This study examines political party contestation over Europe, its relationship to the left/right cleavage, and the nature and emergence of Euroscepticism. The analysis is based on a large original sample of parties’ claims systematically drawn from political discourses in the mass media in seven countries: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. It addresses questions concerning parties’ mobilized criticisms of European integration and the European Union (EU), specifically: their degree and form; their location among party families and within party systems; cross-national and diachronic trends; their substantive issue contents; whether their ‘Euro-criticism’ is more tactical or ideological; whether claims construct a cleavage; and their potential for transforming party politics. Findings show that a party’s country of origin has little explanatory power, once differences between compositions of party systems are accounted for. Also governing parties are significantly more likely to be pro-European, regardless of party-type. Regional party representatives, by contrast, are significantly more likely to be ‘Euro-critical’. Overall, we find a lop-sided ‘inverted U’ on the right of the political spectrum, but this is generated entirely by the significant, committed Euroscepticism of the British Conservatives and Schweizerische Volkspartei. There is relatively little evidence for Euroscepticism elsewhere at the core, where pro-Europeanism persists. Finally, parties’ Euro-criticism from the periphery mostly constructs substantive political and economic critiques of European integration and the EU, and is not reducible to strategic anti-systemic challenges.

Since the 1990s, observers have seen globalization impairing labor’s rights. We take Charles Tilly as an exemplar of this view, subjecting his 1995 article to critical appreciation. We argue that Tilly, known for his work on the National Social Movement, overlooked the fact that some unions under pressure from global neo-liberalism can employ a protest repertoire employing their citizen rights, while others continue to use labor rights. We use port workers, who are directly exposed to globalization, to show how different political opportunity structures and different strategic choices influence these choices. In Sweden, our exemplar of a neo-corporatist system, we find that the employment of labor rights continues to be robust; in the USA, our exemplar of a fully-fledged neo-liberal system, we find much greater recourse to a repertoire calling on citizen rights. Finally, in Australia and Great Britain, countries undergoing a shift to neo-liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, we show that strategic choice influences how effectively unions adapt to shifts towards neo-liberalism: Australian unions effectively used citizen rights while the British port unions failed to make this strategic shift.

The ‘return of religion’ as a social phenomenon has aroused at least three different debates, with the first being the ‘clash of civilizations’, the second criticizing ‘modernity’, and the third focusing on the public/private distinction. This article uses Habermas’ idea of a post-secular society as a prism through which we examine the return of religion and impact on secularization. In doing so, we attempt to understand the new role of religion as a challenger of the liberal projects following the decline of communism. Against this background, section four focuses on Habermas’s central arguments in his proposal for a post-secular society. We claim that the problematique in Habermas’s analysis must be placed within the wider framework of an emerging global public sphere. In this context we examine the problem of religion’s place in political process and the two readings of Habermas as suggested by Simone Chambers.

In this paper, I demonstrate that neo-republicanism, as found in the works of Philip Pettit, Quentin Skinner, Maurizio Viroli, Iseult Honohan, and John Maynor, is underpinned by a conception of the well-ordered republic derived from the classical republican tradition. I also argue that an alternative, modern framework of the republic and its political stability emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and is captured in the work of thinkers like Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville. Neo-republicanism, however, collapses these distinct conceptions of political order. It does so in some cases by misinterpreting these nineteenth-century figures as representing the continuation of the classical perspective that calls for virtuous political participation to secure freedom. It does so in others by aligning with a classical framework of political order and yet not seeing its core conundrum as problematic, perhaps because of adopting assumptions associated with an optimistic perspective on social and political change. What is more, even if neither were a problem, neo-republicanism, in its appeal to a classical tradition, overlooks a relevant body of work which dealt with key republican concerns from within the context of increasingly commercial and heterogeneous societies.

This article is a comparative study of regional differences in social and political value orientations. I identify four central sets of value orientations: two Old Politics orientations – religious–secular and economic left–right; and two New Politics orientations – libertarian/authoritarian and green values. I use the international value studies from 15 West European countries as my empirical base. The article addresses three major research problems: (1) Which of the four value orientations is most strongly anchored in regional differences, and in which countries do we find the largest value differences between the regions? (2) Do we find the same ranking of the regions across the four value orientations, or do the value orientations group the regions in separate ways? (3) Can the other socio-structural variables explain the impact of region on value orientations, or is that impact unique? The average correlations between regions and each of the four value orientations are similar but somewhat larger for religious value and libertarian/authoritarian values. With regard to the second research problem, I hypothesize one-, two-, and three-dimensional solutions based on different spatial configurations. The one-dimensional configurations implied that there exist some (centre) regions that have secular, economic rightist, green, and libertarian regions, and (peripheral) regions with opposite value orientations. This pattern is clearly found in four countries. The expected two-dimensional solution with an Old Politics and a New Politics dimension was found in four countries, whereas the expected three-dimensional solution with two Old Politics and one New Politics dimension was found in three countries. In the multivariate analysis examining the causal impact of region, only a small portion of the correlation between region and value orientations was spurious when controlling for the other (quasi-)ascriptive variables. Furthermore, only a small portion of the impact of region was transmitted via social class variables.

Though comparative political economists have examined active labor market policies (ALMPs) by focusing narrowly on how they affect economic outcomes, this paper develops and argues for a broadened conception of how such policies can shape a variety of outcomes beyond the labor market. In particular, I argue that ALMPs have the potential to shape the quality of people’s private lives by enhancing their opportunities and motives to interact with social others. Analyses of data collected in 17 European countries show that individuals in countries with higher spending on ALMPs report more frequent social interactions and a reduced sense of social exclusion. Moreover, I find that the positive influence of labor market policies on social ties is stronger among individuals whose labor market position is more precarious. The results suggest that public policies have important and multifaceted consequences for people’s private lives and countries’ patterns of social cohesion.