Political Science

In order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the establishment of European Union citizenship under the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, the year 2013 has been designated by the European Commission as the ‘European Year of Citizens’. The European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI) – labelled by the Commission as a ‘direct gateway through which citizens can make their voices heard in Brussels’ - may emerge in the European awareness as a new appealing platform for policy-shaping and communication. The ECI, through its transnational vox civilis character, figures among the most important novelties in the Lisbon Treaty and in the long run may facilitate and accelerate the bottom-up building of a European demos. The question is, however, whether the mechanism of pan-European signature collection is strong enough to face the democratic challenges present in the EU, especially during the ongoing financial crisis.

There has been an increasing use of direct democracy in the form of referendums on aspects of European integration. Two such referendums have been held in Ireland in 2008 and 2009 with the outcome changing from a No to a Yes vote. This paper addresses the question of what explains the change in outcome in two referendums on essentially the same document. It will do so by looking at the role of the campaign in providing information and hence reducing uncertainty, the importance of issue frames and the impact of domestic considerations on vote choice. It is suggested that there has not been a change in underlying attitudes but a change in how the Irish electorate weighed the same factors differently at both referendums. In addition, a change in economic conditions at the time of the second referendum also had an effect on how voters decided the second time around.

The EU has tried to bridge decision-making by qualified majority and unanimity over the years by expanding qualified majorities (consensus) or by making unanimities easier to achieve. I call this decision-making procedure q-“unanimity” and trace its history from the Luxembourg compromise to the Lisbon Treaty, and to more recent agreements. I analyze the most recent and explicit mechanism of this bridging (article 31 (2) of the Lisbon Treaty) and identify one specific means by which the transformation of qualified majorities to unanimities is achieved: the reduction of precision or scope of the decision, so that different behaviors can be covered by it. I provide empirical evidence of such mechanism by analyzing legislative decisions. Finally, I argue that this bridging is a ubiquitous feature of EU institutions, used in Treaties as well as in legislative decision-making.

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), government-owned or managed investment vehicles, have proliferated at a remarkable rate over the past decade, even as political controversy has surrounded them. Why? The extant literature depicts the process of SWF creation as driven by functional imperatives associated with “excess” revenue and reserves accumulated from commodity booms and large current account surpluses. I argue that SWF creation also reflects in large part a process of contingent emulation in which first this policy has been constructed as appropriate for countries with given characteristics, and then when countries took on these characteristics, they followed their peers. Put simply, fashions and fads in finance matter for policy diffusion. I assess this argument using a new dataset on SWF creation that covers nearly 80 countries from 1984 to 2007. The results suggest peer-based contingent emulation has been a crucial factor shaping the decision of many countries to create a SWF, especially among fuel exporters.

This paper focuses on the different forms of action adopted by extreme right organizations (both political parties and non-party groups) in Italy and Spain during their recent mobilization and links them to the environmental conditions and internal organizational factors which might affect them. With particular attention paid to the actors’ perceptions of reality, the macro-level factors (such as the favourable or unfavourable political opportunities of the context, the availability of allies in power, the degree of repression by authorities, etc.) as well as the meso-level factors (such as the internal characteristics of extreme right groups and their dynamics) will be explored in order to understand the action strategies of extreme right organizations and their recourse to violence. This paper, drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, will be based on 20 semi-structured interviews with extreme right representatives of the main right wing organizations in Italy and Spain as well as a protest event analysis of newspapers dating from 2005 to 2009.

This paper examines the problems of the single currency in light of the organization of labour relations in the member-states and their interaction with monetary policies. Continental (western) Europe consists of two very different systems of employment and labour relations, roughly coinciding with ‗coordinated market economies‘ (CME) in the north-west of the continent, and ‗Mixed Market Economies‘ in the south. These differences in employment relations and wage-setting systems implied that, against the background of a relatively restrictive one-size-fits-all monetary policy in place since 1999, the north-west of the continent systematically improved its competitiveness, while the south lost competitiveness in parallel. Small differences between the two groups of countries at the start of EMU thus were accentuated and, against the background of low growth and an almost closed E(M)U economy, the northern CMEs accumulated current account surpluses while the GIIPS ran into severe balance of payments problems in 2010 and 2011. The sovereign debt crises of 2010-11, which threatened the survival of the Euro-zone itself in November and December 2011, simply reflected these structural imbalances: current account deficits are financed through debt, private and public. The problem with EMU, in other words, is one of current accounts, not fiscal deficits. The paper reconstructs the construction and emergence of this system through an examination of the development of wage-setting systems against the background of monetary integration in Europe since the second oil shock.

Political scientists have been concerned about the loss of power of national parliaments through the shift of competences to the EU level. In this respect the Danish system of parliamentary scrutiny has been recommended as being highly effective. In this paper, we explain why the Folketing issues negotiation mandates on some EU law proposals whereas the government can freely chose its negotiation position on other proposals. Our empirical analysis of Danish scrutiny decision between 2006 and 2008 uncovers three answers. First, in contrast to other scrutiny measures, most of which can be initiated by single party groups, the issuance of negotiation mandates is a collective decision. Specifically, it requires the consent of a majority of deputies in the Folketing. As a consequence, the position of the minority government must win the support of a third party. This third party tends to requests a negotiation mandate if it fears that collusion between the government and its international partners might violate its interests. Second, the leading minister requests a negotiation mandate if a majority of Danish parties stand united against an adverse majority in the Council. Third, the coalition partner requests a negotiation mandate to control the leading minister in case of significant intra coalition dissent.

Basic public pension schemes and cut backs in earnings-related public pensions led to an increasing role of supplementary pensions such as pension funds for old-age incomes. In addition to demographic changes that challenge public pensions, private pensions face financial market risks. To what extent are the scope of pension fund capitalism and the impact of financial crises on pension funds related to different institutional arrangements? Given that different production regimes reflect different pension systems, we expect systematic diversities with regard to the public-private pension mix and the specific design of supplementary pensions. These varieties should be mirrored in different forms of vulnerability of pension funds to financial market crises. We hypothesize a higher scope of pension fund capitalism and vulnerability to financial market crises in countries with predominant market-based coordination mechanisms and short term strategies on financial markets (i.e. Liberal Market Economies).

The study of policy change has been receiving increasing scholarly attention. Despite the growing number of empirical studies on policy change, the definition and measurement of the concept has made limited progress. In comparative environmental policy research, for instance, most existing large n studies rely on impact data such as pollutant emissions to approximate processes of policy change, often without discussing the conceptual implications of this measurement approach. Against this background, this article proposes a new measurement concept for empirically assessing environmental policy change, which conceives of policy change in terms of changes in policy outputs. We illustrate our measurement concept on the basis of an original dataset covering the evolution of clean air policies in 24 advanced democracies over a period of almost three decades (1976-2003). In a second step, we evaluate the relationship between our measurement of environmental policy change and standard emission data representing the most widely used proxy in the literature. Our findings suggest that clean air policies cannot be consistently associated with emission levels, therefore calling into question the viability of environmental impact data for the study of the determinants of policy change.