Search

European economic integration has been much more successful than European political integration. This paper argues that European political integration lacks good justifying arguments. More generally, the debate over the European project lacks a clear understanding of what constitutes a good justifying argument. This paper proposes a reasonable standard of justification that all arguments in support of political integration ought to be able to satisfy. On the basis of this theory of justification, the paper considers a number of different arguments in support of a European postsovereign polity. While most euro-enthusiasts favor postsovereignty over a European superstate, this paper argues that a European superstate lacks some of the more obvious failings of a postsovereign polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western European countries differ according to the ways in which they organize local government, not least in the manner in which mayors are selected, in the mayors' statutory positions and responsibilities, and the institutional relations between the council and the mayor/executive board. The institutional arrangements have been modified in several countries. Focal question in the paper is whether the institutional reforms have resulted in a revitalization of local politics and democracy. A first measure to revitalize local politics is a separation of local political powers. In Germany, the UK, Italy, and the Netherlands powers of the council as the representation of the citizenry at the one hand, and the Mayor or the Executive Board at the other, have been separated. They now both have their more or less exclusive statutory powers, tasks and responsibilities, in some cases resulting from the introduction of directly elected mayors. Question then is, whether these policies lead to a revitalization of local politics. Secondly, in a number of Western European countries governments have introduced direct elections for the mayor's office. Despite differences between countries, in all cases the assumption is, that direct mayoral elections do make a difference and that directly elected mayors will appear to be strong leaders. Question, however is to what extent is mayoral performance affected by selection procedures and the statutory position of the mayoral office? The results of a number of comparative empirical studies will be presented in the paper. It will become clear that there are huge differences in mayoral performance. Several factors influencing that performance will be identified. The most important conclusion is that mayoral selection procedures and statutory positions do affect mayoral performance, although not as much as expected. Other factors are at stake. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interdependent duration processes are common in politics and other strategic settings. The time to one type of political event frequently depends on the time to another related event, and the time to an event for one actor often depends on the time to that same event for others. Put in a slightly different way, politics and strategic behavior generate interdependence across durations and duration interdependence across actors. We present a generalized parametric simultaneous equations model that incorporates these two kinds of interdependent duration processes and derive the corresponding full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimator based on the Weibull distribution. We show with Monte Carlo experiments that our estimator outperforms the alternatives available to those doing applied empirical research. Naive estimators that either ignore the interdependence among duration processes or treat one as exogenous to the others are badly biased when the true relationships are simultaneous ones. Two stage least squares, while consistent, is highly inefficient relative to the FIML. We illustrate these findings in a study of the determinants of government formation duration and survival in European parliamentary democracies and an analysis of the timing of position taking in the US Congress. The interdependence in these durations is substantively important and suggests strategic bargaining over governments in Europe and free-riding behavior among members of Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]