The Rise of the Executive and the Post-Political Drift of European Public Law

Contemporary European public law is marked by the uneasy relationship between national constitutional democracies and the executive-based supranational governance of the European Union. Whereas constitutional democracy remains the dominant source of inspiration for European institutional imagination, the supranational executive has relentlessly expanded its scope and institutional culture to key policy fields at the core of national constitutional democracies. This article tracks the rise of the supranational executive by examining three relational paradigms developed between national constitutional democracies and the European Union in distinct phases of the European integration process (i.e., the complementarity paradigm in the foundational period; the competition paradigm in the transformative period; and the encroachment paradigm during the economic and financial crisis). Following this account, this article claims that the supranational executive, owing to its predominance and ethos, corrodes and gradually displaces national constitutional democracies, bestowing an increasingly post-political character to European public law. This article concludes by discussing the possibilities to reverse the current institutional trend and to realign Europe\u27s institutional reality and constitutional imaginati

Chemical source localization fusing concentration information in the presence of chemical background noise

We present the estimation of a likelihood map for the location of the source of a chemical plume dispersed under atmospheric turbulence under uniform wind conditions. The main contribution of this work is to extend previous proposals based on Bayesian inference with binary detections to the use of concentration information while at the same time being robust against the presence of background chemical noise. For that, the algorithm builds a background model with robust statistics measurements to assess the posterior probability that a given chemical concentration reading comes from the background or from a source emitting at a distance with a specific release rate. In addition, our algorithm allows multiple mobile gas sensors to be used. Ten realistic simulations and ten real data experiments are used for evaluation purposes. For the simulations, we have supposed that sensors are mounted on cars which do not have among its main tasks navigating toward the source. To collect the real dataset, a special arena with induced wind is built, and an autonomous vehicle equipped with several sensors, including a photo ionization detector (PID) for sensing chemical concentration, is used. Simulation results show that our algorithm, provides a better estimation of the source location even for a low background level that benefits the performance of binary version. The improvement is clear for the synthetic data while for real data the estimation is only slightly better, probably because our exploration arena is not able to provide uniform wind conditions. Finally, an estimation of the computational cost of the algorithmic proposal is presente

Back to Government?: The Pluralistic Deficit in the Decisionmaking Process and Before the Courts

Back to Government?: The Pluralistic Deficit in the Decisionmaking Processes and Before the Courts, Symposium. University of Trento, Italy, June 11-12, 2004

Back to Government?: The Pluralistic Deficit in the Decisionmaking Process and Before the Courts

Back to Government?: The Pluralistic Deficit in the Decisionmaking Processes and Before the Courts, Symposium. University of Trento, Italy, June 11-12, 2004

Economic and social conflicts, integration and constitutionalism in contemporary Europe. LEQS Discussion Paper No. 13/2009 November 2009

Concern for economic and social conflicts remains one of the most defining features of contemporary political and constitutional systems. This is particularly evident in Western democracies where political alignments are traditionally conceived along the left-right divide, a conflict line whose current configuration is reminiscent of the ideological cleavages associated with the 19th and 20th Century class struggles. This type of conflict (hereafter, first type conflicts), alongside playing a crucial role in the shaping of national political identities, has prominently featured in constitutional history as one of the main variables contributing to the rise of constitutional democracy