This article discusses how nationalist regional and state-wide parties, responding to different sub-national party systems dynamics, contribute similarly to interregional and individual public opinion disagreements about the model of the state in new, successfully decentralized democracies. Using individual survey data and other regional-level aggregate measures to perform a multilevel analysis in the 17 Spanish regions, we will show that both types of parties (non- and state-wide parties), following certain sub-national party system dynamics, are a very important influential and conditional factor in explaining the individual preferences adopted by citizens regarding the model of the state, despite the generally positive evaluation of the performance of new decentralized institutions by a large majority of Spaniards. These different positions are producing a persistent inter-individual conflict among Spaniards that have also a strong interregional component.

Since the 1980s, the level of activism of regions in European Union policy-making has greatly increased, leading to the emergence of claims that regional governments can and do bypass national government in European negotiations. However, two decades after the emergence of the concept, the debate about the ability of regions to engage successfully in this process of continuous negotiation and to represent their interests on the European stage is ongoing. Due to the scarcity of research looking at regional interest representation in concrete cases of policy-making, it has been difficult to establish to what extent and under which circumstances regions do rely on unmediated channels of interest representation on the European level. This article examines these questions through the activities of seven legislative regions during two negotiations of European Directives, as legislative regions have a wider choice of channels of interest representation. Overall, extensive use of unmediated access in regulatory policy-making is rare and can best be explained with reference to domestic conflict and the level of influence of a region in domestic European policy-making. Differences in the size of a region also influence the ability of a region to represent its interests in the coordination of the national position and at the European level.

In recent years, deliberative democracy has moved from a philosophical ideal into an empirical theory with numerous experiments testing the theoretical assumptions. Despite the wealth of evidence on the potential for deliberation, scholars have remained hesitant to test the theoretical premises under rather more adverse circumstances. This article, in contrast, tries to push deliberative scholarship to its edge by focusing on the viability of citizen deliberation in deeply divided societies. Our research questions are whether contact between citizens of competing segments undermines the potential for deliberation, and under which institutional conditions this is so. Based on a deliberative experiment in Belgium, in which we varied the group composition and the decision-making rule, we argue that decision rules are strong predictors of deliberative quality, but more importantly that the confrontation between citizens from both sides of the divide does not undermine the quality of deliberation. On the contrary even, our results indicate that the quality of intergroup deliberation is higher than that of intragroup deliberation, no matter what the rule.

Media coverage of elections in Europe and North America has increasingly focused on the campaign as a game rather than a policy debate. This is often explained by the changes in media pressures. It may also reflect the narrowing of policy space between left and right and the comparative prosperity enjoyed in Europe and North America. But the relevance of policy varies. The global economic crisis might have led to an increased interest in policy among voters and focus on it by media. Ireland experienced both extremes of boom and crisis between the late 1990s and 2011. The Irish case allows us to test the impact of the crisis on media framing of elections. This article uses original data from the three most recent national elections in Ireland, with a research design that holds other pertinent variables constant. We find empirical support for the theoretical expectation that the context of the election affects the relative focus on campaign or horserace vs. substantive policy issues.

Political scientists have started to focus on ‘practice’ as the smallest unit of analysis. Following a broader turn in the social sciences, the practice focus provides multiple advantages, including better conceptualizations of short-term social change, getting closer to the everyday activities of those speaking, writing and doing politics, appropriate conceptualization of agency-structure dynamics, or forms of analysis resonating with other communities than scholarly ones. This contribution asks what the methodological implications of the practice turn are. It is argued that the practice focus does not only imply a certain ‘theory’ but also a certain methodology. I advance the term praxiography to speak about the forms of analysis produced by practice researchers. I discuss key guidelines of praxiographic research on two levels: first, general research strategies that provide empirical access points, second, guidelines for data collection in the frame of participant observation, expert interviews, and document analysis. I conclude in arguing that although praxiography is context driven, and hence requires to be tailored to the research problem, it is vital to reflect on the methodological repertoire of praxiographic research.