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This article explores the politics of policy change by focusing on agenda setting through the lens of the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA), which has been travelling to ever-larger geographies. We aim to produce signposts for future case studies of policy change by bringing together insights from MSA and New Institutionalism. We ask: Which institutions should we focus on when studying agenda-setting politics in different geographies? How do these institutions shape MSA's structural elements – problem stream, policy stream, political stream, policy windows, and policy entrepreneur? In answering these questions, we hope to weave not only formal but also informal institutions into MSA's backbone more tightly. We bring together diverse case studies that are sufficiently abstract and whose findings travel easily across other institutional contexts. We revisit the structural elements of MSA and illustrate how key formal and informal rules structure the politics in these structural elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decades saw the expansion of the geography of comparative welfare state research beyond the three worlds embracing a heterogeneous set of mainly middle‐income countries. In response, two leading state‐of‐the‐art tools for measuring welfare states through social rights, Social Citizenship Indicators Program (SCIP) and Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED), integrated many new countries into their datasets. Comparative welfare state research has yet to address the extent to which these measurement tools originally developed for measuring classic welfare states work equally well for measuring welfare states beyond the three worlds. In this article, we explore a number of challenges these datasets face in measuring these new cases. These challenges, we believe, stem from a set of key institutional characteristics widely prevalent in these welfare states. These characteristics are overt and hidden conditionalities, unconventional instruments, informal practices, nature of changes in statutory pension age and labour market characteristics of the representative worker. We propose a set of solutions to refine these datasets for comparing all cases, old and new. We conclude by drawing lessons for comparative research focusing not only on welfare states beyond the three worlds but also on the three worlds themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern Europe has seen remarkable turnarounds in female labour force participation (FLFP) over the past four decades. In Turkey, however, scores of women have yet to join the labour force. To address this 'Turkish puzzle', we present comparative data on women's work in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece (SE-4) and Turkey. Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we identify the factors behind rising FLFP in Southern Europe to explore the prospects for a steeper rise of FLFP in Turkey. We reveal two causal pathways to rising FLFP: (i) left party rule, or (ii) combinations of higher levels of take-up of early education and care, higher levels of tertiary education among women and larger size of service sector employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is widespread consensus in the comparative welfare state literature that the welfare state can be best conceptualized in terms of social rights of citizenship. The Social Citizenship Indicator Program (SCIP) and the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED), which rely on operational definitions of quantified legislated social rights, constitute centrepieces of this thriving research. As leading state-of-the-art tools for capturing welfare stateness, these two datasets are being widely used. Scholars in general have also been treating them as interchangeable measurement tools. Upon closer inspection, however, we discover that the two datasets point to contrasting images of welfare state change for certain countries and time periods. This article aims to contribute to the scholarly exchange on the validity problem in measuring welfare state generosity. The exchange has hitherto been confined to problems of dataset choice with respect to only replacement rates, a set of key indicators included in both datasets. However, there are 11 key non-replacement rate indicators SCIP and CWED have in common, whose convergent validity has yet to be questioned. We thus explore the convergent validity of these non-replacement rate indicators across the two datasets. We then replicate the two leading composite indexes (Decommodification Index (DI) and Benefit Generosity Index (BGI)) constructed on the basis of these indicators. We identify problems of invalidity manifested in discrepancies in non-replacement rate indicator scores and index values for DI and BGI. We show how these discrepancies could lead to contrasting assessments of welfare state change. We then identify a set of potential sources for these discrepancies, most of which are related to different operationalizations of similar concepts. We conclude by calling for more dialogue among developers of SCIP and CWED to further clarify their conceptual and operational points of departure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is Turkey's approach to EU's European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) more cautious now after a period of active cooperation in their shared neighbourhood? How can such reversal be explained despite parallels in the interests of the EU and Turkey in their shared neighbourhood and complementarities in their policy instruments used to advance these interests? This article evaluates the explanatory power of rational choice, sociological and historical institutionalism in comparative politics in addressing these questions. On the basis of qualitative case study evidence including interviews with key stakeholders, it concludes that historical institutionalism, with its emphasis on context, interaction and temporality, is better equipped than rational choice and sociological institutionalisms at accounting for Turkey's changing foreign policy choices concerning the ENP and the UfM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]