Despite a sizable literature on the elite mass linkage, few of these studies are cross-national. In this paper, I apply multilevel ordered logit models to investigate public opinion toward redistribution in 23 European countries. I test whether these views depend on: (1) the policies of the government (i.e. the bandwagon effect) and (2) personal interest, as indicated by income and education. Briefly, the bandwagon effect appears when people’s perception of strong support for one line of thinking leads to their adopting this reasoning. The self-interest argument states that those who would benefit from a redistributive policy are likely to support it. In addition, I argue that higher education has a dual nature, consisting of an interest in providing one’s own self-interest as well as a critical thinking component. Elite opinion is quantified from the party manifestos of incumbent parties and tested against data from the European Social Survey. I find no significant direct effect of political elite views on public opinion. On the other hand, there is strong support for the self-interest argument, and yet the rightist tendency for higher educated persons is significantly smaller if their government is economically conservative. This finding is attributed to the critical thinking argument as well as to the reasoning that higher education makes people better able to filter political information, thus countering the bandwagon effect.

The status of ideational explanations in political science has been strengthened by the argument that institutionalized ideas structure actors’ identification of their interests as well as the interests of their political adversaries. Despite its utility, the focus on the institutionalization of ideas has had the unfortunate consequence that actors are often, implicitly or explicitly, believed to internalize ideas, making it difficult to understand how actors are able to change their ideas and institutions. Drawing on cultural sociology and ideational theory, the paper introduces the ‘bricoleur’ as an alternative vision of agency. It is argued, first, that actors cannot cognitively internalize highly structured symbolic systems, and ideas are thus ‘outside the minds of actors’. Second, using the cognitive schemas at their disposal, actors construct strategies of action based on pre-constructed ideational and political institutions. Third, actors must work actively and creatively with the ideas and institutions they use, because the structure within which actors work does not determine their response to new circumstances. Fourth, as a vast number of ideational studies have shown, actors face a complex array of challenges in getting their ideas to the top of the policy agenda, which makes it all the more important to act pragmatically, putting ideas together that may not be logically compatible but rather answer political and cultural logics. In sum, agency often takes the form of bricolage, where bits and pieces of the existing ideational and institutional legacy are put together in new forms leading to significant political transformation.

This paper argues that the impact of devolution has been largely misperceived in both liberal intergovernmentalist (LI) and multi-level governance (MLG) accounts of European Union (EU) politics. To address the shortcomings of both LI and MLG, a new data set measuring institutionalized regional involvement in the domestic EU policy-shaping process in the EU-27 is presented. Analysis shows that the relationship between devolution and institutionalized regional involvement is overall positive but non-linear, with a strong threshold effect that is best captured by a quadratic function. The causal nature of the link between devolution and institutionalized regional involvement is ascertained through qualitative means using process tracing and Mill’s method of difference. The article concludes with the necessary updating of MLG and LI frameworks to account for the impact of devolution on EU policy-shaping.

The ‘challenge of convergence’ has become a core element of the European policy-making agenda. Many programs have been initiated by European institutions with a view to ensure uniformity in administrative actions and structures. In this article, we will investigate the formation of a ‘European administrative space’ as a result of a process of convergence toward a common European model, looking, in particular, at the role of communication and information technologies. As numerous policy documents produced by the European Commission indicate, new technologies have the potential to create administrative systems that are integrated across the European context in terms of their semantic, organizational, and technical content. We will pay close attention to the role of technological standardization in promoting economic development and competitiveness, as well as considering security policy as an example of ‘homogenization through technology’.

It is often supposed that the European Union (EU) can be legitimated as a Pareto-improving bargain between its member states. This paper explores the assumptions of social choice and political philosophy that lie behind that claim. Starting out from a republican view that a polity needs to satisfy standards of non-arbitrariness if it is to be legitimate, the paper begins by explaining why ‘Coasian’ assumptions of Pareto improvement are so important to arguments for the continued indirect legitimacy of the EU by its member states. The paper then identifies four reasons from the social choice literature why attempts to follow a ‘Coasian’ pathway to Pareto improvement may fail to deliver forms of collective choice at the European level that are non-arbitrary from the point of view of all member state governments: non-neutral starting points, preference drift, indivisibilities, and multiple equilibria. These problems are, in turn, used to identify difficulties that mechanisms of indirect legitimation are likely to encounter in meeting two key conditions political philosophers specify for the non-arbitrary exercise of political power, namely, political justice and ‘democratic self-legislation’.

Defence cooperation between Western European countries has increased considerably since the end of the Cold War. An analytical distinction can be made between political and economic cooperation, the latter having been neglected by political scientists. This study advances the debate on economic cooperation by identifying sources of variation in the European Union (EU)-15 countries’ membership rate in cooperative armaments fora aimed at restructuring the demand side of European defence from 1996 to 2006. By combining six models from three different schools of thought, the risk of confirmation bias through intra-paradigmatic reasoning is reduced. At the same time, fuzzy-set analysis opens up the space for data-driven combination effects. Two distinct combinations form sufficient paths leading to high rates of membership. Most importantly, intentions to create collective defence technological and industrial benefits combine with trust in partners’ ability and integrity to form an essential combination of conditions for governments to pursue cooperation on armaments.

This article presents an analytical platform for discussing and analyzing administrative reforms in terms of democracy. First, we present the democratic theory positions represented by output democracy and input democracy. These two positions are used to classify different types of reform. The second explanatory approach on democracy and reforms is transformative, and it applies a mixture of external features, domestic administrative culture, and polity features to understand variations in the democratic aspects of public sector reforms. Central issues are whether these reforms can be seen as alternatives or whether they complement each other in terms of layering processes. Third, we take a broad overview of New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM reforms and carry out an in-depth analysis of a new administrative policy report by the Norwegian centre-left government. Finally, we discuss briefly the broader comparative implications of our findings.