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Using party position data of European national political parties, the paper examines political party support and resistance for continued security and foreign policy integration in the European Union. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorizes that the success of European Integration thus far can largely be attributed to the ability of European political elites to limit the forces of democracy among the European citizenry; it further questions the likelihood that this 'democratic deficit' can continue to sustain.Using Comparative Manifesto data from 1945 - 2003, this research explores two primary hypotheses. The first asserts that the expansion of the EU - in size and scope - from its original five members in 1952, to the core of fifteen members in 1995, largely resulted from the ability of political elites to limit the scope of EU deliberation at the domestic level. The second hypothesis explores the possibility that the motivation for support (opposition) of the EU among citizens of Western Europe (the EU15) may be shifting from a purely economic cost-benefit analysis to a cost-benefit analysis that increasingly intertwines considerations of economic well-being with those of cultural homogeneity, and argues that such a shift will limit the degree to which elites can continue to control the reigns of integration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that previous literature has focused too narrowly on the institutional limitations to democratic responsiveness, to the neglect of the cultural-identity concerns raised in democratic theory. I provide and test a framework for conceptualizing identity, and noting its determinants, which takes into account a variety of factors previously addressed in the literature on EU support. Eurobarometer survey data is utilized in a multi-level model, allowing for the simultaneous consideration of both individual-level and state-level theories of identity formation. Identity development is found to be primarily influenced by diffuse elements of policy support and latent socialization mechanisms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents original data on the use of a mechanism for differentiated application of European legislation. It further explores the effect of such diversity accommodating procedures on EU integration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the institutional determinants of healthcare system choice in six Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks if the family and parental leave policies in a particular set of European countries have acted to accelerate the long-term slow-moving trend among men in these countries toward support for feminism regarding the work-family nexus. I develop and test the theory that those policies aimed at increasing men's "non-traditional" experiences with child care and house-keeping have steered more men toward support for feminism than would be the case absent these policies. In this case, men's support for feminism largely depends on education, ideology, occupational status and other variables comprising the more stable, slower-moving "ideological" or philosophical basis of men's support for feminism. A conditional model centered on interaction effects has yielded modest empirical support for an acceleration effect of parental leave policies. Ideology, occupational status and age appear to explain less of men's attitudinal support for feminism in countries with stronger incentives for men's leave-taking. Data was drawn from two sources: Eurobarometer 65.1: The Future of Europe, Consumer Protection in Transborder Purchases, Family Planning, and Opinions and Experiences in Transborder Purchases, February-March 2006 (Papacostas 2007); and the ranking by Gornick and Meyers (2003) of the paid family leave policies of European and other developed countries as of 2000 according to level of gender equality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the relationship between migration, citizenship and nationalism at the intersection of the European Union and the post-communist world, exploring the vicissitudes of dual citizenship in Lithuania. It argues that European integration disaggregates political membership in such a way as to refocus the identitarian aspect of citizenship, and demonstrates how the contradictions between two mutually embedded regimes of legitimacy, nationalism and liberal democracy, inflect the debate on citizenship of huge numbers of emigrants. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper sets out to explain the emergence of social pacts in Western Europe since the 1980's. We criticize the dominant institutional political economy approach, arguing that pacts reflect party responses to electoral volatility and competition. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the role of presidential heads of state in the government termination process in European democracies. From the examination of the constitutional powers of the president over the dissolution of parliament in nine West European democracies, we have found that most presidents in these countries have constitutionally-endowed powers to call or not to call premature elections once the incumbent governments lose the confidence ofparliament. Based on these findings, we derive several hypotheses relating the configuration of preferences among the president, parliament, and government to the duration of the government and electoral performance. We find that a government is likely to terminate more quickly, the more ideologically distant it is from the median parliamentary party; that a government lasts longer, the more ideologically distant the president is from the medianparliamentary party; and that president's parties perform better in early elections than in regularly scheduled elections. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws comparisons between integration efforts in Europe and South America. The comparison points to several universal conditions for the causes, origins, development and, specifically in South America, the future of the integration effort. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to analyze protest behavior on a multilevel basis. After assessing the effects of individual incentives on political protest, we focus on contextual explanations for the resulting cross-country differences in these effects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to contribute to filling in the gaps on the knowledge of public opinion on the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) and on the facets of support of European citizens for the ESDP. From a logt estimation based on the Eurobarometer survey 54.1, we test three sets of hypotheses to identify the determinants for support the ESDP. We find evidence that some threats, European decision-making architecture, amry percpetions are good estimates for ESDP's public support. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislative speeches are an important part of parliamentary activity in the European Parliament. This paper presents new data on the allocation of speaking time in the EP, including a new survey of European party groups and a statistical analysis of speeches during the 5th European Parliament (1999-2004). Contrary to common assumptions in the EP literature, our findings suggest that party groups do not punish dissenters by limiting their speaking time on the floor despite their formal power to do so. Instead, party mavericks take the floor significantly more often than party faithfuls. We argue that there is an institutional explanation of parliamentary debates. Speaking time actually serves as a communication outlet for dissenting MEPs to put the reasons for their defection on the public record, in particular when there is a conflict between the national party and the European political group. The electoral disconnection between European party groups and the European electorate does not motivate the groups to prevent those dissenters from taking the floor. It does not matter whether dissenters denigrate the party label as this has little effect on the party's prospects as a whole. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exploration of the current state of European integration through the lens of a concept called Entitativity, which exams common origin and common goal as a means to assess group awareness and group agency; the paper focuses on European defense. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A theoretical model and an empirical method allowing researchers to study multiple political and social identities, as well as relations between them. The paper also explores identity structure and patterns of intergroup conflict in Europe. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

.This paper investigates the effects of referendums on news coverage of the European Constitutional Treaty (ECT) and on the emergence of a trans-national media discourse. In order to do so it draws on the content analysis of sixteen daily newspapers from France, Spain, Italy and Britain. Results show that referendums affected both the visibility of the ECT and the quality of coverage. They also suggest that by increasing the salience of EU issues, referendums can lead to the development of a trans-national public sphere. The 'domesticisation' of EU affairs and the 'polarisation' of political elites at referendum time are examined as possible explanations for these patterns. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1960s, the European Court of Justice has been a driving force behind the integration of Europe. As the highest court in the European Union, one of its most important duties has been to delimit the powers of the EU. In performing that function, it has frequently favored the interests and institutions of the EU over those of EU member states (Weiler 1991). Despite seeing their sovereignty reigned in by an external, unelected judiciary, EU member states have quietly complied with even the most revolutionary ECJ decisions (Weiler 1991, Caldeira and Gibson 1995, Brown 2000). The lack of opposition to the ECJ is puzzling in light of the experience of the United States Supreme Court, whose decisions limiting state sovereignty in the early 1800s were regularly denounced and defied by the states (Warren 1922, Goldstein 1997). Scholars have offered a variety of explanations for why the ECJ has endured relatively less opposition to its rulings (Weiler 1991; Mancini 1991). Some scholars emphasize institutional differences between the ECJ and the Supreme Court. The ECJ, for example, issues a single unanimous decision in every case, whereas the Supreme Court often splits in its most controversial cases, thereby lending ammunition to its critics. Other scholars have argued that political deadlock in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s simply made European states more receptive to court-driven integration than their eighteenth-century American state counterparts. This paper offers an alternative explanation. It suggests that the Supreme Court faced stiffer opposition from the states because the cases it decided in its early days of the union frequently involved high-stakes litigation (e.g., burdensome revolutionary war debts, state lottery revenues). The ECJ, by contrast, has introduced some of its most pro-EU rulings in cases involving more mundane or trivial matters (e.g., a $5 utility bill, obscure chemicals). Interestingly, when it has adjudicated higher-stakes disputes (e.g., German beer purity regulations), the ECJ has come under attack from the member states. Thus, compliance with ECJ decisions may have more to do with the ECJ’s docket – the characteristics of the disputes it adjudicates – than with institutional design or political context. To develop my thesis, I analyze a sample of groundbreaking decisions made by each court and catalogue state responses to them. I focus on the stakes involved in each particular case, as well as the exact nature of any post-decision opposition. In addition to shedding new light on the brief history of the ECJ, the paper raises questions about the future of the ECJ: Will it encounter stiffer resistance from member states as the jurisdiction of the EU expands and the ECJ’s rulings are applied in more substantial disputes? Or are legal doctrines immune to such opposition, once settled? It also proposes a more general theory of state compliance with court decisions limiting their sovereignty, helping to predict when and how states will oppose such decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines support for European integration? Easton (1975) argues that political support ranges from the specific to the diffuse. Citizens usually assess national governments in terms of short-term performance and judge governmental institutions in terms of long-term experience. European integration is neither a government nor a set of institutions; it is a process The European Union (EU) also does not govern in the traditional sense of the term. Can Easton’s framework be applied here? If so, how are these evaluations framed? The EU will be defined as an asymmetric federation: duration of membership, the degree of shared trade, and financial costs and benefits vary across the member states. These differing contexts could condition how individuals perceive integration. Consequently, this paper will address two questions. First, to what extent do specific and diffuse evaluations drive support for European integration? Second, to what extent are these evaluations framed by the fragmented nature of Europe integration? Data for the analysis will be drawn from responses to identically worded questions in Eurobarometers 51.0, 52.0, 53.0, and 54.1 (which were conducted in the fall and spring of 1999 and 2000). The dependent variable will be an additive index that measures whether respondents prefer national-level or European-level decision-making in 17 major policy areas. Integration increases as national policies are shared at the European level and decreases as European policies are recaptured by the member states. An additive index of support for the four major European-level institutions will represent diffuse support, and an additive index of the perceived national benefits of EU membership will represent specific support. Years of membership, intra-EU trade, and net EU budget contributions will be the key contextual variables. Additional, relevant individual-level and national-level predictors also will be included. When pooled, the surveys include 60 national-level and approximately 58,000 individual-level cases, which permits a multilevel model to be adequately specified at both levels. Consequently, a multilevel rather than a contextual model will be used. This paper should contribute significantly to the literature on European integration. We do not know how either specific or diffuse support contribute to popular perceptions of European integration. Evaluations of integration may be an extension of national-level concerns, as the literature on second-order elections would seem to indicate. Or integration could be assessed via European institutions, in which case some form of European identification potentially may exist. The framing effects of national context are of equal importance. If these perceptions vary with the amount of shared trade or financial contributions, then they may be fleeting; but if they vary with duration of membership, then they may be more enduring. With the introduction of the Euro and the upcoming accession, the EU is at an historical juncture. One only can estimate how far European integration will proceed is one understands how Europeans view this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of public childcare has become a priority in the construction of a “Social Europe”. At the Council of Ministers Meeting in Barcelona (2002) specific targets on the provision of childcare have been adopted. These targets were integrated in the European Employment Strategy and the Broad Economic Guidelines in 2003. While this development shows the importance of childcare in the construction of a New Society in Europe it is still unclear how this will transcend to the national level. This paper compares the “Third Way” model of childcare provision in the UK with the “Neo-Familialist” model of childcare provision in Germany. The paper explores how the emerging “European childcare strategy” implemented via the European Employment Strategy can influence the provision of childcare nationally The paper argues that the British government is fairly insulated from pressures from the EU and national interest groups because of the a priori existence of a “Third Way” National Childcare Strategy, weak social partnership within the industrial relations system and exclusion of civil society from the implementation of the European Employment Strategy. In Germany, however, the European Employment Strategy has put the government between a rock and a hard place. Through the absence of a federal childcare strategy and a cross-class alliance between employers and unions demanding increased childcare the government has come under pressure to develop a strategy. Through processes of learning within the open-method of coordination and pressures from firms the federal government is searching for creative ways to supersede the veto power of sub-national governments and institutions to enhance the provision of public childcare. Theoretically, the paper draws on two sets of literature: varieties of capitalism and gender research on the redesign of welfare states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses that the maximum likelihood estimation of censored proportion data such as the voteshare of extremist right-wing parties using the censored beta distribution may provide more accurate and more precise statistical results than OLS or Tobit estimation using the normal distribution During a recent decade, the electoral success of extremist right-wing parties, especially in Western Europe, has been under close scrutiny by many quantitative social scientists such as Jackman and Volpert (1996), Swank and Betz (1996), and Golder (2003). They are faced with methodological problems in modeling their dependent variable, the voteshare of extremist right-wing parties, that is largely left-censored, significantly skewed and a proportion at the same time; these characteristics of the dependent variable violate many of the classical assumptions such as normality and homoskedasticity. However, by relying upon OLS, many existing studies fail to produce unbiased and consistent statistical estimators. Furthermore, more advanced efforts, which introduce the Tobit procedure to this discipline, also do not recognize important aspects of proportion data; as voteshare cannot be negative, and as the distribution of the extreme right-wing party data is significantly skewed, Tobit, which assumes observations smaller than zero, whether observed or not, as zero under the normality assumption, may be inappropriate. In fact, since anyone can theoretically run for election and get at least one vote, the probability should never be zero. To adequately handle these problems, this paper applies beta maximum likelihood estimation (BMLE), which is recently introduced by Paolino (2001) to political scientists. Nevertheless, since the beta distribution does not allow zero, I make it allow left-censored data by using the censored beta distribution; this approach assumes a threshold, below which values were not observed, more than zero and smaller than the smallest nonzero percentage; various values of the threshold are tested to make sure whether the statistical results are robust. Then, I will demonstrate that censored BMLE is a better method than OLS or Tobit in analyzing censored proportion data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous observers have noted the recent trends of increased voter abstention, reduced confidence in politicians and political parties in decline. Such complaints are levied against the advanced democracies of Europe, their post-communist neighbors, the United States, and Latin America. Some use the term “anti-politics” to capture these apparently global phenomena that affect new and old democracies alike. This usage includes everything from relatively benign conditions of voter apathy to the more consequential loss of regime legitimacy. Whatever the specific symptom, they reflect varying degrees of negative public attitudes toward politics. Along with the rise of anti-politics, particularly in the 1990s, came a resurgence of populism. Several right-wing populists emerged in Europe, at times capturing surprisingly large shares of the popular vote. In Latin America, so-called neopopulists generated discussions of delegative democracy, hyperpresidentialism, illiberal democracy and so forth. Populist leaders of all stripes tend to exploit domestic problems to their own advantage. They play on the complaints of common citizens and blame the nation’s rulers from causing the hardships. As such, their efforts and rhetoric could be described as “anti-political.” Yet this raises an interesting question: what, exactly, is the relationship of anti-politics to populism? Are these merely two terms that describe the same phenomena, or are they analytically distinct? This paper attempts to clarify the relationship between populism and anti-politics. It enters into the conceptual discussion of populism—offering a new definition of populism as a political movement, rather than a style or strategy and so forth—and argues that anti-politics is best considered as a means of securing support. That is, if populism is not in itself a political strategy, then anti-politics must be the strategy populist leaders use. Although one can conceive of non-populists using anti-political strategies, it is difficult to conceive of populists not relying on anti-politics. Populists of all stripes rely on it. The classic populists in Latin America rose in reaction to the oligarchical parties that dominated politics at the time, and infused their messages with nationalist rhetoric. Neopopulists of the 1990s similarly reacted to the so-called political class that seemed aloof and removed from the problems of ordinary citizens. In these, as well as with the agrarian populism in the United States and the right wing populism in Europe, the effort to mobilize support includes the claim that the political system is not working properly, that the interests of ordinary citizens are ignored, and without some big changes the status quo will remain. In all of these cases the predominant argument in favor of the change is that the system needs fixing. Populists claim to offer an appropriate solution. This paper will present the logic behind this conceptualization and explore their relationships in the cases of Peru and Venezuela, with an eye toward providing an inter-regional comparative framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade witnessed an explosion in the scholarly research on economic transition in Eastern Europe. Yet, the discipline of political science is still lagging behind in developing measures of economic processes. This paper aims to address this gap by presenting an innovative approach, as a first attempt, to quantify three separate aspects of economic transition in a way that reflects the political process of economic policy-making. I use information published by international organizations, and in the news media, to develop measures for three aspects of economic reform, price liberalization, privatization, and institutional reform, for 26 former communist countries for 1976-2000 time period. For each measure I identify its major components and quantify government activities with respect to each component. In order to measure processes, which are rather difficult to quantify, I adopt several assumptions about economic reform. First, I assume that economic transformation does not differ from other policy processes, and could be discussed using a basic framework of policy-making. Then, from the literature on public policy, I borrow a framework, based on the stage model of policy-making, to explain the process of economic transition in Eastern Europe. The main advantage of this model is that, because of its simplicity, it could be universally applied across cultures and could easily fit any type of political system. Thus, this model is especially relevant to cross-country comparison. Another advantage of this model is that it is a very logical one and, most often, policy makers do follow a similar series of steps before a policy is implemented. Another assumption I make is that each of the reform components has the same political importance across space and time. Thus, the same weight is assigned to each product group and reform component for each country and every year. It is conceivable that undertaking certain aspects of reform is politically more difficult than that of other reform aspects. In fact, none of the countries in the dataset has liberalized the prices of all goods and services, reformed all aspects of institutional reform, or privatized fully. Yet, assigning arbitrary weights to different groups of products, without theoretical justifications and other research to back it up, is more controversial than giving the same weight to all goods and services. The indexes presented here are a first attempt to construct objective measures of political processes that are intrinsically difficult to quantify. In order to determine the validity of the proposed measure I perform several validity tests. First, I compare my measures to existing measure of economic reform. Next, I compare the new measures with indicators estimating the outcomes of economic reform policies. Put differently, if my measures adequately capture the process of economic transformation at government level, they should be correlated with independent measures of the level of economic transformation in the economy. I conclude that the new measures of economic reform proposed in this paper are closely correlated with existing measures while exhibiting higher degrees of variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the sources of individual-level variation in support for income redistribution in Europe. The paper tests gender-based, economic utilitarian and political explanations of variations in support for income redistribution. The gender-based explanation seeks to build on recent research demonstrating that men and women differ in terms of the provision of economic security. The economic utilitarian explanation posits that individuals seek to maximize their potential gains from income redistribution. The political explanation posits that individuals will be conditioned by their ideological orientation when they think about supporting income redistribution. We develop a series of multinomial logistic models to test these explanations. Data are from the Social Inequalities study from the International Social Survey Programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are more politically and economically sophisticated citizens more likely to form policy opinions consistent with their interests and values? Is the answer to this question sensitive to whether elite policy discourse is characterized by consensus or conflict? This paper investigates these questions by studying the effect of elite consensus and conflict about European integration on individual policy opinions about integration in member states. The paper develops four new measures of the degree of elite consensus about various dimensions of European integration for member states over the last three decades. We estimate how the degree of elite consensus affects the extent to which individual-level measures of a respondent’s interests, values, and sophistication are correlated with opinions about regional integration in a Bayesian hierarchical model of individual European opinion from 1973-2002. We also propose an instrumental variable for the extent of elite consensus based on the historical development of each country’s electoral system to address the possibility that the degree of consensus of elite discourse in a country is at least in part a consequence rather than a cause of patterns of public opinion---a possibility that has been virtually ignored in all previous research on the interaction between the informational environment and individual opinion formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his study of European state formation—Coercion, Capital, and European States—Charles Tilly convincingly argues that “war makes states.” In their efforts to defend or expand territory, European states built up the administrative capacity to manage warmaking and extract manpower and resources from the populace necessary to wage war. State structures and policies varied according to the degree of urbanization and commercialization within their territories. In states of relatively high urbanization and commercialization, central bureaucracies were smaller, governments depended more on indirect taxes (e.g. tariffs) to fund warmaking, and traded political rights and social services for the their right to conscript soldiers. In states with dispersed populations and dependent on agriculture, state machineries were bulkier, and depended more on direct taxes (e.g. land and head taxes) and force to get sufficient resources and men for war. Though European states would lose none of their bellicosity over the centuries, one quirky outcome of warmaking was the civilization of the state. By the 19th century, the ratio of soldiers to civilians would stop increasing, military spending would decline as a portion of the Gross Domestic Product and government budgets, and states would begin to take on more and more non-military roles. Can we apply Tilly’s model to newer states in the developing world, namely, Guatemala? What drives state formation when there is little warmaking? Central America gained independence from Spain without armed struggle, and there was only intermittent warmaking during Guatemala’s failed effort to build and control a Central American Union from the 1830s to the 1880s. Guatemala did not even have a permanent national army until 1871. This paper explores the possibility that if war did not make the Guatemalan state, coffee did. Of course, promoting and protecting coffee production did not provide the Guatemalan state with the same sort of challenges, or developmental imperatives, as would have organized violence. For one thing, it was cheaper to wrest land and labor from basically unarmed Indian villages (and land from the Catholic Church) than it would have been to prepare for and conduct repeated wars. The Guatemalan state was not pushed to build up the administrative capacity to wage war and extract revenue. Although there was some give and take between rulers and Indian communities over land and labor, the Guatemalan state did not confront the same intense wave of claims urban middle and lower classes gave their states in Europe. For these reasons, Guatemala becomes an inversion of Tilly’s model of state formation: an agricultural state with a feeble internal market, an overwhelmingly rural population, and a small, centralized bureaucracy which lightly taps elites for revenue through trade tariffs. Moreover, Guatemala experiences a militarization rather than a civilianization of the state. The Tilly model turns to geopolitics and the intervention of Great Powers to explain this militarization of the developing world. While the US certainly put heavy constraints on Guatemala, this paper will argue that the political economy of coffee contributed to the militarization of the state, independent of US interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 18th of this year, after 16 months of debating more than 7000 amendments, 105 delegates finished the draft of the new constitution for the EU. The completion of this draft is not the end of the struggle over defining Europe’s future—in fact, it has just kicked it off. Over the next year, European governments will debate the language of and propose changes to the draft document. Each of the EU’s current member countries, and the 10 expected to join next year, can press for content changes. June 15, 2004 is the deadline for governments to sign off on the text (which, by the way, must have unanimous approval). Then, from mid-2004 through mid-2005, individual ratification votes will take place in all 25 member countries, either in parliaments, by referenda, or both. This paper will be a comparative study of the American founding period of 1787-1789 and the current process of formulating and ratifying the EU constitution. The parallels are inviting. America’s founders spent a year writing, speaking and debating in an attempt to persuade the 13 colonies to ratify the proposed constitution. Europe is now wrestling with centuries of national histories, long-standing regional differences and 21 different languages. Further, there are some heavily disputed subjects that faced the US Constitutional convention in 1787 that will provide some of the biggest challenges to the push to approve the EU constitution. Some of the most intriguing are: · How much power should a central government have? · What is the proper balance of power between big and small states in the union? · How much should individual states and citizens contribute to their common defense? · How much power and independence should the proposed “president” have? · What is the proper relationship (and/or separation) of church and state? · What happens if a government refuses to ratify the constitution? This paper will examine both the text of and relevant commentary surrounding the draft document, identify the key conflicts that emerge from it, and evaluate how these conflicts are addressed (or fail to be addressed -- there are strategic silences and omissions in key areas such as collective security and defense). I will employ the main forms of constitutional argument: textual, structural, historical and ethical, to compare and contrast the American founding experience with the provisions, procedures and rights found in the EU Constitution, and identify the most important challenges and compromises that will confront the EU member states in the years to come. **This study will precede a Sabbatical year (2004-2005) in Europe, where I will be attending a number of the ratification debates and researching the process of drafting, amending and approving the EU constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and its effect on Egyptian abd Tunisian societies. The foreign policy approaches of the U.S. and the European Union (EU) differ. The U.S. foreign policy is unilateralist while the EU foreign policy is multilateralist and encourages the creation of regional networks in third countries.

This is an empirical examination of the diffusion hypothesis in Central and Eastern Europe. The influence of international media is analyzed at the micro-level during democratization. The findings suggest an alternative to the diffusion hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies constitutional economics to regional integration in the area of prudential supervision of banking activity and tests its predictions against data on cross-border banking and data from interviews with relevent public officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of five European democracies finds that, in the context of PR and certain mixed electoral systems, individual citizens are more likely to possess political sophistication than their counterparts in countries with plurality systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a comparative analysis that includes democracies in Europe and Latin America, I demonstrate that gender-based shortcuts do function outside of the US, and that their function and power varies in different political environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study cross-nationally combines the public policy mood and issue emphasis concepts to empirically test the responsiveness of both American and European political parties to public opinion in terms of changing party manifesto content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As European countries continue along their path to a deeper and wider Union, the prospect of state fragmentation continues to threaten the traditional boundaries of Europe. But the current literature neglects an important theoretical and empirical question: does regional integration encourage ethno-national or regional groups to pursue separatism, including devolution or classic secessionism? In particular, has European integration changed the incentives for groups within European Union member states to pursue self-government so as to encourage such movements? In an attempt to supplement and expand upon earlier works on sub-national mobilization, I suggest the following causal mechanism: European integration has created conditions under which regional groups (e.g. the Scottish) may not need the state (e.g. United Kingdom) to survive internationally. First, I consider the Alesina and Spolaore (1997; 2003) model for optimal size of nations and tease out observable implications for empirical research. Second, utilizing the hypotheses developed in the theoretical discussion, I analyze the electoral support of regional parties. If the model has validity, regional parties will receive more support from citizens as their potential independent state becomes more viable within the EU. The empirical implications of the theory are tested with a dataset of regional party electoral and political economic variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporatism resurges again. After the short period of pessimism due to the 1983 breakup of centralized collective bargaining in Sweden, the 1990s witnessed an explosion of corporatist policy making among European countries. Against the backdrop of European monetary union, European countries experimented with what currently goes under the name of “social pacts”, that is, peak-level deals between governments, unions, and employer associations. This renewed interest in corporatist arrangements among European countries raises an empirical puzzle: that is, corporatism is resurging under the seemingly unfavorable conditions under which the reform of welfare states becomes the primary concern for the governments. This is puzzling especially if we recall that the trade-off between union’s wage restraint and welfare provision by government has been thought of as the precondition for the national corporatism. Faced with this unexpected explosion of corporatism, many have pointed out the possibly positive impact of the European monetary integration on national corporatism. European monetary integration puts pressure on member states to change their macroeconomic policies into non-accommodating direction. This macroeconomic change, in turn, makes it necessary for the governments to both control unit labor cost and reform their welfare state. The resurgence of corporatism in the 1990s is largely due to the fact that European countries found that corporatism was a useful tool to deal with this retrenchment policy. Thus, the argument goes, the macroeconomic change brought up by the Europe monetary integration has been a driving force toward the resurgence of national corporatism in the 1990s. However, the relationship between European monetary integration and national corporatism remains unclear insofar as the underlying relationship between macroeconomic regime, which the European integration is supposed to introduce, and corporatism remains obscure. This study is an attempt to explore the impact of European monetary integration on national corporatism by looking at the relationship between macroeconomic regime and corporatism. Usually corporatism has been posited on the right-hand side of the equation. In this study, however, corporatism is treated as dependent variable influenced by macroeconomic regimes. Using 14 OECD countries’ data, this study conducts a cross-sectional time-series analysis to verify the impact of macroeconomic regime on the level of corporatism. Largely benefiting from the literature on corporatism and macroeconomic performance in the advanced countries, this study constructs a combined corporatism and macroeconomic regime index. The results show that we should observe a high level of corporatism when the macroeconomic regime is more non-accommodating ceteris paribus. These results, in turn, verify that the resurrection of corporatism among European countries largely has been influenced by the changes that European monetary integration has brought to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomena of both European integration and nationalism have been decades-long research topics for social scientists and policymakers alike. Generally speaking, to link these concepts into an analytical framework becomes necessary simply because one cannot conceive of promoting or even applying the logic of a larger integration scheme without first considering the building blocks of such a movement which are in these cases the nations that comprise Europe. We endeavor to examine such a phenomena utilizing two distinct theoretical approaches. The first is a rational choice economic model made known by Anthony Downs, an approach commonly used in electoral studies of both Western and Eastern European systems. The second approach is based roughly on Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, that is, the idea of unique national territories and identities. By using Central and European Eurobarometer survey data, we hope to detect differences among citizens’ perceptions and desires within the context of a rapidly-expanding European Union. We employ several variables including the commonly-utilized socio-economic factors as well as variables presumably relating to a distinct national awareness. We will examine initially the Visegrad societies of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a considerable literature shows how political institutions affect economic and social inequality, and a smaller one argues that inequality affects institutions, we suggest (following most historical literature) that exogenous changes in technology, trade, or demography alter the value of factor endowments and thus change both inequality and institutions. We support this assertion with a welfare-maximizing model of endogenous institutional choice, with a series of historical case studies, and with an empirical examination of the history of franchise extension in 19th and 20th Century Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the US and Europe alike, science and technology policy initiatives in the early 1980s have focused much on improving the capacity to apply their good science base in practice, expecting a resulting increase in technological advancement and implicitly improved market presence and enhanced economic growth. Yet, results vary in the US and Europe. Some advanced industrial economies do not conform to the expected relationship between science and technology, whereby strong performance in science shall lead to strong technological performance. The relationship between science and technology is very much interdependent or symbiotic. The strength and primary direction of the relationship at a given moment in time varies largely by field of science or technological innovation, as well as across long periods of time. In this exploratory study, I identify plausible explanations for the puzzling relationship between science and technology in certain economically advanced countries. I find that the science-technology link in a country may depend on the overall scientific and technological level of development in that country. The strength and interdependent nature of this link has a historical evolution that varies across fields of science and technology. The strength of the link between science and technology in a country is affected by scientific and technological specialization. Different technological fields have different scientific intensities, or degrees of building upon the science base Specialization of countries across scientific and technological fields varies, making it natural for the strength of the science-technology link to differ from one country to another. The high technological specialization of a country may impact its technological performance more than its immediately current scientific performance does. History, tradition and knowledge trasnfers may affect more returns on R&D expenditures than the actual value of R&D funds spent in either science or technology in a country. As there are plausible explanations for the puzzling behavior of the science-technology link in developed countries, I convert these explanations into a few suggested policy recommendations, with applicability to developed countries and to developing countries alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the extent to which the transnational European Political Parties have a role to play as supranational actors within the EU’s governance architecture. .x000d.It will look at their structure; role and responsibilities; response to their changing institutional environment. In so doing it will highlight an interaction between path-dependent legacies and individual agency..x000d..x000d.Against a backdrop of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections the paper argues that the Euro-parties have been suffering from four genetic deficits:.x000d..x000d.Genetic deficit: to what extent is it possible to develop political parties beyond the nation state.x000d..x000d.Functional Deficit: despite Article 191 (EC Treaty ex. Article 138a) the role of the Euro-parties has yet to be given substance within the EU institutional architecture .x000d.Linkage Deficit: Euro-parties lack a structured linkage platform with Europe’s citizens/national party members.x000d.Emotional/psychological deficit: European citizens lack the knowledge/awareness of what the Euro-parties do and what they are there for. .x000d.Thus the Euro-parties face considerable obstacles that constrain their capacity to deliver. This paper will focus on how the parties have sought to overcome those obstacles. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to explain why the European Union decides to intervene outside of its borders to support electoral processes in transitional and non-established democracies. EU’s support for elections takes the form of electoral assistance projects and election observation missions. Election assistance is the technical and material support given to the electoral process, and election observation is its political complement. The EU has been active in the area of election support since the early 1990s, and it has become one of the leading actors in the world in this domain. Although EU’s foreign policy has been studied widely, very little attention has been given to explaining why the EU has become such an important actor in the area of election support. In order to fill this gap, this paper answers the following question: what explains the EU’s decision to provide electoral support to transitional and non-established democracies? This paper will present an analysis of the EU decision-making process and the determinants of intervention in the area of election support since 1993. Preliminary research shows that criteria for interventions fall into four main categories: strategic, ideological, operational, and circumstantial. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of attitudes towards immigration in European countries is highly salient in current public opinion and elite discourses. The socio-economic condition of the native population and axioms derived from ethnic competition theory have often been used in order to account for xenophobic attitudes. By contrast, much less research has been conducted on the impact of previously inherited values and ideological structures on the formation of preferences regarding immigration. This paper aims to fill this gap by suggesting that broad ideological structures (namely left-right self-placements in the European context) are important cognitive determinants of attitudes towards migrants when the direct experience of competition for scarce resources is lower. Departing from Zaller’s (1992) concept of political predispositions and his Receive-Accept-Sample model, the paper shows that ideology structures attitudes when the socio-economic status of citizens is high enough for migrants not to be framed as a direct threat. Economic vulnerability is thus theorized to increase resistance against individual and contextual ideological influences. The findings are obtained through hierarchical linear models using the 2002 European Social Survey. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of a new extreme right populism has been identified as a byproduct of crisis of confidence in the democratic and representative institutions. Both the xenophobic behavior and the distrust in politics and politician have been appointed as the main reasons for voters that have voted in Extreme Right Political Parties (ERPs). The ERPs’ agendas are mostly oriented by euroskeptism because European institutions represent the extension of new representative arenas where national interests can count little as well as the opening of all sorts of frontiers between member states. This paper follow the argues that economic issues are not more important than identity for voters that support ERPs, above all sovereignty defense and national culture are crucial issues for them. Scholars have already analyzed cultural factors influencing support for integration, such as attitudes towards foreigners, however the ways to measure the euroskepticist attitude are not already sufficiently explored. This paper claims that the representation deficit in European institutions is the key aspect to be analyzed in order to have a better understanding of the growth of votes on ERPs in the Western Europe. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the highly influential ‘The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’ of Gosta Esping Anderson (1990) most of the scholarly discussion of comparative social policies has been held within this consecrated framework of liberal, corporatist/Christian democratic and social democratic welfare systems. .x000d.Outside of the Western world little- if any- work on the relationship between government partisanship and the structure of social policy has been done. Part of the purpose of this paper is to fill this gap with a study of the systems of social redistribution in the former Communist countries. The paper will test the relationship between government partisanship and the structure of social spending in twelve new democracies from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). .x000d.Two alternative explanations for the final structures of social expenditure in these twelve countries will also be considered. The first alternative is developed within the ‘path dependency’ framework and looks at how the Communist regimes as well as the initial social needs after democratization shaped the structure of social spending. The second alternative looks at how the need to meet the requirements for EU accession shaped the social policies in the candidate countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper is about the variance of Corporate Responsibility - the voluntary engagement of business for social and environmental ends above legally mandated minimum standards - in contemporary capitalism. As a universal script with negligible costs, CR is an ideal candidate for isomorphism and norm diffusion. Surprisingly, CR has been institutionalized at very different times in otherwise similar affluent countries during the past decades. Why? A variety of quantitative and qualitative evidence shows that the timing of the rise of CR is correlated with the erosion and decline of the post-war compromise and ‘embedded liberalism.’ Varieties of Capitalism with low levels of institutionalized solidarity are prone to CR; the more political economies approach this market-liberal ideal through liberalization, privatization and deregulation, the more they are prone to engage in CR. In demonstrating that CR and neo-liberalism tend to spread in tandem, the paper contributes to the growing literature on trans-national private authority regimes and challenges the received wisdom that Corporate Responsibility constitutes a ‘re-embedding’ of global liberalism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal democracies in Europe are facing a new challenge. Parties belonging to the radical right-wing party family have gained more political influence. Sweden is, in this context, no exception. The Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), the Swedish version of radical right-wing populism, is at the moment the largest political party outside the Swedish parliament. The success of the Sweden Democrats implies a discussion on how the Swedish political system handles the presence of radical right-wing populism. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between radical right-wing populism and the democratic institutions. The paper shows how the Sweden Democrats are used as a marker by the Swedish political establishment; the party has become associated as something the other parties do not want to be connected to. The Sweden Democrats are being perceived as “the Evil Other”, the pariah and used as an instrument for the other political parties in order to distance themselves from each other. The existence of radical right-wing populism within the European political systems implies a thorough discussion on how to handle this existence in relation to the basis and values of the modern European democratic institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal democracies in Europe are facing a new challenge. Parties belonging to the radical right-wing party family have gained more political influence. Sweden is, in this context, no exception. The Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), the Swedish version of radical right-wing populism, is at the moment the largest political party outside the Swedish parliament. The success of the Sweden Democrats implies a discussion on how the Swedish political system handles the presence of radical right-wing populism. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between radical right-wing populism and the democratic institutions. The paper shows how the Sweden Democrats are used as a marker by the Swedish political establishment; the party has become associated as something the other parties do not want to be connected to. The Sweden Democrats are being perceived as “the Evil Other”, the pariah and used as an instrument for the other political parties in order to distance themselves from each other. The existence of radical right-wing populism within the European political systems implies a thorough discussion on how to handle this existence in relation to the basis and values of the modern European democratic institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of calls for new modes of governance this paper will explore the extent to which the transnational European Political Parties (Euro-parties) have sought to enhance their role and significance within the EU’s governance architecture. It will look at their structure; role and responsibilities; response to changing institutional environments. In so doing it will highlight an interaction between path-dependent legacies and individual agency. The paper argues that the Euro-parties have had to deal with three path-dependent deficits:.x000d..x000d.Genetic deficit: to what extent is it possible to develop political parties beyond the nation state?.x000d..x000d.Functional Deficit: despite Article 191 (EC Treaty) their role within the EU institutional architecture remained undefined .x000d..x000d.Linkage Deficit: Euro-parties lack a structured linkage platform with Europe’s citizens/national party members.x000d..x000d.Taken together, such deficits clearly constrain their capacity to deliver. This paper will show that by pursuing a process of institutionalisation the Euro-parties have sought to overcome those obstacles in the run-up to the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2008, the Irish public rejected the EU Constitution in Europe’s only referendum on the document. The purpose of this paper is to examine the official one-month pre-referendum period in order to better understand the debate on both sides and discuss its impact on Irish relations with the EU. Why did the “no” side prevail during the referendum despite a massive government campaign to persuade voters to support the EU Constitution? The paper will examine the arguments of both sides through a discussion of their positions. The pro-constitution position will be evaluated based on the arguments of the government, political parties, and other organizations in support of closer European integration while the anti-constitution side will be evaluated from the arguments of the political parties and groups opposed to Ireland’s participation in a strengthened EU. I visited Ireland for two weeks in May 2008 to observe the pre-referendum debate process on the EU Constitution and this paper will reflect personal observations and conversations with the Irish public as well as information from the pro and con organizations behind of the issue. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do private actors have a decisive role in the transnational diffusion of radical economic reforms and, if so, under what conditions and through what mechanisms?.x000d.This paper answers this question by studying the attempted diffusion of a radical policy idea (the shift from progressive taxation to a regressive “flat tax” system) from transnational right-libertarian networks of economists and conservative think tanks to policy debates in Germany, Spain, Slovakia and Romania. .x000d.While the flat tax was successful in Romania and Slovakia, it failed in Germany and Spain. The paper argues that this can be explained by variations in the political opportunity structure of transnational advocacy networks. The following factors were found to be necessary and sufficient for success:: weak organizational and expertise capacity of the state’s finance bureaucracy, exclusion of domestic economists from the public debate and high dependence of political parties on the economic knowledge, political capital and status resources of the transnational policy network..x000d.The paper contributes to debates on the role of economic ideas on policy, the mechanisms of transnational policy diffusion and the nature of authority in global governence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last two decades have witnessed the second wave of regionalism. The primary focus of this paper is on what political and economic forces drive the process of regional integration. Although there is a plethora of literature in this regard, the formation and development of regional blocs have not been clearly understood. Based on a political-economy analysis, this paper examines the key cases of regionalism from Europe, Asia and the Americas, and concludes that high-level economic interdependence, stabilized domestic situations (particularly those of leading countries in the region), and a regional structure with a majority of small states jointly lead to the success of regional integration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does Varieties Of Capitalism Explain National Differences in Labor Relations?John Kelly and Kerstin HamannThis paper focuses on three questions: First, to what extent do Varieties of Capitalism approaches explain differences in industrial relations systems? Second, and conversely, to what extent do industrial relations systems help develop distinctive types of capitalism? And third, can VoC approaches help explain the dynamics of change in industrial relations systems, and if not, what other factors are better able to do so? The paper starts from the Hall and Soskice framework for understanding 'varieties of capitalism' and uses comparative, time series data to assess its utility in understanding varieties of industrial relations systems and the dynamics of change within these systems. I also review the literature on different facets of European integration, some of which points to processes of convergence in national industrial relations systems. The evidence is intended to throw light on the key attributes of industrial relations systems, namely the structure and organization of the main actors, the relations between them and the outcomes of industrial relations processes. The data therefore covers trade union density, collective bargaining coverage and structure, corporatist decision-making, strike rates, earnings inequality and unemployment and is drawn from the EU15 plus Norway. The paper draws three main conclusions from this evidence: first, the CME category is too broad when applied to industrial relations systems and obscures significant differences between the countries of Northern, Central and Southern Europe, particularly in the areas of union density and union power. Second, the distinctive pattern of low union density, high bargaining coverage, politically divided union confederations, and recourse to political mobilization found in Southern Europe suggests there is a distinctive system of Mediterranean industrial relations. Third, the Hall and Soskice approach underplays the role of the state and tells us little about mechanisms of change within different varieties of capitalism.Turning to the dynamics of change, the paper explores the role of the state in the radical reconstruction of industrial relations systems in the UK and Ireland. In the UK, a CME-type system of industry wide bargaining and tripartite regulation of training and pay was almost entirely eradicated under the Thatcher government. Simultaneously Ireland moved in the opposite direction as the state centralized collective bargaining through a succession of social pacts. The cases underline the central role of the state as an agency of change within national capitalisms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]