Governments across the world increasingly rely on non-state agents for managing even the most sensitive tasks that range from running critical infrastructures to protecting citizens. While private agents frequently underperform, governments as principals tend nonetheless not to enforce delegation contracts. Why? We suggest the mechanism of institutional resilience. A preexisting set of rules shapes non-enforcement through the combination of (i) its structural misfit with the delegation contract and (ii) asymmetric interdependence that favors the agent over time. To demonstrate the plausibility of our argument, we trace the political process behind Europe’s largest military transport aircraft, the A400M. Governments delegated the development and production of this complex program to a private firm, Airbus. They layered a ‘commercial approach’ onto traditionally state-run defense industries. Yet, resilience caused these new formal rules to fail and eventually disarmed principals. Our mechanism constitutes an innovative approach by theorizing an alternative path toward dynamic continuity.

This article contests the view that the strong positive correlation between anti-immigration attitudes and far right party success necessarily constitutes evidence in support of the cultural grievance thesis. We argue that the success of far right parties depends on their ability to mobilize a coalition of interests between their core supporters, that is voters with cultural grievances over immigration and the often larger group of voters with economic grievances over immigration. Using individual level data from eight rounds of the European Social Survey, our empirical analysis shows that while cultural concerns over immigration are a stronger predictor of far right party support, those who are concerned with the impact of immigration on the economy are important to the far right in numerical terms. Taken together, our findings suggest that economic grievances over immigration remain pivotal within the context of the transnational cleavage.

Is it true that national identity increases trust, as liberal nationalists assume? Recent research has studied this side of the ‘national identity argument’ by focusing on conceptions of the content of national identity (often civic or ethnic) and their links to social, rather than political, trust. This paper argues that if we take social identity theory seriously, however, we need to complement this picture by asking how varying the strength – rather than the content – of a person’s sense of their national identity affects both their social and political trust. We break down the different dimensions of national identity, hypothesizing and empirically verifying that there are divergent links from national attachment, national pride, and national chauvinism to social and political trust. We do so with data from the US (General Social Survey) and the Netherlands (Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences ), thus expanding current knowledge of national identity and trust to a highly relevant yet neglected European case.

The effects of bicameral legislatures on government formation have attracted scholarly attention since Lijphart’s (1984) seminal contribution. Previous research found support for the ‘veto control hypothesis,’ showing that bicameralism affects coalition governments’ composition and duration. However, the effects of bicameralism on the duration of the bargaining process over government formation have yet to be explored. Our work contributes to this area of research by focusing on the impact of bicameralism on bargaining delays. We show that the duration of the bargaining process over government formation decreases at increasing levels of partisan incongruence of the two chambers, especially in those legislative assemblies in which the upper chamber plays a relevant role in the policy-making process. Such empirical evidence is in contrast with the conventional expectation according to which bicameralism should delay the government formation process, as it introduces an additional element of complexity in the bargaining environment. We test our hypothesis by using a novel data set about the partisan composition of upper and lower chambers in 12 Western and Eastern European democracies over the postwar period.

Interest groups are key intermediary actors between civil society and public officials. The EU has long emphasized the importance of interacting with representative groups that involve their members. Additionally, there is an increasing trend toward the professionalization of groups that invest in organizational capacities to efficiently provide policy expertise. Both member involvement and organizational capacity are crucial features for groups to function as transmission belts that aggregate and transfer the preferences of their members to policymakers, thus reinforcing the legitimacy and efficiency of governance systems. Yet, not all groups have these organizational attributes. This paper quantitatively examines the effects of interest groups’ investment in member involvement and organizational capacity on the level of access to EU Commission officials. The results indicate that member involvement does not pay off in terms of higher levels of access. In contrast, groups with high organizational capacities have more meetings with public officials of the Commission.

The rise in support for anti-political-establishment parties (APEp), especially since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession, has put democracy in peril. Some scholars have warned us about the negative implications the recent rise of APEp might have for the development of democracy in Western Europe. For that reason, it is important we begin to understand what generates APEp’s electoral success. Drawing on a new comparative dataset that examines all Western European democracies from 1849 until 2017, the current article attempts to provide an explanation. In particular, our analyses examine three alternative explanations put forward by the literature: economic, institutional, and sociological. Our results show that it is not economic performance but both institutional and sociological change which together can help to understand the current wave of support for APEp.

This study examines the information demands of decision-makers from across the globe in their exchanges with interest organizations. It proposes two explanatory factors that drive these information demands: democracy and development. We argue that decision-makers’ information demands vary depending on whether they hail from developed countries or developing countries, as well as the extent to which their political systems are democratically accountable. We test our expectations based on interviews with 297 decision-makers from 107 different countries who were active during transnational trade and climate change negotiations. Our findings demonstrate that decision-makers from less developed countries exhibit a higher preference for interactions with organizations that provide them with technical information. Decision-makers from democratically accountable countries, by contrast, tend to place relatively greater value on political information provided by interest groups.