Showing papers in "West European Politics in 2008"

Changing Values among Western Publics from 1970 to 2006

Abstract: In 1971 it was hypothesised that intergenerational value changes were taking place. More than a generation has passed since then, and today it seems clear that the predicted changes have occurred. A large body of evidence, analysed using three different approaches – (1) cohort analysis; (2) comparisons of rich and poor countries; (3) examination of actual trends observed over the past 35 years – all points to the conclusion that major cultural changes are occurring, and that they reflect a process of intergenerational change linked with rising levels of existential security.

Researching Interest Group Politics in Europe and Elsewhere: Much We Study, Little We Know?

Abstract: While understanding interest group systems remains crucial to understanding the functioning of advanced democracies, the study of interest groups remains a somewhat niche field within political science. Nevertheless, during the last 15 years, the academic interest in group politics has grown and we reflect on the state of the current literature. The main objective is to take stock, consider the main empirical and theoretical/conceptual achievements, but most importantly, to reflect upon potential fertile future research avenues. In our view interest group studies would be reinvigorated and would benefit from being reintegrated within the broader field of political science, and more particularly, the comparative study of government.

The Challenge to Party Government

Abstract: At a time when the literature on political parties is brimming with health and vitality, the parties themselves seem to be experiencing potentially severe legitimacy problems and to be suffering from a quite massive withdrawal of popular support and affection. This article addresses one key aspect of the problems facing contemporary parties in Europe, which is the challenge to party government. I begin by reviewing the changing pattern of party competition, in which I discuss the decline of partisanship in policy-making and the convergence of parties into a mainstream consensus. I then look again at the familiar ‘parties-do-matter’ thesis and at the evidence for declining partisanship within the electorate. In the third section of the paper I explore the various attempts to specify the conditions for party government, before going on in the final section to argue that these conditions have been undermined in such a way that it is now almost impossible to imagine party government in contemporary Europe eit...

Interest Groups in the European Union: How Powerful Are They?

Abstract: The question of interest group influence is central for both scholars interested in studying policy-making in the EU and those concerned with the legitimacy of decision-making in that entity. Many hypotheses exist that stress a series of factors possibly shaping interest group influence. Nevertheless, only few studies have tried empirically to examine these hypotheses for the case of the EU. What is more, existing empirical studies report contradictory findings. To help researchers advance upon this state of the art, three obstacles that impede research dealing with interest group influence in the EU are discussed: defining the terms ‘power’ and ‘influence’; accounting for different pathways to influence; and measuring influence. In addition to this, several ways to address these obstacles are advanced: by taking a pragmatic approach with respect to defining influence and power; by being conscious that actors may use different pathways to influence when drawing conclusions about interest group influence; ...

Worlds, Families, Regimes: Country Clusters in European and OECD Area Public Policy

Abstract: This article focuses on the notion that the policies and politics of states and nations constitute distinct worlds or clusters. We begin by examining the concept of clustering as it has emerged in the literature on policy regimes and families of nations. We then address a series of empirical questions: whether distinct worlds persist in an era of policy convergence and globalisation, whether policy antecedents cluster in the same ways as policy outcomes and whether the enlargement of the EU has led to an increase in the number of worlds constituting the wider European polity. Our main conclusions are that country clustering is, if anything, more pronounced than in the past, that it is, in large part, structurally determined and that the EU now contains a quite distinct post-Communist family of nations.

Reshaping european regulatory space: An evolutionary analysis

Abstract: The article examines European institutions for implementing EU regulation. It assesses their development using seven different models that have been introduced or discussed for organising implementation. It argues that the development of European regulatory space has followed an evolutionary pattern involving gradual reshaping through a series of steps, with previous stages influencing later stages and institutions being built on existing structures. Despite pressures and frequent discussions of comprehensive change, existing organisations have managed to limit and shape reforms. The result has been institutional ‘layering’ and ‘conversion’ instead of streamlining, and a gradual strengthening of networks of national independent regulatory agencies. The analysis therefore suggests that evolutionary analysis based on historical institutionalist approaches seems highly appropriate to the EU. Equally, it shows how even if there are strong demand-side pressures for centralisation of regulation, existing instit...

Individualised Constituency Campaigns in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: Candidates in the 2005 German Elections

Abstract: Constituency campaigns are important phenomena for students of political parties, voting behaviour as well as political communication. These research communities perceive constituency campaigns as parts of centralised high-tech campaigns aiming in strategic ways at the efficient mobilisation of voters. We propose in this paper an alternative understanding of constituency campaigns using the case of the German parliamentary elections in 2005 to empirically test this understanding. We perceive constituency campaigns as phenomena signalling a relative independence of individual candidates from the national party campaign. We label this phenomenon individualised campaigning. We argue that individualised campaigning is driven among others by electoral incentives. We test this hypothesis with regard to the German mixed-member electoral system and on the basis of a survey of all candidates standing for election in 2005.

Who consults? The configuration of expert groups in the European union

Abstract: This article examines and explains the committee system of the EU as a crucial property of the EU governance system using a database on the European Commission's experts groups. What is the extent of the expert consultative system? What is the distribution of expert groups? Are these groups best understood as loose networks or do they constitute a stable, well-established consultative system? We observe a proliferation of expert groups over time and across sectors. They have become permanent properties of the EU governance system; yet they are remarkably unevenly distributed among different policy domains. Sectoral differentiation is accentuated by weak horizontal coordination between the Directorates-General. We argue that this heterogeneity is not only a result of deliberate design attempts and differences in policy tasks, but also the result of differences in legal and administrative capabilities, as well as the gradual development of different routines and norms among the DGs.

Thirty Years of Territorial Politics

Abstract: For many years, territorial politics was neglected in political science under the influence of a modernist paradigm according to which territory gives way to function as a principle of social and political organisation. In the last 30 years it has received more attention as territorial political movements have made an impact. This has provoked a reconsideration not just of the present but also of the past, as scholars have identified the persistence of territorial politics even within unitary states. There is a continuing separation of the study of local and urban from regional politics, although the respective literatures address similar issues and use similar concepts. The ‘new regionalism’ literature examines the emergence of territorial systems of action under the impact of state transformation and transnational integration. There are marked differences in territorial politics in western and east-central Europe, not because of primordial ethnic characteristics, but because of the evolution of the stat...

Delegation of powers in the European union: The need for a multi-principals model

Abstract: Whereas a principal–agent model has widely been used to analyse the establishment of manifold autonomous agencies at the European level, it fails to capture some key elements of this process, such as the recurrent inter-institutional struggle of agency institutional design or the Commission's basic ambivalence vis-a-vis independent regulators. In contrast, acknowledging the absence of a clearly defined principal in the EU enables us to understand the relative weakness of existing agencies and the multiplicity of controls to which they are subjected. In such a system, strong EU regulators are unlikely to be established.

Opportunity Structures in the EU Multi-Level System

Abstract: A wide range of approaches on EU interest representation rely on an (explicit or implicit) notion of ‘political opportunity structure’. Through a systematic review of four literatures (social movements and political contention, resource exchange in EU interest representation, venue shopping, and the political construction of scale), we show that these approaches exhibit close affinities in the way they use and conceptualise a notion of political opportunity structure. At the same time, these literatures reveal two distinct perspectives: one that views opportunity structures as a fixed external constraint on interest group behaviour (what we call an exogenous perspective) and one that views them as the outcome of social and political processes in which interest groups themselves participate (an endogenous perspective). We argue that theoretical and empirical progress can be made by systematically and explicitly analysing the dynamic interplay between the exogenous and endogenous elements of opportunity str...

Conditional Punishment: A Comparative Analysis of the Electoral Consequences of Welfare State Retrenchment in OECD Nations, 1980–2003

Abstract: Do incumbent parties that retrench the welfare state lose votes during the next election? That is the guiding question for our paper. We analyse elections and social policy reforms in 18 established OECD democracies from 1980 to 2003. We show that there is no strong and systematic punishment for governments which cut back welfare state entitlements. The likelihood of losing votes is the same for governments that retrench the welfare state as for those that do not. Rather, electoral punishment is conditional on whether governments have the chance to stretch retrenchment over a longer period of time, and whether social policy cuts are made an issue in the electoral campaign. If other political parties and the mass media do not put the theme on the agenda of the campaign, and if the retrenchment can be carried out in small steps during a longer governmental term, governments may considerably reduce welfare state effort without fear of major electoral consequences.

New modes of governance and the participatory myth

Abstract: One of the most common arguments about ‘new governance’ is that it is characterised by heterarchy rather than by hierarchy, creating horizontal modes of governance among a multitude of actors – public and private – involving all relevant stakeholders. Often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, this argument is linked with a normative democratic claim that praises the particular participatory features of ‘new governance’ as compared to ‘old governance’. Using as a case study European occupational health and safety policy, characterised by a shift from ‘old’ to ‘new governance’ since the 1990s, this article warns us that one should be very reluctant in making normative claims on new governance. The analysis of new governance modes such as comitology, agency networking, and social dialogue in this field shows that more horizontal and heterarchical governance does not mean automatically more participatory governance in terms of involving civil society actors and all stakeholders.

Regulation, the Regulatory State and European Politics

Abstract: For the past 15 years or so, the claim of a rise of the regulatory state in Europe has been a dominant theme in public policy research. This paper critically reflects on this claim and the associated scholarship by considering four key questions. First, what is the significance of the supposed rise of the regulatory state for the state in Europe and how can this trend be explained? Second, what insights have been gained from the study of phenomena associated with the regulatory state, both in terms of EU and national levels of government as well as in terms of process and organisational understandings of policy analysis? Third, does the regulatory state represent a stable arrangement or does it suffer from its own peculiar dilemmas that fundamentally affect the nature of European states? Fourth, and finally, this article develops three scenarios – those of withering away, plodding along, and rejuvenation – for the future of the (study of the) regulatory state in Europe.

Tradition and innovation: Europe's accumulated executive order

Abstract: With the advent of the European Union and its predecessors, Europe's executive order has become qualitatively different from the intergovernmental order inherited from the past. We ascribe this phenomenon in particular to the consolidation of the European Commission as a new and distinctive executive centre at the European level. This institutional innovation triggers significant centrifugal forces within national governments due to the Commission's strategy of establishing direct partnerships with semi-independent national agencies that are crucial for the implementation as well as the formulation of EU policies. The new order does not replace former orders; instead it tends to be layered around already existing orders so that the result is an increasingly compound and accumulated executive order. Such an order raises sensitive questions about which actors should be held to account: holding governments to account may no longer be enough and may need to be complemented with mechanisms and forums that focu...

Policy Issues, Organisational Format and the Political Strategies of Interest Organisations

Abstract: Contemporaneously, the study of EU lobbying appears somewhat disconnected from other sub-areas within the study of EU politics. Research tends to be focused on single issues – either particularistic or directional – and concentrates on communicative interaction modes that emphasise network governance, ignoring the electoral side of politics. This essay's main objective is to make the politics component of interest group politics more intelligible. The core argument is that interest group strategies, as well as potential influence, are not adequately explained by resources only. In response to this, a framework is built that links different interaction modes (arguing, bargaining and voting) with political strategies (inside and outside), organisational formats and the nature of political issues.

Why is there no Radical Right Party in Ireland

Abstract: The rise of the radical or extreme right parties in Europe – parties usually noted for strong, sometimes racist anti-immigrant ideologies – has attracted a great deal of attention in political science. Ireland, despite having some conditions favourable to the growth of such a party has no radical right party. This paper argues that that this is because the ‘space’ usually occupied by such parties – for young, poor people disaffected by economic change – is taken up by Sinn Fein, which though it has similarities to radical right parties, differs markedly in its attitudes to immigrants. It goes on to explain the special circumstances that prevent nationalist parties in Ireland from presenting overtly anti-immigrant platforms. The focus on anti-immigration and liberal economic policies for such parties may mean that other parties with strong resemblances are excluded from studies they might usefully be included.

Interest Groups and Democracy in the European Union

Abstract: Research on interest group participation in European Union politics has mushroomed since the end of the 1990s. What role citizens should play in the political process – should they participate through elected representatives or through interest groups and so-called ‘civil society organisations’– has taken a central place in political and academic debates surrounding the alleged EU's democratic deficit. Here I critically analyse the literature dealing with the potential value of interest groups and ‘civil society organisations’ to the development of democracy in the EU. The existing empirical case studies lead to the conclusion that the elite characteristics of these actors question their capacity to increase democratic legitimacy. Finally, future research should be designed around large-scale quantitative and qualitative empirical studies that investigate participation designs and effective participation in the EU and other political systems.

The European Welfare State: Golden Achievements, Silver Prospects

Abstract: For the welfare state the last 30 years have witnessed a turbulent transition from the ‘Golden Age’ of expansion to a ‘Silver Age’ of permanent austerity. This shift has been the result of external pressures and of internal transformations of domestic economies and social structures. Permanent austerity has entailed incisive institutional adaptations and has been accompanied by a ‘new politics’, centred on a plurality of ‘blame avoidance’ strategies on the side of parties and governments. The article summarises and discusses the main factual developments since the mid-1970s but it also surveys the main strands of academic debates on both the expansion and the crisis phases. The author argues that comparative welfare state research has been one of the liveliest fields of political economy – a field marked by important analytical and theoretical advances and by the accumulation of relevant and systematic empirical knowledge about a key institution of the European political landscape.

Converging perspectives on interest group research in Europe and America

Abstract: The European and American literatures on interest groups developed largely separately in previous decades. Europeans were more commonly rooted in studies of policy systems and Americans more concerned with precise tactics of lobbying or the membership calculus following from the work of Mancur Olson. Recent developments suggest that the literatures have begun to be much more closely aligned. We focus on three major points of convergence. First is the impact of governmental structures on the development of national interest group systems. Using examples from the US and the EU, we discuss the co-evolution of groups and the state. Looking both over time and across issue domains, groups are more active when and where the state is more active. Second, we look at the impact of government structures on the locus of advocacy. Originally explored in the US context, multi-level governance structures in European settings have led to consideration of the concept of venue-shopping. Finally, we discuss how groups in bo...

Mapping the European administrative space

Abstract: The European administrative space is the area in which increasingly integrated administrations jointly exercise powers delegated to the EU in a system of shared sovereignty. Its development has been evolutionary and fluid. Its structures have been established on a case-by-case basis in different policy areas. Despite this differentiation, the phenomenon of administrative cooperation has led to an ‘integrated administration’ in the form of an intensive and often seamless cooperation between national and supranational administrative actors and activities. This article explores the reasons for and consequences of this development.

The 2007 Polish Parliamentary Election: Some Structuring, Still a Lot of Chaos 1

Abstract: The parliamentary election of 21 October 2007 was an early election, held two years ahead of schedule. The two years between the autumn of 2005 and the decision in July 2007 by Law and Justice (Pra...

Governance as a Path to Government

Abstract: During the 1970s, analyses of state and government in Western Europe were preoccupied with crises of governability and legitimacy. The early 1980s witnessed sharply differing responses to these crises, exemplified by the socialist experiment in France and Thatcherism in the UK. By the end of the 1980s, ‘governance’– in both national and European arenas – began to be regarded as the dominant institutional response to problems of governability. Considered from the perspective of comparative European government, the oft-claimed shift from government to governance appears overstated. Governance is less widespread and consequential both at national and European levels than its proponents suggest, as a survey of the propellants, conditions and national and European constellations of governance shows. Viewed historically, governance does not so much indicate a shift from government as towards government, as the core institutions of the state build up capacity to deal authoritatively and hierarchically with new g...

The Foreign Relations of European Regions: Competences and Strategies

Abstract: The article traces the foreign relations of 81 European regions by looking first at the constitutional competences which these regions enjoy within their nation-states. We discover that the regions in federal states have expanded their competences in two directions: conducting autonomous foreign activities and influencing national foreign policy. How far the Belgian regions, as well as the German and the Austrian Lander go in both directions depends very much on the scope of their competences in domestic politics. In non-federal states (France, GB, Italy), regionalisation brought rather more leeway to conduct a certain level of autonomous foreign activity than regional influence in national foreign policy. When we – in a second step – trace the strategies or directions of international activities which the regions pursue it becomes obvious that setting up an office in Brussels in order to adapt to political integration is very common among West European regions. In contrast, much more variety can be obser...

European Political Economy: Labour Out, State Back In, Firm to the Fore

Abstract: Much has changed in European political economy over the past 30 years, both in terms of the political economic realities and the scholarly explanations of those realities. National economic policies and policymaking have undergone major transformations, largely in response to the pressures of globalisation and Europeanisation. Such transformations have entailed significant alterations in the role of the state, the importance of business, and the power of labour. In light of these changes in the political economic realities, political economists have shifted their focus over time, first taking labour out of the equation, then bringing the state back in only to devalue it in light of globalisation and Europeanisation before putting the firm front and centre. Only recently has the state been brought back in yet again while labour has made a comeback.

Political Mobilisation, Political Participation and the Power of the Vote

Abstract: This article proposes a framework to recast our thinking about political participation. The approach adopted insists on the role of collective actors and their agents – the political elites – in the democratic process and, by implication, in determining the amount and forms of individual political participation. The proposed framework builds on a simple model of representative government and introduces some major changes in the political context which have become ever more conspicuous in the course of the last 30 years, and which are substantially modifying the conditions for conventional (electoral) and unconventional political participation. Prominent among these changes are the increasing role of the media in politics, and the decline of party control over the voters. These changes tend to enhance both electoral and non-electoral forms of participation. Another set of contemporary institutional changes reduces the electoral accountability of political decision-makers, with expected consequences that ar...

At a critical juncture? Change and continuity in the institutional development of the Council Secretariat

Abstract: This article provides a historical institutionalist perspective on the General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers–an institution that has expanded significantly over the course of the integration process and whose role in the institutional politics of the EU has been recognised as significant in the recent literature on the subject. Charting the history of the institution, we demonstrate the way in which the original institutional design contributed to a particular trajectory which can be understood as a ‘path-dependent’ development. However, we also identify recent developments which can be seen as a break with the historical legacy of the Secretariat–an observation which raises the question as to whether the institution is at a critical juncture in its development. The article closes with an examination of the present and future challenges the Council Secretariat is facing at this time.

Bureaucratic change in the European administrative space: The case of the European commission

Abstract: In this article, we compare bureaucratic change in the European Commission with developments in the public administrations of the member states of the European Union using two standard features of the study of comparative public administration: the degree of politicisation of the higher management and the degree of openness of the career system. The empirical data shows that the Commission started as a public administration in the Continental tradition and over time partially moved towards the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian models. At the same time, the majority of the member states remained rather stable with regard to their position along the two administrative dimensions under study. We argue that none of the mechanisms commonly invoked to explain organisational change–functional adaptation, path dependency, isomorphism or policy windows–can convincingly account for the complete pattern and the magnitude of change that we observe in the case of the European Commission. While we find no convincing support...

The European Union Interest System in Comparative Perspective: A Bridge Too Far?

Abstract: Can we meaningfully compare within a single theoretical framework the politics of interest representation in the European Union with its counterparts in the United States and other national political systems? We address this question by first considering several candidate explanations for the lack of broad-ranging comparative research on interest representation, focusing in the end on the problem of context. We then argue that much of the recent progress in the literature is a result more of segmentation of theoretical issues. The third section discusses how this successful strategy of segmentation has unfortunately raised new theoretical barriers to comparative analysis. This argument is explored by comparing work on organised interests in the EU with two other cases – the hyper-pluralistic interest politics of the United States and the neo-corporatist politics of the Netherlands.

Europe in Search of Political Order

Abstract: This book could well have been titled Europe in Search of Further Research. It identifies key theoretical questions raised by the current state of the European Union: Can the different dimensions of EU politics be incorporated within a single theory of institutional change? How can the need for democratic legitimation of the Union be reconciled with its requirement of considerable bureaucratic organisation? To what extent is the institutional status quo of the EU a product of intentional choice? These questions, considered with acuity, are posed as critiques of the existing literature rather than in an attempt to develop answers. There is much to be learned from the exercise, and the book will be particularly useful for doctoral students. Those looking for a fully-fledged institutional alternative to instrumentalist accounts of the EU, however, may find themselves wishing the author had asked fewer questions and provided more answers. The volume’s subtitle conveys the scope of its ambition: ‘An institutional perspective on unity/diversity, citizens/their helpers, democratic design/historical drift, and the co-existence of orders.’ Olsen’s institutional perspective, well known from his work with James March, ‘assumes that rule-following is a more fundamental logic of action than action based on the continuous calculation of expected utility’ (p. 100). His preferred metaphor is that of constitutional gardening, which he counterposes to constitutional choice (instrumentally rational) and constitutional drift (evolutionarily adaptive). ‘Constitutional gardeners . . . have some long-term normative standards that make it possible to recognize constitutional weeds and to turn incremental reforms into a unified, coherent constitution’ (p. 207). How this approach might come together as an empirically researchable project is most clearly elucidated in chapter 4, ‘A Prelude to an Institutional Account’. If rule-following is the lodestar of institutionalism, then it becomes crucial to understand the process of reinterpretation ‘of what the rules of appropriate behavior are, how concrete situations are to be understood, and how to map rules onto individual cases’ (p. 109). Citing Frank Schimmelfennig’s work on the (re)definition of acceptable behaviour towards candidates for EU enlargement, Olsen shows how framing of acceptable behaviour can trump narrow standards of interest calculation at given moments of time, thus offering a tantalising view of how the institutionalist research programme can generate new insights into processes of institutional change. Yet the difficulty of empirically applying Olsen’s tenets of institutional change is often vexing. One central debate about the EU is the extent, cause, and solution of its democratic deficit. Olsen makes a series of points about both the democratic deficit (chapter 5) and its relationship to the Brussels bureaucracy (chapters 6 and 11). Here is the terrain on which institutionalist analysis should have the surest footing, as West European Politics, Vol. 31, No. 3, 624 – 638, May 2008