, SNAs (sub‐national authorities) seek to represent their interests through various lobbying practices, including taking part in the European Commission's open consultations. In this article, we argue that varying levels with which SNAs take part in open consultations cannot be adequately explained by r…
Complex Political Decision-Making
Steering or Networking
This article probes into how regions organize themselves to deal effectively with the Europe 2020 reform program. More specifically, it maps governance structures of regional policy-making and implementation of Europe 2020 and explains variation in these structures between policy domains and policy stages. The empirical focus is Flanders as this Belgian region possesses substantial legislative and executive autonomy and is therefore highly affect…
The Effects of Active Learning Environments
Simulations have become popular teaching tools in political science and EU studies curricula. Proponents point out that simulations match with constructivist theories of learning. They argue that students will better understand EU decision making when they combine theoretical knowledge about negotiation theory with knowledge about how the EU works and with the experience of negotiating as if they were EU actors. This article aims to validate the …
Domestic European Union Coordination and Interest Group Mobilization in Three Member States
One conclusion in the literature on domestic European Union (EU) coordination is that the formal institutional properties of countries—devolved versus centralized or unitary—affect the nature of coordination practices. Basically, the view has emerged that domestic coordination is a largely bureaucratic process in which political control mechanisms remain relatively weak. Instead of only looking at public authorities and their formal networks, thi…
Democratic legitimacy in multilevel political systems
Federal Dynamics
Federal Dynamics: Continuity, Change, and the Varieties of Federalism." West European Politics, 37(5), pp. 1192–1193
How Europe Shapes the Nature of the Belgian Federation
This paper disentangles the impact of various dimensions of European integration on different aspects of the Belgian federal polity. We discern two opposite trends. While the institutional embeddedness of Belgium as an EU member state results in domestic centralizing tendencies and co-operative political practices, economic integration stimulates political pressures for regional autonomy, contributing to further divergence and hollowing out of th…
Small States in the European Union
Going Beyond Paradiplomacy? Adding Historical Institutionalism to Account for Regional Foreign Policy Competences
This article argues that the literature on paradiplomacy has been very successful in conceptualizing the external activities of regions and in making descriptive inventories of paradiplomatic activities and instruments. However, we also claim that it has not yet delivered satisfactory explanations for the development of regional foreign activities. The article offers a theoretical contribution to the paradiplomacy literature, suggesting that comp…
Going Beyond Paradiplomacy? Adding Historical Institutionalism to Account for Regional Foreign Policy Competences
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
The European rescue of the federal state
This article investigates the impact of European integration on the Belgian federal polity. In particular, we substantiate two propositions. First, we show that European integration stimulates Regions, Communities and central government to cooperate. Second, Europe prevents the central government level from disappearing. Europeanisation seems to have a centralising effect on some parts of the Belgian polity. In general, the constitutionally dual …
Why Denmark and Belgium Have Different Implementation Records
Statistics of the European Commission show different performances among member states regarding the implementation of European policies. In particular, this article explains why Denmark and Belgium have different records with respect to the legal or administrative transposition of European Union environmental directives. The article starts with a short overview of the implementation problematique and a presentation of the latest available statist…
Regional parliaments in the EU multilevel parliamentary system
European integration has created a multilevel political system that is dominated by executive actors. Despite the increasing competences of the European Parliament, a growing EU-awareness of national assemblies and an emerging attention of regional parliaments for EU affairs, the EU polity still lacks a sound parliamentary representation. As the EU presents itself as a representative democracy, the current set-up raises questions from the perspec…
Europeanization of Subnational Polities
This paper considers how subnational entities adapt under the pressure of European integration. In particular, the article looks at whether the combined institutional mechanisms of goodness-of-fit and mediating domestic factors offer sufficient understanding of adaptational behaviour by regions of member states. Empirical data come from the transposition of an environmental directive and an agriculture regulation in Flanders. It is argued that fo…
The revolving door in Brussels
The staff flow between the public sector and organised interests is metaphorically defined as 'revolving door'. This paper seeks to explain variation in hiring behaviour across interest organisations (IOs). Using data from the Comparative Interest Group-survey project, we show that revolving door practices do not occur systematically across IOs but that, under specific conditions, IOs are more likely to attract employees from the public sector th…
How Europe Shapes the Nature of the Belgian Federation
This paper disentangles the impact of various dimensions of European integration on different aspects of the Belgian federal polity. We discern two opposite trends. While the institutional embeddedness of Belgium as an EU member state results in domestic centralizing tendencies and co-operative political practices, economic integration stimulates political pressures for regional autonomy, contributing to further divergence and hollowing out of th…
Seizing the moment
Constitutionally, Belgium represents the most extreme case of regional entities wielding power over EU external trade policymaking. Formally, the Flemish, Walloon and Brussels regions can wield veto power over Belgian positions. Yet, only once has a Belgian region actually made use of this capacity, when Wallonia temporarily blocked the conclusion of the EU trade agreement with Canada in 2016 (CETA). We show that political actors – legislative an…
The Effects of Active Learning Environments
Simulations have become popular teaching tools in political science and EU studies curricula. Proponents point out that simulations match with constructivist theories of learning. They argue that students will better understand EU decision making when they combine theoretical knowledge about negotiation theory with knowledge about how the EU works and with the experience of negotiating as if they were EU actors. This article aims to validate the …
You'll Never Lobby Alone. Explaining the Participation of Sub‐national Authorities in the European Commission's Open Consultations
The multi‐level system of the EU (European Union) constrains the institutionalized representation of the regional tier of government. Consequently, SNAs (sub‐national authorities) seek to represent their interests through various lobbying practices, including taking part in the European Commission's open consultations. In this article, we argue that varying levels with which SNAs take part in open consultations cannot be adequately explained by r…
EU Environmental Policy‐Making in Belgium
In the literature on European integration liberal intergovernmentalism and multi–level governance are often presented as competing approaches. In this article, the value of both approaches’ claims with respect to describing the involvement of the subnational level in European policy–making is put to a test. Empirical data are drawn from the Belgian practice of preference formation and representation in the environmental policy sector. Finding tha…
Going Beyond Paradiplomacy? Adding Historical Institutionalism to Account for Regional Foreign Policy Competences
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
Going Beyond Paradiplomacy? Adding Historical Institutionalism to Account for Regional Foreign Policy Competences
This article argues that the literature on paradiplomacy has been very successful in conceptualizing the external activities of regions and in making descriptive inventories of paradiplomatic activities and instruments. However, we also claim that it has not yet delivered satisfactory explanations for the development of regional foreign activities. The article offers a theoretical contribution to the paradiplomacy literature, suggesting that comp…
Slow adapters or active players? Belgian regional parliamentarians and European affairs after Lisbon
How do members of regional parliaments engage in EU policymaking? This paper examines how and why members of the Walloon, Flemish and Brussels regional parliaments vary in their EU-contacting activities, by adapting a German survey. Belgium makes a relevant case, as the ‘in foro interno, in foro externo’ principle entitles regions to conduct foreign policy, including EU affairs in those areas they possess internal competency. Our data show that t…
Choosing channels. Intra-state and extra-state strategies of Belgian subnational authorities in response to the European Semester
Europeanization literature has found that, in general, subnational authorities prefer to target the EU indirectly via member state channels. This article tests whether these findings hold in the non-legislative domain of the European Semester. With respect to the Belgian case, the article concludes that all Belgian subnational authorities indeed primarily use the cooperative intra-state channels as a response to the domestic division of competenc…
Democratic legitimacy in multilevel political systems
Environmental interest representation in Belgium and the EU
Starting from the assumption that institutional changes have an impact on the structure and strategies of environmental interest groups, this article, first, compares the Belgian and European interest representation configurations and, second, examines whether the integration process has changed the Belgian configuration. Regarding the former, little differences are found, although the Belgian configuration shows relatively more internal involvem…
Exploring the Relationship between Federal Reform and the Representation of the People
Federal systems tend to have two venues of representation to ensure that both the people as a whole and the constituent units are represented at the federal level. While this double representation is put forward as a basic (normative) feature of federal systems, little to no empirical research has been conducted on this issue. This contribution therefore studies the representation of the people as a whole and of the constituent units in the Belgi…
Domestic European Union Coordination and Interest Group Mobilization in Three Member States
One conclusion in the literature on domestic European Union (EU) coordination is that the formal institutional properties of countries—devolved versus centralized or unitary—affect the nature of coordination practices. Basically, the view has emerged that domestic coordination is a largely bureaucratic process in which political control mechanisms remain relatively weak. Instead of only looking at public authorities and their formal networks, thi…
The Co‐ordination of the European Union
Une “ troisième voie ” entre approches qualitative et quantitative
Au terme de ce Forum, bien des questions restent ouvertes, à la fois au niveau\nplus fondamental de l’approche qu’au niveau plus concret de la technique\net du travail empirique. Ces deux niveaux sont bien évidemment liés :\nles questions apparemment techniques, que ce soit dans l’AQQC ou les Ensembles\nFlous (EF), appellent souvent une réflexion plus fondamentale... et\nvice-versa.\nNotre propos sera tout d’abord de faire le point sur les atouts…
Understanding bias better
European Union (EU) agencies are known to have a high risk of capture by regulated business interests.To limit this risk, agencies try to involve a diverse set of stakeholders.One way of doing so, is to install advisory councils (ACs): permanent bodies with a fixed number of stakeholders selected by the agency.Current scholarship has mainly studied whether stakeholders' access to ACs is biased towards business interests.However, it remains unknow…
Beyond descriptions and good practices
The introduction of the symposium sets out a possible research agenda on producing systematic empirical evidence of the effect of active learning tools to the discipline of political science, inspired by and drawing from educational research. It discusses the core research questions of such an agenda. Do active learning environments enhance political science students’ learning outcomes? Does the introduction of active learning in political scienc…
Student Diversity in a Cross-Continental EU-Simulation Exploring Variation in Affective Learning Outcomes Among Political Science Students
Current research struggles to illuminate significant learning outcomes of role-play simulations, such as Model European Union (MEU) and Model United Nations (MUN). In this study, we introduce a model for measuring simulation effects, distinguishing between cognitive, affective and regulative learning outcomes. In particular, we introduce the MISS-model (Motivation, Interest and Self-efficacy in Simulations), which enables measuring affective lear…
Enduring Federal Consensus
Environmental interest representation in Belgium and the EU
Starting from the assumption that institutional changes have an impact on the structure and strategies of environmental interest groups, this article, first, compares the Belgian and European interest representation configurations and, second, examines whether the integration process has changed the Belgian configuration. Regarding the former, little differences are found, although the Belgian configuration shows relatively more internal involvem…
How Multi-level are IGCs? The Belgian Federation and the 2000 Intergovernmental Conference
Why Denmark and Belgium Have Different Implementation Records
Statistics of the European Commission show different performances among member states regarding the implementation of European policies. In particular, this article explains why Denmark and Belgium have different records with respect to the legal or administrative transposition of European Union environmental directives. The article starts with a short overview of the implementation problematique and a presentation of the latest available statist…
Enduring Federal Consensus
Une “ troisième voie ” entre approches qualitative et quantitative
Au terme de ce Forum, bien des questions restent ouvertes, à la fois au niveau\nplus fondamental de l’approche qu’au niveau plus concret de la technique\net du travail empirique. Ces deux niveaux sont bien évidemment liés :\nles questions apparemment techniques, que ce soit dans l’AQQC ou les Ensembles\nFlous (EF), appellent souvent une réflexion plus fondamentale... et\nvice-versa.\nNotre propos sera tout d’abord de faire le point sur les atouts…
EU Environmental Policy‐Making in Belgium
In the literature on European integration liberal intergovernmentalism and multi–level governance are often presented as competing approaches. In this article, the value of both approaches’ claims with respect to describing the involvement of the subnational level in European policy–making is put to a test. Empirical data are drawn from the Belgian practice of preference formation and representation in the environmental policy sector. Finding tha…
The European rescue of the federal state
This article investigates the impact of European integration on the Belgian federal polity. In particular, we substantiate two propositions. First, we show that European integration stimulates Regions, Communities and central government to cooperate. Second, Europe prevents the central government level from disappearing. Europeanisation seems to have a centralising effect on some parts of the Belgian polity. In general, the constitutionally dual …
Europeanization of Subnational Polities
This paper considers how subnational entities adapt under the pressure of European integration. In particular, the article looks at whether the combined institutional mechanisms of goodness-of-fit and mediating domestic factors offer sufficient understanding of adaptational behaviour by regions of member states. Empirical data come from the transposition of an environmental directive and an agriculture regulation in Flanders. It is argued that fo…
The Co‐ordination of the European Union
Going Beyond Paradiplomacy? Adding Historical Institutionalism to Account for Regional Foreign Policy Competences
This article argues that the literature on paradiplomacy has been very successful in conceptualizing the external activities of regions and in making descriptive inventories of paradiplomatic activities and instruments. However, we also claim that it has not yet delivered satisfactory explanations for the development of regional foreign activities. The article offers a theoretical contribution to the paradiplomacy literature, suggesting that comp…
Going Beyond Paradiplomacy? Adding Historical Institutionalism to Account for Regional Foreign Policy Competences
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
Small States in the European Union
How Europe Shapes the Nature of the Belgian Federation
This paper disentangles the impact of various dimensions of European integration on different aspects of the Belgian federal polity. We discern two opposite trends. While the institutional embeddedness of Belgium as an EU member state results in domestic centralizing tendencies and co-operative political practices, economic integration stimulates political pressures for regional autonomy, contributing to further divergence and hollowing out of th…
Domestic European Union Coordination and Interest Group Mobilization in Three Member States
One conclusion in the literature on domestic European Union (EU) coordination is that the formal institutional properties of countries—devolved versus centralized or unitary—affect the nature of coordination practices. Basically, the view has emerged that domestic coordination is a largely bureaucratic process in which political control mechanisms remain relatively weak. Instead of only looking at public authorities and their formal networks, thi…
Democratic legitimacy in multilevel political systems
Federal Dynamics
Federal Dynamics: Continuity, Change, and the Varieties of Federalism." West European Politics, 37(5), pp. 1192–1193
Steering or Networking
This article probes into how regions organize themselves to deal effectively with the Europe 2020 reform program. More specifically, it maps governance structures of regional policy-making and implementation of Europe 2020 and explains variation in these structures between policy domains and policy stages. The empirical focus is Flanders as this Belgian region possesses substantial legislative and executive autonomy and is therefore highly affect…
The Effects of Active Learning Environments
Simulations have become popular teaching tools in political science and EU studies curricula. Proponents point out that simulations match with constructivist theories of learning. They argue that students will better understand EU decision making when they combine theoretical knowledge about negotiation theory with knowledge about how the EU works and with the experience of negotiating as if they were EU actors. This article aims to validate the …
You'll Never Lobby Alone. Explaining the Participation of Sub‐national Authorities in the European Commission's Open Consultations
The multi‐level system of the EU (European Union) constrains the institutionalized representation of the regional tier of government. Consequently, SNAs (sub‐national authorities) seek to represent their interests through various lobbying practices, including taking part in the European Commission's open consultations. In this article, we argue that varying levels with which SNAs take part in open consultations cannot be adequately explained by r…
Complex Political Decision-Making
Student Diversity in a Cross-Continental EU-Simulation Exploring Variation in Affective Learning Outcomes Among Political Science Students
Current research struggles to illuminate significant learning outcomes of role-play simulations, such as Model European Union (MEU) and Model United Nations (MUN). In this study, we introduce a model for measuring simulation effects, distinguishing between cognitive, affective and regulative learning outcomes. In particular, we introduce the MISS-model (Motivation, Interest and Self-efficacy in Simulations), which enables measuring affective lear…
Regional parliaments in the EU multilevel parliamentary system
European integration has created a multilevel political system that is dominated by executive actors. Despite the increasing competences of the European Parliament, a growing EU-awareness of national assemblies and an emerging attention of regional parliaments for EU affairs, the EU polity still lacks a sound parliamentary representation. As the EU presents itself as a representative democracy, the current set-up raises questions from the perspec…
Choosing channels. Intra-state and extra-state strategies of Belgian subnational authorities in response to the European Semester
Europeanization literature has found that, in general, subnational authorities prefer to target the EU indirectly via member state channels. This article tests whether these findings hold in the non-legislative domain of the European Semester. With respect to the Belgian case, the article concludes that all Belgian subnational authorities indeed primarily use the cooperative intra-state channels as a response to the domestic division of competenc…
Beyond descriptions and good practices
The introduction of the symposium sets out a possible research agenda on producing systematic empirical evidence of the effect of active learning tools to the discipline of political science, inspired by and drawing from educational research. It discusses the core research questions of such an agenda. Do active learning environments enhance political science students’ learning outcomes? Does the introduction of active learning in political scienc…
Explaining self-efficacy development in an authentic higher education learning context of role-play simulations
Political science (28 works) · Politics (20 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (18 works) · European union (16 works) · Public Administration (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · International trade (13 works)