This paper notes the tendency of ‘social movement unionism’ scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic to focus on and prescribe the citizen repertoire as the single most important repertoire of labor for challenging neoliberal globalization. Consistent with liberal conceptions of civil society and theories of participatory democracy, it implicitly dismisses political unionism as a path to labor’s revitalization. It also assumes epochal change and confines neoliberalism to the post-Washington Consensus era. Deviant case analysis of Italian labor’s use of two repertoires (the citizen and the labor repertoire) and of its two regimes of capitalism (in succession, a post-WWII neoliberal regime and a post-1970 corporatist regime) over the course of the ‘American Century’ gives pause to both these contentions. This study relates labor’s citizen repertoire to the era of US hegemony that promotes changes in party-government that tend to reproduce the image of the archetypically neoliberal American polity: a polity that is devoid of ‘labor’ as a recognized category of the political community, is low in social rights, and, relatedly, is devoid of a party of labor. In this neoliberal political order, labor is perennially locked into the category of ‘citizen’ and reliant on the citizen repertoire. By contrast, the survival of parties of labor in non-US polities during the post-war wave of neoliberalism permitted union movements a route away from labor-decategorizing orders – political unionism. Now, in the post-Washington Consensus wave of neoliberal regime change, that route is more onerous owing to Third Way changes in parties of labor. The major challenge for labor movements that have experienced regime change to a neoliberal polity is in directing their efforts and even their new citizen repertoire to the task of recapturing parties of labor or to creating new ones – or risk long-term US-style labor decategorization.

The European Union is at a make-or-break moment. The current crisis could be beneficial or detrimental for its future. We revisit Schmitter’s model of crisis-induced decision-making cycles (1970) and critically discuss why the current crisis might not be as benign as originally thought.

The literature on Public Utilities has increasingly shown that the adoption of corporate governance tools for the management of public services in local policy-making has given rise to a considerable reshaping of political strategies and practices. Corporatisation should be understood as not merely a policy instrument, but also as a new opportunity for local politicians to adjust their preferences, to deal with various interests, and to build unusual coalitions. Corporatisation may (and does) influence the concrete operation of local political systems. Today, the boards of municipal enterprises, as well as the public–private partnerships stemming from this emerging tendency towards corporatisation, can be conceived as both actors of local policy-making and arenas in which a number of functions traditionally associated with the mechanisms of electoral representation are performed: inter- and intra-party bargaining, recruitment of élites, and negotiation with local and ‘external’ stakeholders. The paper illustrates the impact of corporatisation on local representation mechanisms in Italy, considering its opaque side with specific reference to the problem of democratic accountability and control, and the creation of new local oligarchies. Empirical evidence is provided from research on municipal enterprises in six different Italian regions. Statistical data on companies (amount of social capital, fields of activity, private and public shareholders, etc.), as well as qualitative data, are analysed in order to show how corporatisation has provided local actors with unusual (and often non-transparent) channels of political representation and public–private bargaining.

Conventional wisdom suggests that environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) play a major role in pushing states towards more ambitious environmental policies. However, demonstrating that this presumption is in fact true is rather difficult, because the same system structures of democracies that may create more opportunities for ENGO activities are also, on their own, conducive to better environmental policies. This leaves open the possibility that the additional (marginal) impact of ENGOs on policy making is smaller than presumed. In trying to disentangle these effects, this paper examines the influence of ENGOs contingent on key structural characteristics of democratic systems. We develop the argument that presidential systems with a plurality electoral rule per se tend to provide more environmental public goods, which induces a smaller marginal impact of ENGOs. Conversely, parliamentary systems with a proportional representation electoral rule are likely to provide fewer environmental public goods, which allows for a larger marginal impact of ENGOs. We find robust empirical support for these hypotheses in analyses that focus on the ratification behavior of 75 democracies vis-à-vis 250 international environmental agreements in 1973–2002.

This article develops a concept of transnational civil dis/obedience. It provides a framework for interpreting and evaluating practices of cross-border movement by citizens and migrants, who mobilize international or supranational law to sidestep and challenge domestic rules deemed illegitimate. Such acts are made possible by, but also enact, complex, overlapping and competing legal orders in Europe and elsewhere. In contrast to analyses stressing the private and market-based nature of these actions, the conceptual lens introduced here draws out their potentially civic and political character. To construct and illustrate my argument, I engage with an in-depth case study of EU citizenship and cross-border movement in the area of marriage migration, where individual liberty and political membership are fiercely contested. The paper draws on narrative interviews with Danish-international couples who in response to Denmark’s restrictive family unification rules have used EU-law to protest against what they see as unjust interference in their private lives.

This article examines one widespread but widely overlooked informal party practice to access state resources indirectly: the ‘taxing’ of MP salaries, which obliges candidates who win elected office on a party ticket to regularly donate a fixed share of their private income to party coffers. Linking Duverger’s classical approach on party organization that stresses the importance of party–society relations with the more recent, highly influential cartel party theory that argues that parties are shaped by their relationship with the state, we specify factors that shape the acceptability of this informal practice and thus parties’ capacity to extract rent from their MPs. The analysis of an original dataset covering parties across a wide range of advanced democracies reveals that demanding salary transfers from national MPs to their parties are not only more common in leftist parties as argued by Duverger but also in systems in which the penetration of the state apparatus by political parties is intense as argued by the cartel party approach. Linking the two perspectives further reveals that ideological differences between parties shape their relative capacity to collect higher payments from MPs in systems where parties and the state are less intertwined.

What populist right parties offer (the supply side) should be examined in relation to the preferences of the populist right electorate (the demand side). This article examines how the supply and demand in the electoral market are met by assessing the relative importance of party, party leader, and district-level candidate for the right-wing populist vote. The study is set in an electoral system, which uses preferential voting for candidates in multi-member districts, namely Finland, where all three objects of vote choice may matter. We analyse post-election survey data for the 2011 parliamentary election in which the right-wing populist True Finns party gained almost one fifth of the national vote. The results show that being guided by the characteristics of the party leader is a much stronger predictor the of the True Finns vote than being affected by party or district-level candidate characteristics.

We investigate the levels of horse-race coverage in 160 different European print and broadcast outlets in 27 different countries at three different points in time. We match information on outlets’ content to survey-based information on the average levels of interest in politics and education of outlets’ audiences. We formulate hypotheses concerning journalists’ and citizens’ preferences over the ideal level of horse-race coverage, as well as hypotheses concerning the information content of horse-race coverage in different party systems. After controlling for the composition of each outlet’s audience, we find that horse-race coverage is most frequent in polarized party systems with close electoral contests, and in large markets with professional journalists. These findings challenge the traditional view of horse-race journalism as a ‘low-quality’ form of news.

An important outcome of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). This was set up to discipline the use of national food safety and animal and plant health regulations and to prevent their emergence as technical barriers to trade. The Agreement privileges free trade and scientific evidence, thus excluding many ethical considerations from the regulations that national governments can enact in relation to production methods in the agri-food chain. Autonomously from the SPS Agreement, a number of global private standard schemes have been developed that have incorporated values rejected by the SPS Agreement. This paper examines the relationship between the Agreement and the private standards and argues that this case highlights a gap in the institutional literature with respect to parallel institutions emerging autonomously from the primary institution to embody values excluded by the latter. We adopt the term commensalism for these previously undescribed relationships.