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This paper identifies possible micro-mechanisms for the operation of Lipset and Rokkan's freezing hypothesis and suggests that their effects do not disappear altogether with the decline of cleavage politics but are sustained by any persistent social or attitudinal divide between the electorates of different parties. A multi-level analysis of survey data from the 2004 European Election Study supports the expectation that political involvement should be consistently higher and volatility lower than otherwise expected among citizens who are predisposed to support particular parties because of their enduring attitudinal and social characteristics. This paper argues that this fact powerfully biases the choices of established parties towards appealing to those citizens who vote in a way that maintains existing political divides among groups in the electorate. This provides a new explanation of why the mobilisation of enduring social and attitudinal divides in the electorate makes party systems reflect past divides even when the conflicts that gave rise to them have lost some or all political relevance, for instance, because of a shift from the national to the European electoral arena. The analysis also provides additional insights into why European elections fail to produce a European party system and why sources of political participation and interest vary across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the partisan foundations of education policies leads to ambiguous expectations with regard to the predominant cleavage structures in party competition on this topic. There is disagreement as to whether leftist or rightist parties are responsible for increasing spending on education, while others claim that educational expansion has become a consensual topic. This paper analyses the cleavage structure of party competition over the topic of educational expansion, relying on data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. It identifies political parties as ‘issue-owners’ and ‘issue-ignorers’, respectively, and finds considerable variation with regard to cleavage structures of party competition between countries and across time. One tentative conclusion from the analysis is that policy legacies play an important role in shaping cleavage structures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous studies suggest, and common wisdom holds, that government participation is detrimental for new parties. This paper argues that the opposite is true. Drawing on a large-N analysis (111 parties in 16 countries) in combination with two case studies, it demonstrates that new parties generally benefit organisationally from supporting or entering a government coalition. Compared to established parties, new parties have the advantage that their leadership is more able to allocate effectively the spoils of office, and can change still malleable rudimentary party structures so as to respond to intra-organisational demands, as well as the functional demands of holding office. The authors conclude by setting their finding in wider perspective and elaborate on its implications for contemporary West European politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholarly research on the emergence of anew politicsagenda of democratic regeneration, driven by the electoral growth of challenger parties, has focused the analysis primarily at the national and supranational levels, leaving the subnational level underexplored. This article contributes to filling this gap through a comparative analysis of party competition in peripheral regions of Italy, Spain and Great Britain during the European Great Recession. UsingRegional Manifestos Projectdata, it shows that the regionalisation of the state and the presence of a centre‒periphery cleavage represent no obstacle when it comes to responding to a change of preferences among the electorate. The transformation of political spaces in the aftermath of the Great Recession is happening as much at the regional as at the national level. At the same time, the political relevance of challenger parties and the diversity of regional responses contradict the alleged secondary nature of regional dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Populism has been on the rise for some time in Europe now, and its rise has been one of the key concerns of Peter Mair. He has linked it to the increasing erosion of the representative function of European party systems. The spectre that haunted him was ‘partyless democracy’, a democratic regime where parties had lost their representative function, which opened the door for unmediated populist protest. While largely sharing his interpretation of the overall structural trends giving rise to the populist challenges in Western Europe, the article is critical of the static character of his assessment. It suggests that there are three forms of ‘protest populism’, all of which may eventually end up transforming the West European party systems in the name of the new structuring conflicts that characterise contemporary European societies. In addition, it proposes to extend the scope of Peter’s argument to the less established democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on a particular aspect dear to theories of democracy in general and theories of representation in particular: the tension between responsiveness and responsibility affecting political parties in modern, liberal democracies. In doing so, it engages with Peter Mair’s intellectual passion for this topic, which he developed over the years and intensively worked on until his premature death in 2011. He argued that this tension became ever more apparent, putting the very functioning and legitimacy of democratic government under great pressure. This contribution goes back in time, to the very beginning of the modern state, and argues that already the nascent parties and party systems were affected by the tension between responsiveness and responsibility. It then offers a synopsis, organised in a series of ‘pictures’ or ‘frames’ of the historical parcours along which this tension has impacted on the development of political parties. The article also presents and summarises the collective effort undertaken by a number of scholars, coming together to honour Peter Mair’s work, to shed further theoretical and empirical light on this fundamental tension. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates different dynamics in government formation in 16 Western and 10 Central-Eastern European democracies during the post-war period. The study provides the first systematic comparison of determinants of participation in government in the East and the West. Applying mixed effects logit regression models while taking into account missing values in the dataset, the results demonstrate substantial differences between the two regions and show that most of the existing findings about participation in government are driven by Western democracies. Policy-based factors are relevant in Western countries, but no indications were found for these factors in Central-East European democracies where membership of government is mainly the result of electoral gains and losses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the links between populist radical right parties and their voters regarding European integration in 11 European countries. It does so by using data from the 2008 European Social Survey and the 2006 UNC-Chapel Hill Expert Data Base on political parties and European integration. In addition to mapping the Eurosceptic orientations of political parties and their voters, the article examines the degree to which attitudes towards the EU and voting for populist radical parties are connected to each other. The results lend support to the hypothesis that most populist radical right parties have managed to establish links with their voters regarding European integration. The analysis also shows that links between populist radical right parties and their voters tend to be stronger for those parties that adopt more extreme negative positions towards European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature on institutional innovation in European governance has been dominated by an inward-looking focus on the European integration process. However, in the context of a highly integrated and interdependent world, it is not possible to understand the evolution of European governance without taking into account developments in the international institutional environment. This article aims to contribute to the study of the interaction between global and European modes of governance by examining the impact of EU's engagement with the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), and its predecessor the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) on the institutions of European accounting regulation. Following an analysis of the politics of international accounting harmonisation, it is demonstrated that EU's decisions to adopt the standards produced by the IASB, and to establish a new, differentiated European accounting regulatory mechanism, were driven by its desire to bolster European influence in the context of the IASC/IASB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on the politicisation of the EU should consider its consociational nature. Comparing the EU to Switzerland and Belgium, this article discusses S. Hix's and S. Bartolini's contrasting views on politicisation. S. Hix's recipe for bipolar politicisation is based on some incorrect assumptions. It is not obvious that the EU is evolving towards more Left-Right polarisation. Even if this were the case, the nature of the EU implies that compromises are indispensable. Therefore, Hix's suggestions would not suffice to clarify political choice, and Euroscepticism would not be reduced. The consociational nature of the EU also makes less credible S. Bartolini's fears of possible negative consequences for governability. The politicisation of constitutive issues can even help to integrate Eurosceptic segments of public opinion. The authors suggest a middle way regarding EU politicisation based on lessons from consociational polities, and the coupling of a system of 'negotiation democracy' with mechanisms of direct popular participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the sub-field of cleavage research - the sub-field within which this special issue fits. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the sub-field and characterises it as (with some shining exceptions) being prone to weak theorising, loose logic, and/or shaky methodology (sometimes all three at once). These three themes are pursued in three separate sections of the article, after which the contents of the special issue are themselves assessed in the same terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both critical citizens and governance are attracting increasing interest in political science. Strangely enough, however, the two strands of research are rarely combined. This article sheds light on the relation between governance and political criticism by focusing on Europe. The article discusses and examines whether the level of political criticism expressed by a state's citizenry correlates with or even affects the quality of governance. In contrast to the conventional 'translation' of criticism as discontentment, this article scrutinises 'normative critical attentiveness', which is explained in detail (data: International Social Survey Program 2004, module: Citizenship). Legitimate and effective governance, as measured by the World Bank indices, correlates positively with critical attentiveness: states with citizenries that regard attentiveness as a civic duty provide more legitimate and effective governance than states with less attentive citizenries. These correlations remain significant when controlled for economic development. The cause of direction is not uniform, but must be differentiated for different characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the notion that the policies and politics of states and nations constitute distinct worlds or clusters. We begin by examining the concept of clustering as it has emerged in the literature on policy regimes and families of nations. We then address a series of empirical questions: whether distinct worlds persist in an era of policy convergence and globalisation, whether policy antecedents cluster in the same ways as policy outcomes and whether the enlargement of the EU has led to an increase in the number of worlds constituting the wider European polity. Our main conclusions are that country clustering is, if anything, more pronounced than in the past, that it is, in large part, structurally determined and that the EU now contains a quite distinct post-Communist family of nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology lags considerably behind political science in its comparative research on European societies, but enough material now exists to enable us to talk broadly about the major changes that have taken place since the 1970s across western Europe, and also to some extent central and eastern Europe too. Attention is here concentrated on those social trends that seem particularly salient for the study of politics, with occupational structure as the starting point. Although this dominant theme of classical sociology has tended to be neglected by much recent research in favour of such areas as deviance, gender and the formation of identities, working life remains fundamental to social organisation and in particular to politics. In fact, the theme of gender is easily accessed through consideration of changes in occupations, and considerable attention will be devoted to it here. This leads in turn to consideration of the family, then on to other aspects of demography including immigration and cultural diversity. This relates clearly to the final theme that will be discussed: the state of religion in Europe. In the conclusions some of the political implications of these changes are brought together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conclusion evaluates the causal models set out in the introduction to this collection and considers whether, in the light of the 2003 accession referendums, they require modification. On the basis of this examination we argue that the results of EU accession referendums appear to demonstrate that the key factors determining the results are the consequences of: (a) underlying mass attitudes in combination with (b) cues provided by elites. The variance in the levels of turnout in the EU accession referendums appears to be predominantly the consequence of: (a) the general levels of electoral turnout specific to countries in combination with (b) the level of contestation of the European issue. Consideration is then given to the generalisability of the models to other referendums, on both European and non-European issues. Finally, we look ahead to whether these countries are likely to repeat the experience of direct democracy when determining their attitudes towards other European issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This survey briefly examines the EU accession process for the countries included in this collection and considers the distinctive features of this set of referendums, particularly the comparatively high levels of Yes vote and low levels of turnout. It argues that, although they represent a distinctive sub-type of European referendum, they can be used as a basis to draw at least tentative comparative and theoretical conclusions. Consequently, it then posits causal models that both provide an analytical framework for this collection and, more broadly, attempt to explain the results and turnout in these and, potentially, other (European) referendums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the process of institutional development in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Requirements for joining the European Union; Replication of Western European institutions; Establishment of democratic forms of government and democracy in CEE countries.

Examines the vulnerability of post-communist states of Europe. Description on the typology of post-communist transition; Disturbing factors on post-communist politics; Analysis on the role of civil society on democratic transitions.