World politics is no longer a matter of executive multilateralism and technocratic expert decisions. What we see instead is the politicization of international institutions – a twofold process of growing resistance to and the more intensive utilization of these institutions. After providing evidence for this claim, this article develops propositions on the effects of politicization of world politics on the quality of decision making and the content of policies on both the international and national level. On the one hand, the politicization of international institutions arguably heralds a reflexive stage of global governance. The increased participation of societal actors leads to a new mode of decision making in world politics, which includes a notion of global common goods in conjunction with elements of public deliberation. By the same token, increased politicization of international institutions contradicts lamentations about the hollowing-out of national democracies and shows that political participation is in fact partly emigrating to the international level. While politicization has the inherent potential for initiating the democratization of international institutions and making new types of global policies possible, there are on the other hand several dangers associated to this process. First, it may perpetuate existing inequalities between North and South in terms of representation on the global level. Second, the politicization of world politics puts pressure on national democracy, since it moves attention away from national political matters and skews national policies towards universalist positions. Moreover, it arguably provokes the constitution of a new political cleavage, cosmopolitanism vs. communitarianism, which may possibly restructure politics in the 21st century to a large extent. These propositions on the effects of politicization will be developed with the help of empirical illustrations. However, they will not be systematically tested – the purpose of this contribution is to elaborate the analytical potential of a new concept and identify broad trends.

This article provides a comprehensive theoretical model for analysing the influence of European party federations (Europarties) on their Central and Eastern European (CEE) partner parties. It draws on the concepts of Europeanization and party change and is, in principle, applicable to similar processes of party enlargement elsewhere. In the process of their Eastern enlargement, Europarties have searched for suitable CEE partner parties on which they have tried to exert influence. Thus far, little is known about the precise mechanisms involved and the actual impact of these processes. We argue that Europarty influence leads to party change on the side of the CEE partners, which brings about ‘West-Europeanization’. Europarties are expected to apply a double strategy that consists of a process of political exchange based on a largely asymmetric power relationship in favour of Europarties and a socialization strategy in which Europarties try to socialize their partners and convince them of the appropriateness of change. We present the theoretical and analytical tools for the analysis of the arguably largest extension of transnational party organizations, which provides ample testing ground for more general theories on party change. Furthermore, we present preliminary empirical evidence on the two most important cases, namely the European People's Party and the Party of European Socialists, which indicates that Europarties played an important role in the development of CEE parties and party systems in general.

We present a model of deliberative inclusion, focusing on reciprocity in the interaction between structural minorities/disadvantaged groups and majorities/privileged groups. Our model, however, comes with a ‘friendly amendment’: we have put the ‘burden of reciprocity’ mainly on majorities and privileged groups. It is mainly their obligation to seriously listen and respond to the demands and arguments of minorities and disadvantaged groups and show a willingness to respect and accommodate these interests. Empirically, we apply our model to the interaction of linguistic groups in the Swiss parliament. We find a highly egalitarian, sometimes even minority-favoring mode of interaction between the German-speaking majority and linguistic minorities. The German-speaking majority seems to be willing to take the ‘burden of reciprocity’ when linguistic minorities’ vital interests are concerned. Conversely, linguistic minorities are slightly more self-referential and adversarial under such conditions.

We hypothesize that decisions to constrain government revenue may constitute an attractive strategy, especially to right-wing governments, when pursuing a preference for welfare state retrenchment. Whereas programmatic retrenchment in social policy programs imposes concentrated losses in return for diffuse gains, the distributive profile of systemic retrenchment via tax cuts might entail concentrated benefits for specified groups financed by diffuse losses for larger groups in a distant future. Consequently, the electorate may accept or even desire tax cuts and associated initiatives to curb government income relative to retrenchment measures of services and benefits. Our empirical analysis supports such theoretical propositions. In an extensive comparative analysis of all tax laws adopted by four Danish governments, we find clear partisan differences. In an in-depth study of the tax policy of the latest right-wing government, we moreover empirically support the causality of the argument as the government did in fact try to curb specific taxes in order to constrain the spending side of the welfare state in an indirect manner.

The European Union (EU) has been through many institutional transformations since the start of the integration project in the 1950s. While much of the literature has focussed on the more dramatic changes, less attention has been paid to instances of more limited institutional change. This article maps out and then accounts for the limitedness of the EU's departure from its original ‘federal blindness’ vis-à-vis regional actors. Theories of institutional change would lead one to expect that, as integration and regionalization heightened, endogenous pressures for change would trigger greater reform than that observed. Using a novel formula to estimate the EU's aggregate regionalization levels over time, the article demonstrates that it peaked between 1986 and 2003 but has since dropped to a level below that of the 1950s. Such a finding not only corrects a widespread assumption about regionalization levels in the European polity, but also provides an explanation for the pace and scope of the observed change as well as predictions about its future sources.