Search

The resurgence of the far-right in European politics has caused alarm. Political observers have looked on anxiously while far-right parties in Austria and Italy have participated in the governing coalitions of those countries. In 2002, Jean Marie Le Pen stunned the world with his advancement into the second round of the French Presidential election. Why is the radical-right so strong right now? In this paper, I have examined this question and offered some insight into how far-right parties rose to prominence in France, Italy, Austria, and Belgium. I hypothesize that voters who supported far-right parties in the last parliamentary elections have less trust in both domestic and supranational political institutions, follow politics less closely, are more likely to feel alienated, and are more likely to feel that immigrants take away jobs than their counterparts who supported mainstream parties. My findings reveal that these hypotheses were accurate in France and Belgium, but did not correctly depict the sentiments of Italian far-right voters. This finding suggests that far-right parties are perhaps not as similar as some people believe, but are characterized by different platforms that appeal to different bases cross-nationally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Varieties of Capitalism literature would benefit from more coherence and a model of firm preferences will allow the many moving parts of this branch of scholarship to more convincingly hang together. I offer a critical review that calls for a mapping scheme that would orient and redirect a broad swath of the literature. This review will include scholarship that positions the firm as its core unit of analysis to trace and model the vertical and horizontal junctures of strategic interaction. Local, state, national, and supranational institutions and the dense webs that tether them together comprise the vertical junctures. The cross-firm intersections comprise the mainstay of the horizontal junctures. Importing this simple, compact vertical and horizontal mapping scheme braids the panoply of writing on the firm into four strands of patterned activity. I propose a typological model of firm preferences in (1) social and (2) competition policy arenas, which comports rather snuggly with much of the extant writings with in the VOC branch within these two policy spheres. This model hones in on variation in firm level lobbying strategies, recruitment, frame, and changing repertoire of resources throughout European integration since 1986 (Single European Act). This mapping scheme and preference model also has purchase on questions of agenda setting, malleable veto points, and the configurations of corporatism and pluralism at the EU level. The paper will include discussion of a down-stream enterprise - likely my dissertation - that would chart the intersection of national and EU social and competitive policy spheres through the lens of business interest intermediation since 1986. Some regression analysis will hopefully be presented, but my primary desire is feedback on the precision of my critical literature review and tweaking of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do courts affect the way in which federalism works? And, do different courts (or systems of constitutional review) affect the functioning of federalism differently? I argue that politicians anticipate the likelihood of a judicial veto in order to determine whether compliance or defection from the federal arrangement is more beneficial. To the extent that one system of constitutional review may make it more difficult for politicians to anticipate court rulings than another, it is reasonable to expect that politicians will strategize differently in one and another system. The paper compares the case of Spain, Belgium and Canada. I argue that the European system of concentrated constitutional adjudication makes the predictability of the Court’s behavior more difficult than in the Canadian decentralized model of judicial review. This accounts for the higher degree of litigation on federalism in Spain compared to Canada, where federal conflict tends to be resolved in the political arena. Low levels of litigation in Belgium are explained in terms of the balance between the incentives provided by courts and the party system. My arguments are tested with author’s own data set on the pattern of litigation in the three countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasingly important feature of the administrative politics is the delegation of government functions to quasi autonomous non-governmental organizations (QUANGOs). Research on QUANGOs identifies differences in how QUANGOs are overseen in comparison with other administrative agencies within the same country and across countries. However, there has been little research aimed identifying patterns of these differences or at building a theory to explain them. Following, Huber and Shipan (2002) and Tsebelis (2002) I argue that single veto player structures enable governments to control the terms of the contracts with QUANGOs, giving them strong ex post control over QUANGO behavior and reducing the need for ex ante oversight of QUANGOs. In contrast, ideological divisions within governments increase the incentives to build ex ante oversight mechanisms into QUANGO related legislation in that country. I examine references to oversight mechanisms in over 200 environmental laws from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and the UK. This paper shows that patterns of overseeing QUANGOs are consistent with theories of delegation and oversight established in the broader literature on political institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper focuses on the socio-anthropological mechanisms that drive the working-class youth (which means young people from the bottom of social hierarchy) to fields of study that are situated at the bottom of school hierarchy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops and evaluates empirically a signaling model on the use of time constraining rules in legislative bargaining. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers current parliamentary proposals on constitutional reform in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium from historical institutional and social choice perspectives. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responses of political parties and other actors to sustained EU adaptive pressures during the CEE countries? accession negotiations with Brussels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature political participation of immigrants is one dimension of their political integration: "The more one politically participates the greater the integration in this democratic domain” (Tillie 2004:3). I consider another dimension of immigrants' political integration: the behavior of citizens following the incorporation of immigrants in the electoral process. Based on the case of Belgium I explore the relationship between participation of immigrants in the 2006 local elections and change in citizens’ electoral support for anti-immigrant parties between the 2003 and 2007 national elections as a proxy of political integration of immigrants in the local community. I expect this relationship to be conditioned by the cultural dimension of citizenship: a volk type of citizenship in Flanders but not in Wallonia. .x000d..x000d.I conduct a diachronic and ecological study at the municipality/district level. I evaluate the effect of immigrants’ participation in local elections on their political integration by means of a statistical model that incorporates demographic, political, and economic variables. I use visual tools to identify structural patterns, and spatial tools of analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In certain countries, the constitutional courts holds the authority to ban political parties. This authority makes these courts de facto players in the party politics. Yet only under certain circumstances they are invited to play, especially when the government, political parties, elites or leaders fails to achieve or decides not to pursue their goals through conventional party politics. This process also displays the alliances between judicial and political elites and how they form. This article comparatively investigates of the recent bans on extremist parties in Turkey, Spain and Belgium to see under which conditions constitutional courts act as legitimate players in game of party politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conceptualize and analyze the causes of an emerging politics of identity as distinct from the classic right and supplanting the politics of interests using data from France and Belgium. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]