About the project
Processes of European integration have been developing in multiple and varying directions in recent decades. Countries in Europe have been developing various forms of attachment to the institutional arrangements of political and economic governance in the European Union. European integration, in short, is not and for the foreseeable future will not be a unifying and coherent process leading towards one dominant type of political unification process across countries in Europe. Slovakia and Norway are examples of countries with various degrees of integration into the EU’s political order. A comparative approach using the two country contexts as a point of departure and extending the research scope towards other country contexts in Europe and beyond provides a fertile ground for the study of differentiation and democratic governance in today’s Europe.
Outcomes
The current project addresses this issue area and seeks to establish lasting cooperation between Comenius University as the leading political science milieu in Slovakia and ARENA at the University of Oslo as a leading European center of research excellence on democratic governance in Europe. The project sets up frameworks for transfer of a successful set of best practices in managing research and teaching excellence on the PhD level in the field of democratic governance. Project activities include lectures, PhD courses and common publications as well as a guest researcher’s scheme at ARENA.
Financing
The project is co-funded by the EEA Grants and the state budget of the Slovak Republic from the EEA Scholarship Program Slovakia.
Project period: September 2015 - August 2016.
Cooperation
Project Leader is Associate Professor Jozef Bátora at the Department of Political Science, Comenius University in Bratislava.
At ARENA the project is coordinated by Professor John Erik Fossum, and other contributors include Christopher Lord, Johan P. Olsen, Jarle Trondal and Espen D. H. Olsen.