We hypothesize that decisions to constrain government revenue may constitute an attractive strategy, especially to right-wing governments, when pursuing a preference for welfare state retrenchment. Whereas programmatic retrenchment in social policy programs imposes concentrated losses in return for diffuse gains, the distributive profile of systemic retrenchment via tax cuts might entail concentrated benefits for specified groups financed by diffuse losses for larger groups in a distant future. Consequently, the electorate may accept or even desire tax cuts and associated initiatives to curb government income relative to retrenchment measures of services and benefits. Our empirical analysis supports such theoretical propositions. In an extensive comparative analysis of all tax laws adopted by four Danish governments, we find clear partisan differences. In an in-depth study of the tax policy of the latest right-wing government, we moreover empirically support the causality of the argument as the government did in fact try to curb specific taxes in order to constrain the spending side of the welfare state in an indirect manner.

This article examines one widespread but widely overlooked informal party practice to access state resources indirectly: the ‘taxing’ of MP salaries, which obliges candidates who win elected office on a party ticket to regularly donate a fixed share of their private income to party coffers. Linking Duverger’s classical approach on party organization that stresses the importance of party–society relations with the more recent, highly influential cartel party theory that argues that parties are shaped by their relationship with the state, we specify factors that shape the acceptability of this informal practice and thus parties’ capacity to extract rent from their MPs. The analysis of an original dataset covering parties across a wide range of advanced democracies reveals that demanding salary transfers from national MPs to their parties are not only more common in leftist parties as argued by Duverger but also in systems in which the penetration of the state apparatus by political parties is intense as argued by the cartel party approach. Linking the two perspectives further reveals that ideological differences between parties shape their relative capacity to collect higher payments from MPs in systems where parties and the state are less intertwined.

Since the new millennium, scholars have acclaimed a vigorous global justice movement (GJM). Many accounts have stressed the tolerant identities of those involved in this movement, and/or the movement's horizontal decision-making structure. Consequently, formal organizations are often excluded from analysis, precluding the chance to assess systematically whether they are involved in social movement modes of coordination. The article uses deductive block modelling and inferential statistics on survey data of a broad sample of 208 western European global justice organizations to uncover their modes of coordination. I find that many organizations commonly considered integral to the GJM demonstrate organizational and coalitional modes of coordination, while formal organizations often engage in coalitional work. Organizations most densely networked, including some formal organizations, do have social movement modes of coordination: they identify with the GJM, display continuity in attendance at international protests/events, and have contentious relations with political institutions. In addition, I raise methodological considerations for future studies of social movement modes of coordination.

Coalition theories have produced arguments about the importance of party positions for participation in government coalitions, but have not connected the existing government institutions (in particular agenda setting) with the coalition government that will be formed. This article presents a veto players’ approach to coalition formation, which pushes the logic of non-cooperative game-theoretic models one step further: we argue that policy positions play a significant role in coalition formation because governments in parliamentary systems control the agenda of the policymaking process. As a result, the institutions that regulate this policymaking process affect coalition formation. In particular, positional advantages that a government may have (central policy position of formateur, fewer parties, and small policy distances among coalition partners) will become more necessary as a government has fewer institutional agenda setting advantages at its disposal. The empirical tests presented in this paper corroborate these expectations by explicitly accounting for the conditional effects of policy positions and institutional agenda setting rules on one another in a set of multilevel logit models.

The role played by legislative committees in parliamentary democracies is directly related to some of their properties. In particular cohesion, namely similarity of committee members’ preferences, is the most important non-institutional feature that influences committee working. This non-institutional aspect, on its turn, is directly affected by the institutional environment. In this paper we hypothesize that electoral rules, committee agenda setting power and MP’s level of knowledge of the committee policy domain influence the committee cohesiveness by affecting the utility that a MP derives from a purposeful choice of the legislative committee she belongs to. To test this proposition we focus on the last 30 years of Italian legislative activity using data from co-sponsorship to infer MPs’ preferences in a multidimensional policy space. During this period Italy has experienced drastic changes in its political system. These changeable circumstances give a strong comparative flavor to the present study. Statistical analysis at individual level confirms our hypotheses.

In this paper, we propose a new measure of party system nationalization based on a minimalist definition of the phenomenon. A perfectly nationalized party system is a party system with only national parties or, in other words, without sub-national parties. Instead of the homogeneity of parties’ vote shares or the number of parties throughout the country, our measure captures the aspirations of parties to be national whose proxy is the proportion of districts (weighted by seats) that a party runs a candidate. The measure is compared with existing indicators through a longitudinal analysis of 256 elections in 18 Western European countries from 1945 to 1998.

This paper argues that Honneth's theory of recognition opens promising venues for exploring the role of emotion in politics, particularly when issues of injustice are at stake. While endorsing Honneth's view that ‘feelings of injustice’ are an important source for intelligibility of injustice, and that disadvantaged individuals need to build a ‘shared interpretative framework’ in struggles for recognition, this article contends that a more nuanced account of discursive justification is required to deal with dissent and moral disagreement. As a response to this problem, we suggest that Honneth's approach of subjective reaction to injury as violation of conditions to practical identity can be brought together with notions of discursive justification in the Habermasian fashion. Through an empirically based analysis – using storytelling of deaf people gathered in two virtual environments: (a) the website of the main Brazilian organization for deaf persons (FENEIS), and (b) Orkut, an online social network – this paper evinces that subjects not only articulate feelings of injustice or claims for recognition in everyday experience, but also usually engage in interpretation, judgment and justification of such claims. Results show that Honneth's theory of recognition, when articulated with a notion of discursive justification, can better equip scholars concerned with practices that aim to overcome injustice.

The European Union (EU) has been through many institutional transformations since the start of the integration project in the 1950s. While much of the literature has focussed on the more dramatic changes, less attention has been paid to instances of more limited institutional change. This article maps out and then accounts for the limitedness of the EU's departure from its original ‘federal blindness’ vis-à-vis regional actors. Theories of institutional change would lead one to expect that, as integration and regionalization heightened, endogenous pressures for change would trigger greater reform than that observed. Using a novel formula to estimate the EU's aggregate regionalization levels over time, the article demonstrates that it peaked between 1986 and 2003 but has since dropped to a level below that of the 1950s. Such a finding not only corrects a widespread assumption about regionalization levels in the European polity, but also provides an explanation for the pace and scope of the observed change as well as predictions about its future sources.

Political scientists have started to focus on ‘practice’ as the smallest unit of analysis. Following a broader turn in the social sciences, the practice focus provides multiple advantages, including better conceptualizations of short-term social change, getting closer to the everyday activities of those speaking, writing and doing politics, appropriate conceptualization of agency-structure dynamics, or forms of analysis resonating with other communities than scholarly ones. This contribution asks what the methodological implications of the practice turn are. It is argued that the practice focus does not only imply a certain ‘theory’ but also a certain methodology. I advance the term praxiography to speak about the forms of analysis produced by practice researchers. I discuss key guidelines of praxiographic research on two levels: first, general research strategies that provide empirical access points, second, guidelines for data collection in the frame of participant observation, expert interviews, and document analysis. I conclude in arguing that although praxiography is context driven, and hence requires to be tailored to the research problem, it is vital to reflect on the methodological repertoire of praxiographic research.

To what extent and in what way does European integration fuel state restructuring? This is a long-standing but still not a fully answered question. While the theoretical literature suggests a positive link between the two, previous empirical studies have reached contrasting conclusions. The article offers an alternative testing of the proposition, centred on the role of party strategies as a causal mechanism, analysed across space and time. On the cross-sectional axis, it focusses on parties in Flanders and Wallonia (Belgium), Lombardy and Sicily (Italy), Catalonia and Andalusia (Spain), and Scotland and Wales (United Kingdom). On the cross-temporal axis, it focuses on four critical junctures connecting integration and state restructuring. It analyses the degree to which ‘Europe’ has been strategically used in connection to state restructuring and which conditions have been necessary and/or sufficient to that outcome. The analysis has been conducted on the basis of a Qualitative Comparative Analysis methodology. Five main results emerge: (1) overall, parties have generally exploited ‘Europe’ in connection with state restructuring to a limited extent only but in a few cases exploitation has been very intense and intimately linked to strategic turning points; (2) ‘Europe’ has overwhelmingly been used to support state restructuring; (3) the most intense use has been made by regional parties with a secessionist position and positive attitude to the EU; (4) ‘use of Europe’ is a product of a complex conjunctural effect of several conditions; (5) it has increased over time but is not a linear product of integration, a sharp drop can be observed between the two most recent time points. These findings show that European integration can indeed exercise causal influence upon state restructuring via party strategies but that this is highly contingent on the complex interaction of multiple factors.

World politics is no longer a matter of executive multilateralism and technocratic expert decisions. What we see instead is the politicization of international institutions – a twofold process of growing resistance to and the more intensive utilization of these institutions. After providing evidence for this claim, this article develops propositions on the effects of politicization of world politics on the quality of decision making and the content of policies on both the international and national level. On the one hand, the politicization of international institutions arguably heralds a reflexive stage of global governance. The increased participation of societal actors leads to a new mode of decision making in world politics, which includes a notion of global common goods in conjunction with elements of public deliberation. By the same token, increased politicization of international institutions contradicts lamentations about the hollowing-out of national democracies and shows that political participation is in fact partly emigrating to the international level. While politicization has the inherent potential for initiating the democratization of international institutions and making new types of global policies possible, there are on the other hand several dangers associated to this process. First, it may perpetuate existing inequalities between North and South in terms of representation on the global level. Second, the politicization of world politics puts pressure on national democracy, since it moves attention away from national political matters and skews national policies towards universalist positions. Moreover, it arguably provokes the constitution of a new political cleavage, cosmopolitanism vs. communitarianism, which may possibly restructure politics in the 21st century to a large extent. These propositions on the effects of politicization will be developed with the help of empirical illustrations. However, they will not be systematically tested – the purpose of this contribution is to elaborate the analytical potential of a new concept and identify broad trends.

According to quantitative studies, oil seems the only natural resource that is robustly linked to civil war onset. However, recent debates on the nexus of oil and internal conflict have neglected the fact that there are a number of peaceful rentier oil states in existence. Few efforts have been made to explain why some oil-exporting countries have experienced civil war while others have not. We thus address this puzzle, by arguing that civil war risks depend on the specific conditions of oil production and how they come to structure state–society relations. Specifically, we expect that states that are either highly dependent on oil or who have problematic relations with oil regions are prone to civil war. However, these risks will be mitigated either when democratic institutions can manage conflicts peacefully or when abundant oil revenues can be spent in such a way as to buy peace. We test this conditional argument by comparing 39 net oil exporters, using a (crisp-set) Qualitative Comparative Analysis – a methodology particularly suited to test conditional relationships in medium-N samples. Our results largely confirm our conditional hypotheses. Conditions of oil production are ambiguous, and particular combinations thus explain the onset of civil war. Specifically, we find that high abundance is sufficient to ensure peace, while two distinct pathways lead to civil war: the combination of high dependence and low abundance, as well as the overlap of ethnic exclusion and oil reserves in non-abundant and non-democratic oil states.

A growing field of discursive institutionalism has argued for the importance of ideas and discourse in policy changes. The aim of the study is to analyse framing effects empirically by examining how, and to what extent, competing frames can shape public opinion on the implementation of a specific policy change. The case study focuses on the administration of social assistance in Finland. Results indicate that the framing of ideas shapes public opinion. Analyses show that some types of frames are more effective than others. To be successful, a politician must simplify the issue and appeal to moral sentiments rather than present too many difficult ‘factual’ viewpoints. Our study also emphasizes that even frames that succeed in shaping popular opinion may fail if powerful political actors oppose reform. Therefore, we argue that the interplay between the ‘old’ power resource approach and the ‘new’ ideational approach should be taken into account when explaining institutional changes.

Globalization pressures result in a new ideological conflict among Europeans. We use detailed items from the Eurobarometer survey on issues of immigration and European integration that measure the ideological perspective underpinning positions toward the EU. This provides a fine-grained analysis of the ideologies underlying the poles of the new globalization-centered conflict line, which we define as cosmopolitan and communitarian. Our results show that, next to socio-demographic characteristics, subjective measurements have a considerable additional power in explaining the divide among Europeans along the communitarian–cosmopolitan dimension. Subjective deprivation, evaluation of globalization as a threat, and (sub)national and supranational identities play an important role in dividing Europeans into groups of winners and losers of globalization in both Western and Central and Eastern European countries. At the country level, the national degree of globalization is associated positively with the communitarian pole and negatively with the cosmopolitan pole in all EU countries.

Media coverage of elections in Europe and North America has increasingly focused on the campaign as a game rather than a policy debate. This is often explained by the changes in media pressures. It may also reflect the narrowing of policy space between left and right and the comparative prosperity enjoyed in Europe and North America. But the relevance of policy varies. The global economic crisis might have led to an increased interest in policy among voters and focus on it by media. Ireland experienced both extremes of boom and crisis between the late 1990s and 2011. The Irish case allows us to test the impact of the crisis on media framing of elections. This article uses original data from the three most recent national elections in Ireland, with a research design that holds other pertinent variables constant. We find empirical support for the theoretical expectation that the context of the election affects the relative focus on campaign or horserace vs. substantive policy issues.

The national identity argument holds that a shared national identity is necessary to motivate citizens in democratic societies to pursue a number of goals, especially social justice. We review the empirical evidence for and against this claim, looking particularly at how national identities have been measured. We distinguish between studies that aim to compare the relative strength of identities cross-nationally and those that look at individual differences within one nation. We separate four dimensions of national identity: national attachment, national pride, critical vs. uncritical patriotism, and civic vs. cultural conceptions of identity. These are only weakly correlated with each other, and impact differently on support for social justice and the welfare state. Using case studies from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, we suggest that the relationship between national identity and social justice varies between societies, and that a key factor is finding an appropriate balance between the strength of such identities and their inclusiveness.

This study investigates priming effects during the global financial crisis that erupted in September 2008. Using two longitudinal data sources on public opinion dynamics in Sweden between 2007 and 2010, we find no evidence of a basic priming hypothesis. Drawing upon the distinction between accessibility and applicability mechanisms, however, additional analysis indicates that priming of economic considerations was moderated by citizens’ attributions of responsibility for current economic developments. These results support the notion of priming as a two-step process, whereby heavy news coverage of the financial crisis increases the accessibility of economic considerations among the audience, but whether these considerations are used in government approval assessments depends on their perceived applicability as well.

In recent years, deliberative democracy has moved from a philosophical ideal into an empirical theory with numerous experiments testing the theoretical assumptions. Despite the wealth of evidence on the potential for deliberation, scholars have remained hesitant to test the theoretical premises under rather more adverse circumstances. This article, in contrast, tries to push deliberative scholarship to its edge by focusing on the viability of citizen deliberation in deeply divided societies. Our research questions are whether contact between citizens of competing segments undermines the potential for deliberation, and under which institutional conditions this is so. Based on a deliberative experiment in Belgium, in which we varied the group composition and the decision-making rule, we argue that decision rules are strong predictors of deliberative quality, but more importantly that the confrontation between citizens from both sides of the divide does not undermine the quality of deliberation. On the contrary even, our results indicate that the quality of intergroup deliberation is higher than that of intragroup deliberation, no matter what the rule.

Despite strong evidence in the wider study of electoral behaviour that party campaigning can have important effects on performance, and a large pan-European literature on populist radical right and extreme right campaigns, we know very little about the impact of the latter on electoral performance. Drawing on a range of innovative campaign-related data at the aggregate and individual level, we examine the electoral impact of the British National Party (BNP) at the 2010 British general election. Our analysis reveals that whereas the extreme right polled strongest in working class manufacturing areas, support for the extreme right was significantly higher in areas where it ran intensive local campaigns, recruited larger numbers of members, has achieved local electoral success, and where local politics has historically been dominated by the centre-left. However, we find little evidence that the extreme right has benefited electorally in areas where the English Defence League social movement had previously demonstrated. Our aggregate level findings are also confirmed at the individual level after controlling for a battery of established attitudinal predictors of extreme right voting. Those contacted by the BNP campaign were significantly more likely to vote for the party, while campaigning by all other political parties was ineffective in reducing the probability of voting BNP.

The current debate on political participation is bound to a discussion about whether citizens are active or passive. This dichotomous notion is nurtured by an extensive normative debate concerning whether passivity is an asset or a threat to democracy; and it is especially manifest in studies of young people's political orientations. Drawing on this discussion, the present study goes beyond the dichotomy by keeping political interest conceptually separate from participation in order to improve our understanding of political passivity. Multivariate cluster analysis of empirical data on Swedish youth suggests that we need to consider three distinctive forms of ‘political passivity’. In the paper we present empirical evidence not only of the existence of a particular ‘standby citizen’, but also of two kinds of genuinely passive young people: unengaged and disillusioned citizens. Alongside active citizens, these people are in distinctly different categories with regard to their political behavior. This entails a new analytical framework that may be used to analyze an empirical phenomenon that has received surprisingly little attention in the literature on political participation and civic engagement.