The chair works on se­lected questions of the po­lit­ical sci­ences anal­ysis of the Eu­ropean in­sti­tu­tion­al or­der. Focus points are the normative question for the basis of le­git­imacy of the Eu­ropean Union as well as the em­pirical anal­ysis of Eu­ropean governance pro­cesses. Funded by the Ini­tia­tive ProHuman­ities (“Initiative ProGeis­teswissenschaften”) of the Thyssen and VW foundations a book project address­ing “Power and Jus­tice in the Eu­ropean Union” is currently be­ing re­alized in this regard. Fur­thermore the chair carries out ba­sic research on changes of national and international po­lit­ical struc­tures, in­volving de­moc­rati­zation processes with­in nation-states as well as reconfig­urations of po­lit­ical power in inter­state spaces like the Eu­ropean Union or the world Trade Orga­ni­zation (WTO). A special focus for 2009-2011 is the inves­tigation of the syn­chron­icity of integrative and disintegrative processes.