The hitherto most successful theory explaining why similar industrialized market economies have developed such varying systems for social protection is the Power Resource Theory (PRT), according to which the generosity of the welfare state is a function of working class mobilization. In this paper, we argue that there is an under-theorized link in the micro-foundations for PRT, namely why wage earners trying to cope with social risks and demand for redistribution would turn to the state for a solution. Our approach, the Quality of Government (QoG) theory, stresses the importance of trustworthy, impartial, and uncorrupted government institutions as a precondition for citizens’ willingness to support policies for social insurance. Drawing on data on 18 OECD countries during 1984–2000, we find (a) that QoG positively affects the size and generosity of the welfare state, and (b) that the effect of working class mobilization on welfare state generosity increases with the level of QoG.

The Federalist, justifying the Electoral College to elect the president, claimed that a small group of more informed individuals would make a better decision than the general mass. But the Condorcet Jury Theorem tells us that the more independent, better-than-random voters there are, the more likely it will be that the majority among them will be correct. The question thus arises as to how much better, on average, members of the smaller group would have to be to compensate for the epistemic costs of making decisions on the basis of that many fewer votes. This question is explored in the contexts of referendum democracy, delegate-style representative democracy, and trustee-style representative democracy.

Political parties are often faced with seemingly opposing goals when trying to secure members’ reelection and maintain party unity. On one hand, a party needs to fulfill members’ diverse electoral needs for their reelection, and on the other hand, the party must force members to vote in unison according to party lines for collective decisions. How does a party influence its members to take unified action while meeting their individual electoral needs? Through an analysis of the Japanese Diet, this study argues that parties attempt to achieve the reelection of their members and maintain party unity by manipulating legislative committee assignments and deliberations. In particular, the study demonstrates that a party shapes committees in a different way according to policy areas over which committees have jurisdiction. A party tends to accept its members’ requests for affiliation and allow their self-management in committees concerned with particularistic benefits so that they can deliver specific benefits to each electoral district. In addition, a party tends to assign members who have average policy positions in the party to committees concerned with general benefits to make policies that satisfy many constituencies.

In modern governing, a variety of actors in the public domain daily make decisions with consequences for the common good, but how these actors are held accountable to political representatives is not always clear. While representative democracy in most societies still functions as the traditional standard, deficits in democratic control are perceived. There is an exercise of power-without-corresponding-representation. At the same time modern citizens appear hard to engage in politics. Representation-without-corresponding-participation also appears. We address this dual problem, one of accountability and one of legitimacy, in terms of political theory. Various strategies are explored, indicating that some of them contribute to bringing democracy up to date more than others. In particular, it seems fundamental to rethink contemporary democracy by connecting it with the multi-dimensional character of governance. Functional participation by modern citizens can enhance the legitimacy of the exercise of power by making the latter accountable in a multi-local way.

This article investigates the ways in which political parties are codified in modern democratic constitutions, providing a unique cross-sectional and longitudinal overview of the patterns of party constitutionalization in post-war Europe. Although the constitutions of western liberal democracies traditionally have paid little attention to the role of parties, evidence suggests that in contemporary democracies, both old and new, they are increasingly accorded a formal constitutional status. Little is known, however, about the substantive content of their constitutional position or about the normative connotations of their constitutional codification. In this article, we demonstrate that there is a clear correlation between the nature and the intensity of party constitutionalization and the newness and historical experience of democracy and that, with time, the constitutional regulation of the extra-parliamentary organization and the parties’ rights and duties has gained in importance at the expense of their parliamentary and electoral roles. The analysis furthermore suggests that three distinct models of party constitutionalization can be identified – Defending Democracy, Parties in Public Office, and Parties as Public Utilities – each of which is related to a particular conception of party democracy.

This article identifies the determinants of party loyalty while making a distinction between government and opposition voters within an electoral cycle in the two most recent European Union members (Bulgaria and Romania). Both countries are characterized by the perception of widespread corruption and a general distrust of politicians that are likely to hinder the development of strong ties between citizens and parties. We test the explanatory potential of both traditional and revisionist theories of partisanship, suggesting that perceptions of corruption should be treated as equal to evaluations of actual performance. The statistical analysis of comparative study of electoral systems survey data emphasizes the salience of party performance evaluations for party loyalty. Corruption perceptions are significant predictors of loyalty in the Bulgarian case. Voters in both countries assess critically the performance of their preferred party whether it was part of the government or in opposition. A significant difference arises between government and opposition voters with regard to the predictive potential of identification conceptualized as closeness to a party.

How does the European Court of Justice (ECJ) firmly maintain a now 45-year-old consistent integrationist jurisprudence when exerting virtually no control over the recruitment of its members (a selection left to national governments)? Rather than considering such judicial consistency over time as a ‘given’, the paper questions the social fabric of judicial preferences. On the basis of a variety of commemorative materials produced within the Court (Festschriften, tributes, eulogies, and jubilees) and never studied so far, the paper stresses the manner in which these rituals are home to social processes of aggregation (into one unique judicial family), demarcation (from the political realm), and self-identification (to roles of so-called ‘founding father’, ‘current spokesmen’, or ‘would-be judges’), thereby enabling transnational role transmission within international courts such as the ECJ.

Feminism and rational choice theory have both been hailed as approaches with the potential to revolutionize political science. Apart from a few exceptions, however, work utilizing these two perspectives rarely overlaps. This article reviews their main contributions and explores the potential for a combined approach. It argues that a synthesis of feminism and rational choice theory would involve attending to questions of gender, strategy, institutions, power, and change. The contours and benefits of this approach are illustrated with reference to one particular area of research: the adoption of electoral gender quotas. Despite a current lack of engagement across approaches, this example illustrates that the tools of feminist and rational choice analysis may be brought together in productive ways to ask and answer theoretically and substantively important questions in political science.

Linguistic barriers may pose problems for politicians trying to communicate delicate decisions to a European-wide public, as well as for citizens wishing to protest at the European level. In this article I present a counter-intuitive position on the language question, one that explores how grassroots activists in social movements use translation as a novel practice to debate political alternatives in the European Union's (EU) multilingual public sphere. In recent years, new cross-European protest movements have created the multilingual discursive democracy arena known as the European Social Forum (ESF). I compare deliberative practices in the multilingual ESF preparatory meetings with those in monolingual national Social Forum meetings in three Western European countries. My comparison shows that multilingualism does not reduce the inclusivity of democratic deliberation as compared to the national context. In the ESF, grassroots deliberators work using a novel practice of translation that has the potential to include marginalized groups. It is, however, a distinct kind of translation that activists use. Translation, compared to EU-official practices of multilingualism, affects a change in institutionalized habits and norms of deliberation. Addressing democratic theorists, my findings suggest that translation could be a way to think about difference not as a hindrance but as a resource for democracy in linguistically heterogeneous societies and public spaces, without presupposing a shared language or lingua franca, nor a national identity.

In the debate about the relationship between institutions and overall economic performance, the dependent variable has received scant attention – in contrast to the independent variable(s). This paper tries to enhance the understanding of the link between institutions and performance by presenting and assessing a substantively grounded conceptualization and operationalization of overall economic performance based on economic growth, employment, and public debt. A fuzzy-set ideal-type analysis of performance of 19 OECD countries between 1975 and 2005 reveals substantial variation across countries and over time that cannot sufficiently be accounted for by two key institutional features: corporatism and consensus democracy. Corporatism and consensus democracy may account for policy formation and implementation, but hardly for economic performance.

This paper deals with the often-observed complex relationship between the so-called old, ‘economic’ left/right alignment (egalitarianism) and the new, ‘cultural’ alignment. Many authors have observed that the less educated members of society occupy an apparently contradictory position, combining a leftist stand in favor of more equality and government intervention, with a rightist stand on minority rights, the treatment of criminals, and other aspects of democratic citizenship. Various explanations have been offered for this paradox. This paper proposes an explanation in terms of vulnerability and the way in which it is culturally processed. Less educated people are often vulnerable and long for more equality. The stronger their desire for equality, the greater their frustration when feeling vulnerable, and the greater the need to cope with that vulnerability. They do so, using particular narrative-coping strategies that create an affinity with the attitudes that form the new left/right alignment. One such coping strategy is based on feelings of relative deprivation. In the empirical part of the paper it is shown that relative deprivation completely explains the paradoxical position of the less educated, and that, when taking feelings of deprivation into account, the two left/right dimensions are in fact independent of each other at all levels of education, creating a situation that leads to tensions within parties that pursue egalitarian policies. The mechanism uncovered in this analysis reveals a tension at the heart of egalitarianism: the stronger the longing for equality among the vulnerable members of society, the more likely they are to opt for right wing positions on the new left/right dimension.

Independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) are increasingly attracting academic and societal attention, as they represent the institutional cornerstone of the regulatory state and play a key role in policy-making. Besides the expected benefits in terms of credibility and efficiency, these regulators are said to bring about a ‘democratic deficit’, following their statutory separation from democratic institutions. Consequently, a ‘multi-pronged system of control’ is required. This article focuses on a specific component of this system, that is, the media. The goal is to determine whether media coverage of IRAs meets the necessary prerequisites to be considered a potential ‘accountability forum’ for regulators. The results of a comparison of two contrasted cases – the British and Swiss competition commissions – mostly support the expectations, because they show that media coverage of IRAs corresponds to that of the most relevant policy issues and follows the regulatory cycle. Furthermore, a systematic bias in media coverage can be excluded.

A substantial number of studies support the notion that having a high number of women in elected office helps strengthen the position of women in society. However, some of the most cited studies rely on questionnaires asking elected representatives about their attitudes and priorities, thus focusing on the input side of the political system. The closer one gets to outcomes in citizens’ everyday lives, the fewer empirical findings there are to report. In this study, we attempt to explain contemporary variations in gender equality at the sub-national level in Sweden. We use six indicators to capture a broad spectrum of everyday life situations. The overall finding is that having a high number of women elected does affect conditions for women citizens, making them more equal to men in terms of factors such as income levels, full-time vs. part-time employment, and distribution of parental leave between mothers and fathers, even when controlling for party ideology and modernization at the municipal level. No effect was found, however, on factors such as unemployment, poor health, and poverty among women. Thus, the politics of presence theory (Phillips, 1995), which emphasizes the importance of having a high number of women elected, does exert an effect, but the effect needs to be specified. For some dimensions of gender equality, the driving forces of change have more to do with general transformations of society than the equal distribution of women and men in elected assemblies. We thoroughly discuss measurement challenges since there is no accepted or straightforward way of testing the politics of presence theory. We challenge the conventional wisdom of using indexes to capture the network of circumstances that determines the relationship between women and men in society; aggregating several factors undermines the possibility of building fine-tuned understandings of the operative mechanisms.

The existing comparative literature focuses on political institutions to explain party unity in parliament, and largely ignores the role of party characteristics in this process. This study argues that the strength of political party organization directly and independently influences the level of party unity. Organizational strength makes the party a valuable asset to individual legislators, thus increasing their willingness to be disciplined. Therefore, parties with strong organizations are likely to be more unified in parliament than those with weak organizations. I find support for this argument with data from four post-communist democracies: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland. Narratives suggest that the proposed causal mechanism is plausible.

Does an increasing emphasis on individual freedom in mass values erode or revitalize democratic societies? This paper offers a new approach to this debate by examining it through the lens of Isaiah Berlin, and his distinction between positive and negative freedom. I show that, contrary to the common assumption among scholars who study mass values regarding freedom, these do not consist of one dimension but two: negative and positive freedom. I also show that, while valuing negative liberty clearly leads a person to become more morally permissive and more condoning of non-compliance with legal norms, valuing positive liberty does not seem to have the same effects at all; in fact, it shows the very opposite relationship with respect to some of these attitudes. Thus, it matters what kind of freedom people value. The results rely on confirmatory factor and regression analyses on World Values Survey data from ten affluent Western countries in 2005–2006.

Theoretical work on parliamentary government leads to the expectation that parties will defect from governing coalitions when they anticipate greater payoffs in replacement governments or after new elections; similarly, governments as a whole (or their prime ministers) will dissolve legislatures prematurely with the same expectation in mind. Surprisingly, however, very little empirical work has been done to assess the extent to which defectors from or dissolvers of coalition governments actually manage to profit from their actions. We also know very little about what happens to coalition members who engage in government-ending disputes. The purpose of this paper is to address these deficiencies by examining the fates of dissolvers, defectors, and disputers in West European democratic systems since 1945. The results show that parties generally end up no better off, and usually worse off, in terms of measurable benefits when they engage in these types of action.

Variation in secessionism among sub-state nationalists is part of one of the great puzzles of ethnic politics. Sub-state national movements tend to bifurcate and, at times, trifurcate, into two or three basic nationalist orientations: independentist nationalism, autonomist nationalism (and its sub-variants), and federalist nationalism (and its sub-variants). There is a dearth of systematic comparative research into the sources and patterns of internal variation in the political orientations of sub-state national movements. This article investigates why some sub-state nationalists opt for a secessionist orientation while other nationalists within the same national movement opt for a variety of non-secessionist orientations. I use evidence gathered in Quebec and Catalonia, consisting of 42 interviews among the top leadership of the eight national parties of these societies, 15 focus group interviews with party militants, and 370 questionnaires answered by militants, etc. The national consciousness and materialist approaches fail to elucidate these issues. Instead, sub-state nationalists have expectations about what is fair treatment by the central state, and notions about what obligations emerge due to common membership in a plurinational state. Independentists and strong decentralizers (strong autonomists and radical asymmetric federalists) opt for their chosen orientations because they perceive that central state institutions are unable to promote an ethos of plurinational reciprocity and are aggrieved by state nationalism, while less-decentralizing nationalists (weak autonomists and traditional federalists) assert that the central state is capable of accommodation and reciprocity and have no grievances about state nationalism.

This article analyzes why, despite similar transformations in the dimensions structuring political space since the late 1980s, extreme right-wing populist parties have emerged in some West European countries, but not in others. Two factors may affect the fortunes of these parties. First, if electorates remain firmly entrenched in older cleavages, new parties will find it difficult to establish themselves. Second, the positions of the established actors with respect to the new cultural divide that the extreme populist right mobilizes may be crucial. This article systematizes the various explanations regarding the impact of mainstream party positions on the electoral fortunes of the extreme right, and develops two new hypotheses that differentiate between the conditions that favor the entry of the extreme right, and its subsequent success. The various hypotheses are then tested in an empirical analysis of election campaigns in France and Germany, combining data on party positions as reflected in the news media with mass-level surveys. The results show that the diverging behavior of the established parties, rather than the strength of the traditional state-market cleavage, explains the differences between these two countries. More specifically, the differing strategy of the mainstream left in the two contexts has allowed the Front National to anchor itself in the French party system, whereas similar parties have not achieved a breakthrough in Germany.