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We examine the individual-level characteristics and political and economic conditions associated with political discussion. To build our model of discursive engagement, we draw on existing research on political participation as well as our own theoretical reasoning. Our data cover two million individuals in twenty-eight European countries over forty-five years, and we employ a little-used approach to multilevel analysis that distinguishes variations in engagement attributable to cross-country differences from those stemming from within-country changes. Our primary findings reveal that, within countries, citizens are more likely to talk about politics at election time, when there are more electorally competitive political parties, during periods of recession, when unionization levels are higher, and when racial and ethnic diversity is greater. Across countries, political discussion is more likely where elections are ongoing and in countries with lower levels of income inequality and corruption. We also find that men and the higher-educated are more likely to discuss politics, as are those who are middle aged or employed. Our approach is wide-ranging, but it is also deliberately correlational. Future observational and experimental studies might expand on and identify the causal underpinnings of the associations we establish here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some consider populist parties to be a threat to liberal democracy, others have argued that populist parties may positively affect the quality of democracy by increasing political participation of citizens. This supposition, however, has hitherto not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests. The voter turnout literature, moreover, has primarily focused on stable institutional and party system characteristics – ignoring more dynamic determinants of voter turnout related to party competition. To fill this double gap in the literature, we examine the effect of populist parties, both left and right, on aggregate-level turnout in Western and Eastern European parliamentary elections. Based on a dataset on 315 elections in 31 European democracies since 1970s, we find that turnout is higher when populist parties are represented in parliament prior to an election in Eastern Europe, but not in Western Europe. These findings further our understanding of the relationship between populism, political participation and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does joining a governing coalition as a junior partner influence a party's subsequent electoral success? We argue that joining a multiparty cabinet as a junior partner considerably hurts a party's future electoral prospects as junior partners cannot enact much of what they promised before the election and since they cannot sufficiently differentiate themselves from their larger coalition partner. To test our theoretical expectations comparatively and over time, we have compiled a comprehensive data set on the electoral performance of 307 political parties running in 219 elections in twenty-eight European countries from 1972 to 2017. To shed light on the underlying causal mechanisms, we additionally provide empirical evidence from an illustrative case study showing that the inability to deliver on election promises and a large degree of misperception among voters are important drivers of junior coalition parties' electoral losses. Our findings provide important insights into the relationship between coalition governments and electoral competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using new scaling methods and a comprehensive public opinion dataset, we develop the first survey-based time-series–cross-sectional measures of policy ideology in European mass publics. Our dataset covers 27 countries and 36 years and contains nearly 2.7 million survey responses to 109 unique issue questions. Estimating an ordinal group-level IRT model in each of four issue domains, we obtain biennial estimates of the absolute economic conservatism, relative economic conservatism, social conservatism, and immigration conservatism of men and women in three age categories in each country. Aggregating the group-level estimates yields estimates of the average conservatism in national publics in each biennium between 1981–82 and 2015–16. The four measures exhibit contrasting cross-sectional cleavages and distinct temporal dynamics, illustrating the multidimensionality of mass ideology in Europe. Subjecting our measures to a series of validation tests, we show that the constructs they measure are distinct and substantively important and that they perform as well as or better than one-dimensional proxies for mass conservatism (left–right self-placement and median voter scores). We foresee many uses for these scores by scholars of public opinion, electoral behavior, representation, and policy feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how the question of democracy divided the post-war European socialist parties. Contrary to conventional historiographical wisdom, it demonstrates that the socialist conversion to the classic liberal model of elections, parliaments and constitutions was hardly a self-evident or uncontested affair. To this end, it focuses on two sets of parties that adopted widely divergent attitudes to parliamentary democracy. On the one side, the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party and the French Socialist Party considered free and fair elections, sovereign parliaments and constitutional checks and balances sacrosanct. On the other, the Italian Socialist Party and the Polish Socialist Party believed that elected parliaments did not necessarily reflect the popular will, meaning that constitutional boundaries could justifiably be overstepped in the struggle for socialism. With this pan-European approach, the article not only brings to light the many parallels across the two emerging geopolitical blocs but also suggests that socialist attitudes towards the concept of militant democracy were less straightforward than historians have assumed. In fact, it shows that the experience of dictatorship and war had seen the four parties move in opposite directions on the question of 'democratic self-defence' or the use of anti-democratic means against (supposed) enemies of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on Raymond Rifflet, a Belgian proponent of socialism and European federalism and the Director-General and Deputy Director-General of the European Commission's Directorate-General of Social Affairs (DG V). Particular emphasis is given to his position on and initiatives in the development of a European social policy within the context of the development of the European Economic Community (CEE). Rifflet's demotion to Deputy Director-General in 1974 is also mentioned.

The article discusses the relation of gender to the 1968 student protests in Europe. Topics include the significance of public speech in the protests, rallies by women in relation to abortion laws and social critiques in Eastern Europe, and the role of women in strikes in Poland in relation to working class struggles.

We analyze morality policy change from the perspective of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to test whether reform dynamics in this policy sector follow a distinct pattern. First, we propose a new measurement scheme capturing changes in the intensity of morality policy output. Second, we demonstrate that morality policy change is strongly punctuated. Finally, and most importantly, we show that the degree of policy punctuations varies between different domains of morality policy, but not according to institutional features operating on the country level, supporting existing PET research, which has discovered similar domain-specific dynamics in changes of public spending. Specifically, punctuations are particularly pronounced in areas of manifest morality policy, that is, policies characterized by strong value conflicts, whereas punctuations are less pronounced for latent morality policies, that is, policies in which other dimensions of conflict are present next to the value dimension. Significant differences in reform dynamics are neither discerned for countries belonging to the religious or the secular world, nor for countries with majoritarian or consensual democracies. The analysis relies on an original dataset capturing legislative changes in five manifest (abortion, euthanasia, prostitution, pornography, and homosexuality), and three latent morality policies (drugs, gambling, and handguns) in 19 European countries (1960-2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When democracies ban political parties, one of the central issues that usually emerges in both public and academic debate concerns the effects of proscription. Some argue that proscription may lead to radicalisation, a growth of militancy and readiness to use violence. Others argue that, in the long run, banning parties may damage the foundations of a democratic polity as the ban may be interpreted as a silent weakening of democratic rights in the state and therefore a failure of democracy itself. However, and notwithstanding its centrality for the conduct of democratic politics, the impact of party bans on party system development has remained mostly under-researched. Trying to address this lacuna, and employing a new dataset of banned parties in Europe between 1945 and 2015, the study reported in this article compares the effects of party ban regulation on party system stability in three different arenas: electoral, parliamentary and governmental. In particular, the impact of party proscription on electoral volatility, fragmentation and closure is examined in three countries: Turkey, Germany and Spain. Using examples both at national and regional (e.g., Basque Country, Navarre, Saxony) levels, and making use of survey data when available, it is found that the banning of a relevant political party not only increases volatility and reduces fragmentation, but also alters the existing structure of competition at the time of government formation. Likewise, the empirical analysis also suggests a number of alternative hypotheses (i.e., organisational succession, electoral system) when trying to explain why the outcomes of some cases within each country deviate from theoretical expectations. Finally, the article also examines the phenomenon of 'non-banning' and how the failure of attempts to ban political parties might affect the development of a party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction scrutinizes the numerous studies that deal with the memory of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and it identifies two major fault lines. The first concerns the level of analysis. A large body of work favours top-down approaches and focuses on the institutions and policies that govern the communist past. Conversely, another set of studies opts for bottom-up approaches that address the social representations and practices related to that past. The second fault line concerns the conception of the presence of the communist past, regarded either as a permanent legacy from the past (primordialist perspective) or as an instrument mobilized for political aims (instrumentalist perspective). In order to bridge these divides, the authors advocate approaching memories through the public policy instruments that are designed and implemented to deal with the past. Adhering to the notion that policy instruments are not purely technical and neutral devices but in fact carry interpretations of the ‘problem’ to be solved, this approach offers insights into what constrains social practices linked to the communist past, and how individuals put up with these constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The break-up of the Cold War order, the Eastwards expansion of the European Union into former socialist countries and the more recent economic and humanitarian crises have led to the emergence of new symbolic borders and the reconfiguration of spatial hierarchies within Europe. The article shows how metageographical categories of "Europe," "East," and "West" and underlying classificatory logics are not only circulated in geopolitical discourses but can be appropriated by ordinary citizens in their everyday life. Using the Russian -- Estonian border as a case study, the article examines the recursive negotiations of Europe's East -- West border by people living in the borderland as a response to the geopolitical changes. It highlights three border narratives: the narrative of becoming peripheral/Eastern, the narrative of becoming European, and a narrative contesting the East -- West hierarchy by associating the East and one's own identity with positive things. On both sides of the border, the status as a new periphery does not create unity across the border but rather results in multiple and competing border narratives, in which "Europe" functions as an unstable referent in relation to which one's position is marked out. This "nested peripheralisation" at Europe's new margins reflects power relations and uneven local experiences of transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Europe, technocratic governments have become a popular topic of debate. Commentators have condemned them as a ‘suspension of democracy’ or even as ‘the end of democracy as we know it’. However, no academic analysis has assessed whether technocratic governments are indeed undemocratic. This article is intended to fill this gap by assessing technocratic governments’ democratic credentials. It compares them to party governments along the main dimensions of party democracy, including representation, deliberation, constitutionality and legitimacy. It concludes that technocratic governments in Europe are not undemocratic per se, but are still a worrying phenomenon insofar as they reveal shortcomings that remain hidden in normal party governments: a loosening of delegation and accountability ties between voters, parties and cabinets; increasing external pressures on domestic political actors; and the weakening of partisan ideology-based politics. The article will add further elements to reinforce the already vast literature on the crisis of – especially party – democracy in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reprint of the article "Trade Winds," by David W. Brady, regarding globalization and the political instability in the U.S. and Europe. Topics discussed include the instability of electoral results in the U.S. between 1992 and 2014, the electoral politics and parliamentary democracy in Great Britain, and generation of political instability due to the change of the world economy between 1850 and 1890.

Do parties learn from or emulate parties in other political systems? This research develops the argument that parties are more likely to employ the heuristic of learning from and emulating foreign successful (incumbent) parties. Spatial-econometric analyses of parties’ election policies from several established democracies robustly confirm that political parties respond to left-right policy positions of foreign political parties that have recently governed. By showing that parties respond to these foreign incumbent parties, this work has significant implications for our understanding of party competition. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature on public policy diffusion, as we suggest that political parties are important vehicles through which public policies diffuse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Parties often tailor their campaign message differently to different groups of voters with the goal of appealing to a broader electorate with diverse preferences and thereby winning their votes. I argue that the strategy helps a party win votes if it can convince diverse groups of voters that the party is ideologically closer to their preferred positions. Using election data from nine Western European democracies, I first show that parties gain votes when they appeal broadly. Analysis of individual-level survey data suggests that voters perceive broadly appealing parties as ideologically closer to their own positions, a finding that identifies a plausible mechanism behind the aggregate positive effect of this strategy on party election performance. These findings not only help explain the behavior of some European parties, but they may also offer a potential recipe for electoral success in multiparty democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Civic Culture by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba is a path-breaking work within political science. Although The Civic Culture still provides inspiration for studies, new approaches to political culture have identified alternative citizen orientations that may be replacing the value orientations identified at the time. The more recent studies have examined specific attitudes such as political trust, party identification, and political efficacy or types of political subcultures such as critical citizens, stealth citizens or disenchanted citizens. These studies provide insights into the developments of specific attitudinal orientations, but do not discern the mix of political orientations among the population, which The Civic Culture suggests is central for democratic stability. The implications of these changes for the composition of political cultures are therefore still unknown. In this article, we, as suggested by The Civic Culture, examine the composition of political cultures to shed new light on the differences in political culture between old and new democracies. We use the fourth round of the European Social Survey to examine this question in 25 European democracies. The results suggest that there is a need to revise some of the main conclusions of The Civic Culture when it comes to the connection between political culture and democratic stability. Although civic citizens are widespread in old democracies, there is no single political culture sustaining a stable democracy. We also find considerable heterogeneity in the composition of the political cultures within old and new democracies alike, suggesting that there may be considerable variation in the cultural conditions for creating a stable democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information is provided for the 2015 conference "Europeanization of Foreign Policies. International Socialization in Intergovernmental Policy Fields and the Example of the EPC/CSFP (European Political Cooperation/Common Foreign and Security Policy)," part of the DFG-Project (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) "To speak with one voice? Europeanization in Intergovernmental Policy Areas: The example of the European Political Cooperation (EPC) 1970-1981," held at Hamburg University. Topics include the 1974-75 Cyprus crisis, German foreign policy toward the Middle East, and the the "Europeanization" of National Radio.

The article discusses the European political left and social democracy from the 1970s through the mid 2010s, including the impact of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis on the left. An overview of neoliberalism in Europe, including in regard to the blame received by European social democratic parties for the Sovereign Debt Crisis is provided. An overview of the role that economic conditions in Europe play in politics on the continent, including regard to British Labor Party chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown's praise of the British economy, is also provided.

There is an assumption in much of the electoral engineering literature that domestic episodes of electoral system choice occur in a vacuum, isolated from international influences. Yet this assumption remains largely untested, despite the comparative focus of much of that literature. This article focuses on part of this gap by considering two electoral mechanisms that seek to limit party system fragmentation under proportional representation - low district magnitudes and high electoral thresholds - and shows that the mechanisms have spread across many European countries during the post-1945 period. Analyses reveal that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of peer countries have made similar choices within the last two or three years. This effect is robust to various model specifications and to the inclusion of multiple controls. The article also offers some qualitative evidence from case studies and parliamentary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the huge number of possible seat distributions following a general election in a multiparty parliamentary democracy, there are far fewer classes of seat distribution sharing important strategic features. We define an exclusive and exhaustive partition of the universe of theoretically possible n-party systems into five basic classes, the understanding of which facilitates more fruitful modeling of legislative politics, including government formation. Having defined a partition of legislative party systems and elaborated logical implications of this partition, we classify the population of postwar European legislatures. We show empirically that many of these are close to critical boundary conditions, so that stochastic processes involved in any legislative election could easily flip the resulting legislature from one type to another. This is of more than hypothetical interest, since we also show that important political outcomes differ systematically between the classes of party systems--outcomes that include duration of government formation negotiations, type of coalition cabinet that forms, and stability of the resulting government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Sino-Soviet dispute had considerably weakened Moscow's supremacy in world communism, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was keen on restoring control and unity. But he soon discovered that his meaning of unity did not exactly coincide with what others had in mind. West European communists were striving to accommodate social principles to domestic conditions so, as to be able to accede to government. They advocated for each party's right to make their own decisions independently and alsofor an enlargement of world communism beyond its initial sectarianism. Their cause was vulnerable though as internationalism was still an important part of their political identity, apart from the fact that Moscow did subsidize most of them. In the second half of the 1960s though, a new voice joined those asking for reform in world communism: Nicolae Ceau?escu, a leader of the Romanian Communist Party. Interested to promote his country's autonomy in the Soviet bloc, Ceaujescu had no reason to support Moscow's efforts to regain control. Instead, Ceau$escu developed close relations with West European Communist parties and assumed some of their ideological tenets, trying tofend off Soviet domination. This way, although he never was a Eurocommunist, Ceau$escu did play an important part in the ideological debates that were later to produce Eurocommunism, defending West European arguments in front of Moscow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the huge number of possible seat distributions following a general election in a multiparty parliamentary democracy, there are far fewer classes of seat distribution sharing important strategic features. We define an exclusive and exhaustive partition of the universe of theoretically possible n-party systems into five basic classes, the understanding of which facilitates more fruitful modeling of legislative politics, including government formation. Having defined a partition of legislative party systems and elaborated logical implications of this partition, we classify the population of postwar European legislatures. We show empirically that many of these are close to critical boundary conditions, so that stochastic processes involved in any legislative election could easily flip the resulting legislature from one type to another. This is of more than hypothetical interest, since we also show that important political outcomes differ systematically between the classes of party systems-outcomes that include duration of government formation negotiations, type of coalition cabinet that forms, and stability of the resulting government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the extent to which opposition parties engage in wedge-issue competition. The literature on wedge-issue competition has exclusively focused on the two-party system in the United States, arguing that wedge issues are the domain of opposition parties. This study argues that within multiparty systems opposition status is a necessary but not sufficient condition for wedge-issue competition. Since parties within multiparty systems compete in the wake of past and dawn of future coalition negotiations, parties that are regularly part of a coalition are not likely to exploit wedge issues as it could potentially jeopardize relationships with future coalition partners. Conversely, it is less risky for parties that have never been part of a government coalition to mobilize wedge issues. These theoretical propositions are empirically substantiated by examining the attention given to the European integration issue between 1984 and 2010 within 14 Western European countries, utilizing pooled time-series regressions. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Sarah Palin in the US, populist leaders claim to offer more power to 'the people'. However, most scholars argue that populism is in fact a democratic pathology, because it seeks to build a political system devoid of the rule of law. While it is true that populism maintains an ambivalent relationship with liberal democracy, little attention has been paid to the legitimacy of the questions raised by populist forces. Drawing on the work of Robert Dahl, I argue that current manifestations of populism are offering specific responses to two dilemmas that do not have a clear democratic solution: the boundary problem (how to define the people?) and the limits of self-government (how to control the controllers?). My article shows that populist forces are posing legitimate questions about the current state of democracy in Europe and the Americas, although their solutions tend to be more controversial than helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research documents a wage penalty for mothers compared to childless women. We demonstrate there is also an occupational status penalty to motherhood. Interrogating supply- and demand-side explanations of the motherhood penalty from the life course perspective, we formulate and test original hypotheses about the short-term and long-run career implications of parity-specific births. We analyze longitudinal data from the European Community and Household Panel for 13 European countries and eight time points between 1994 and 2001. Our fixed-effects models show that status losses for a first birth are not just short-term but accumulate over the career. The timing of a birth in a woman’s life course matters only for older women, who experience a significant penalty to third births. Although the personal strategies that women use to minimize the career costs of motherhood (e.g., having only one child) prove ineffective, our cross-national evidence shows that public policies are linked to the motherhood penalty in occupational status. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, two unexplored trends in European electoral politics are highlighted. Using newly collected data the article tracks the politicisation of corruption in electoral campaigns from 1981 to 2011, an electoral strategy that has been increasing over time in most European countries. It then empirically tests two aspects of this campaign strategy. First, what are the factors that are systematically associated with a party’s decision to politicise corruption? Second, what are the electoral effects in terms of relative vote share for parties that politicise corruption? Using an original data-set that employs multi-level data (parties nested in countries) the results demonstrate first that politicisation of corruption occurs systematically more often among established parties from the main opposition, new parties and parties on the political right, and occurs as a function of country-level corruption, district magnitude and public party financing. Second, it is found that the main opposition and new parties that use such a campaign strategy make significant electoral gains relative to the previous election compared to parties that do not politicise corruption. Yet gains are offset in low-corruption countries. The findings demonstrate salient implications for research on party systems, corruption studies and democratic legitimacy, among other areas of investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the similarities and differences between multiculturalism and interculturalism, with particular reference to the impact of globalisation and changing patterns of diversity. It reflects briefly on the origins of multiculturalism-largely from a European perspective-with its focus on 'race' and the socio-economic analysis that accompanied it. The article suggests that while multiculturalism was right to continue to focus on inequalities, it failed to adapt to super-diversity and the multifaceted aspects of difference and 'otherness', including those based on disability, age and gender. Further, while multiculturalism became rooted in intra-national differences, between minority and majority populations, an intercultural approach is now necessary to support the changing patterns of national identity and respond to the recent challenge posed by the growth of far-right and popular extremist parties (PEPs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which discusses the development of the European Union (EU) from 1945 through the 1980s, contending the process of European integration was Machiavellian in nature. The role that the creation of the EU played in delegating political power in Europe to unelected institutions, including in regard to the status of democracy in EU countries, is discussed. The constitutional impact of the EU on its member states, including in regard to public debt levels, is also discussed.

This article reviews Peter Mair’s argument on the failure of political parties and the subsequent failure of representative democracy in Europe. It develops a conceptual framework to test the validity of Mair’s argument against competing interpretations of the development of representative democracy. It identifies three ideal typical models of representative democracy that seem to have succeeded each other over time: cleavage-based democracy, competitive democracy, and audience democracy. The article proposes specific empirical hypotheses for political parties and voters in each of these periods and provides empirical evidence to test the validity of these hypotheses. It concludes with a discussion of the results, evaluating whether the changes that occurred indicate failure of representative democracy or rather the emergence of a different form of representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims at ‘bringing ideology back in’ for the analysis of party politics and, more specifically, for the discussion of the delicate dyad ‘responsiveness vs. responsibility’. The article starts with an analytical discussion on the concept of ideology and on how to study its adaptation and change. It then reviews the ideological shifts that have characterised welfare state discourse and politics since the 1980s: first, the neoliberal turn and its attack on the old social democratic consensus; then the gradual emergence of a new ideological perspective that is called here liberal neo-welfarism. The main argument is that ideology plays an important role in framing partisan strategies in the delicate and increasingly prominent field of social politics. Ideological change reflects not only exogenous socio-economic transformations but also endogenous and relatively autonomous epistemic dynamics that bridge intellectual and partisan arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Parliamentary regimes offer the unique opportunity for opposition parties to react to foreign policy by proposing no-confidence motions (NCMs). The threat of an NCM bringing down the government may be enough to induce pacific behavior by the executive. Yet, this simplistic characterization neglects the possible electoral motivations of opportunistic opposition parties. I develop a theory that opposition parties respond to involvement in international conflict by proposing NCMs as a tool to influence voters’ opinions with an eye toward the next election. I develop two expectations based on policy disagreement and issue ownership that I use to explain the electorally motivated decision to propose NCMs following conflict. I test these expectations with a dataset of 14 European parliamentary democracies from 1970 to 2001. The empirical evidence suggests that the partisanship of both the government and opposition parties interact to create varying electoral incentives to propose NCMs based on issue ownership. Right-wing opposition parties are more likely to challenge than left-wing parties, and this effect is exacerbated when facing left-wing governments. This study has important implications that underpin a number of theories of the domestic causes of international conflict as well as implications for the study of party strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A large body of research has claimed that budget making by multiparty governments constitutes a “common pool resource” (CPR) problem that leads them to engage in higher levels of spending than single-party governments and, further, that this upwards fiscal pressure increases with the number of parties in the coalition. We offer a significant modification of the conventional wisdom. Drawing on recent developments in the literature on coalition governance, as well as research on fiscal institutions, we argue that budgetary rules can mitigate the CPR logic provided that they (1) reduce the influence of individual parties in the budget process and (2) generate endogenous incentives to resist spending demands by coalition partners. Our empirical evaluation, based on spending patterns in 15 European democracies over nearly 40 years, provides clear support for this contention. Restrictive budgetary procedures can eliminate the expansionary fiscal pressures associated with growing coalition size. Our conclusions suggest that there is room for addressing contemporary concerns over the size of the public sector in multiparty democracies through appropriate reforms to fiscal institutions, and they also have implications for debates about the merits of “proportional” and “majoritarian” models of democracy that are, at least in part, characterized by the difference between coalition and single-party governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Squatting empty properties for living or to develop public activities has lasted in European cities for more than three decades. Although local and national contexts differ significantly, there are also some general trends and patterns that deserve careful attention. When squatting occasionally appears in public debates, controversy is generated and many gaps open between academic, social and political perceptions. In this article I use evidence from several European cities to argue that the squatters' movement has produced an original impact in urban politics. The main feature of this impact has been to generate a relatively wide autonomous and mainly non-institutional mode of citizen participation, protest and self-management. How has this been possible? Which are the specific contributions made by this urban movement? These are questions that both scholars and activists continuously claim to be relevant, so that this research attempts to offer some general answers based on detailed comparisons and experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union has undergone a severe crisis since 2007. This crisis is not only of a financial, economic and public debt matter but in fact is it a severe crisis of European integration. The time of urgent rescue measures, however, seems to have been overcome but any mistaken decision might potentially revive the crisis. Under the circumstances of this uncertainty, the article compares the current crisis with other crises in the long history of European integration crises and discusses what is new about it and which patterns have been repeated. Based on three crisis narratives (crises swirling down, periodical crises and constructive crises) the author presents a typology of crises of European integration and thereby, identifies four necessary conditions for constructive crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish economic crisis, evidenced after the outbreak of the great housing bubble has left on the table a series of questions, which the author states the purpose of understanding the depth of the problem that led Europe push Spain to the reform in 2011 of its economic constitutionalism. This reform followed the path set by the previous reviews the constitutions faced in Poland, Switzerland and Germany. But the public accounts of certain southern states of the European Union have come to constitute a problem for the economic and financial policy across the EU, whose solution has become an opportunity to advance their political construction, situation in which the Constitutionalists should make their best efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between political conservatism and left-right orientation was examined in 15 Western European and 13 former communist Central and Eastern European countries using the data from European Social Survey Round 3 (N = 46,103) and Round 4 (N = 50,601). Cross-culturally validated values were used to measure the two potential aspects of conservatism: resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. Both of these aspects were positively related to right-wing orientation in Western countries. In the former communist countries, the relationships were positive, negative, and nonexistent; they differed between the countries and varied between 2006 and 2008. The results indicate that conservatism can be related to left-wing or right-wing orientation depending on the cultural, political, and economic situation of the society in question. The results also show that despite the shared communist past, former communist Central and Eastern Europe is a diverse region that should be treated as such also in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This intervention discusses Perry Anderson's treatment of the European Union in The New Old World, tracing its origins in his intellectual and political history, and the ambivalences it reveals in his relationship to Marxism and to left politics. It identifies some of the key themes in a specifically Marxist analysis of the EU and explores the political possibilities implied by the present crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. The regionalization of public policy is one of the most remarkable transformations European states have undergone since the 1970s. Through an examination of this particular development, the article explores theories of interregional competition in two very different cases: education policy in France, a decentralized unitary state where regional governments are entrusted with limited policy competences in this field, and Germany, a federal state where regions have exclusive responsibility over secondary education. The paper shows that, in both cases, interregional competition lends itself neither to a race to the bottom nor a race to the top, but rather to a race to the middle. Regional governments aim, in fact, to demonstrate that they adopt similar policies to other regions so as to avoid being blamed by both the electorate and the central state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What determines how ‘European’ a party’s manifesto is? This article examines the salience of European issues in national parties’ Euromanifestos during the 1979–2004 period. I argue that domestic politics, including voter, party, and party system factors, influence the European content of a party’s Euromanifesto. Using data from the Euromanifestos Project for 14 member states, I find that the differential emphasis on European issues in the national party system, intra-party dissent on European integration, voter ambivalence on membership of the European Union, and party type all influence the salience of European issues in a party’s manifesto. These findings have important implications for understanding both how parties use manifestos to manipulate the political agenda and the dimensions of contestation in elections to the European Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While basic differences between countries are losing importance in today world, we see regional differences inside the same borders draw the most attention. Regional instabilities arise not only in less-developed and developing countries but it's also one of the main problems argued and policies are made for in developed countries. Since its foundation, both in structure of its unity and of member countries, EU has faced the problem of regional differences. To tackle the negative consequences of regional differences and to build economic integration, European Union has formed "EU Regional Policy" In Turkey-EU relations, continued since 1963, by reducing regional differences to the lowest level, Turkey will cross an important obstacle and will put an important step forward on the way to become regional power center. In this article, EU's Regional Policies and operation of Development Agencies which have been working in EU member countries since 1950s and their infrastructure in Turkey are discussed. On the other hand, related EU-Turkey issues have been investigated and quality of change in regional policy approach and tools has been considered regarding European Union policies and performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differences in the intra-party balance of power explain variation in social democratic responses to the economic crisis of the late 1970s. This article evidences this claim by analysing the case of welfare state retrenchment by social democratic parties. Welfare state retrenchment is electorally risky for social democrats and often contrary to their principles. Therefore cases of welfare state retrenchment by social democrats provide an excellent case study of the difficult trade-offs parties have to make between office, policy and vote pay-offs. The article claims that leadership-dominated parties advance office-seeking strategies and are therefore responsive to economic conditions and public opinion. Conversely, activist-dominated parties advance policy-seeking strategies and therefore support traditional social democratic policy platforms or seek more radical solutions. By comparing seven social democratic parties (Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK) between 1980 and 2005, this article explains variation in when social democrats introduced welfare state retrenchment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How best to govern reproduction is the subject of heated controversies and policies on abortion and reproductive technologies present strong variations. Through fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, the article explores the interplay of institutional settings, Christian Democratic politics, women’s movement, and Christian opposition in France and Switzerland since the 1970s. If little evidence is found for any institutional impact on policies regarding abortion and reproductive technologies, the analysis confirms the growing influence of the medical profession over reproductive issues and shows that the success of the women’s movement has been fluctuating while prolife opposition seems to have gradually lost influence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Government alternation is a fundamental component of any efficient democracy and it could be seen both as an empirical proof (in democracy there is government alternation) or as an ideal pattern of competition (in democracy there should be government alternation). However, to what extent do democracies work according to such an ideal pattern? A Government Turnover Index (GTI) is provided to answer this question with respect to 524 governments in 22 European contemporary democracies since World War II. As suggested by the data and by the GTI, there is not necessarily a link between democratic competition and government alternation, although some democracies are more likely to experience it. It is therefore necessary to direct the analysis towards some systemic factors which may favour or hinder government alternation (such as the party system structure and the institutional framework). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the process of party constitutionalization in post-war Europe. It explores the temporal patterns of party constitutionalization and reveals their connection with moments of fundamental institutional restructuring. It discusses the different modes of party constitutionalization, and addresses what these convey about the underlying conceptions of party democracy. It argues that the constitutional codification of political parties has consolidated the empirical reality of modern party government as well as its normative foundations of modern party government, thereby transforming political parties from socio-political organizations into integral units of the democratic state. Finally, it suggests that the constitutionalization of the democratic importance of political parties might reflect an attempt to legitimize their existence in the face of their weakening as agents of democratic representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on multiparty governments has started to debate how coalition partners oversee each other’s policymaking. Due to the divergence of preferences among partners and the difficulty of sanctioning members of other parties, cabinet members attempt to monitor each other in policymaking activities through the use of junior ministers. By analyzing multiple countries’ governments across decades, this article contributes to the current debate about government oversight by defining the circumstances under which parties in coalition governments choose to use junior ministers to keep tabs on ministers from coalition partners. Specifically, we contend that their use depends on the power dynamics within a coalition, as well as the institutional structures in the broader political environment.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]