Why do some military deployment decisions lead to high levels of political contestation, whereas others do not? Or, put differently, when does parliamentary consensus on the use of force abroad exist? In this article, we aim to answer this question by focusing on the varying levels of consensus in national parliaments when taking military deployment decisions. We do so by examining conditions that were derived from research on the domestic-level determinants of the use of force, parliamentary voting, and opposition behaviour. These conditions were included in an integrated theoretical framework, which we tested with fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The results of our analysis show that the international legal status and the objectives of the military operation are of crucial importance for explaining the pattern of political contestation. However, domestic variables need to be taken into account as well to fully explain the level of political contestation of military deployment decisions.

The comparative study of debt and fiscal consolidation has acquired a new focus in the wake of the global financial crisis. This paper re-evaluates the literature on fiscal consolidation that flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. The conventional approach to explanation is based on segmenting episodes of fiscal change into discrete observations. We argue that this misses the dynamic features of government strategy, especially in the choices made between expenditure-based and revenue-based fiscal consolidation strategies. We propose a focus on pathways rather than episodes of adjustment, to capture what Pierson terms ‘politics in time’. A case-study approach facilitates analysis of complex causality that includes the structures of interest intermediation, the role of ideas in shaping the set of feasible policy choices, and the situation of national economies in the international political economy. We support our argument with qualitative data based on two case studies, Ireland and Greece, and with additional paired comparisons of Ireland with Britain, and Greece with Spain. Our conclusions suggest that the conventional literature, by excluding key political variables from consideration, may distort our understanding and result in misleading policy prescription.

In spite of the recent increase in dual citizenship, there are widespread fears that this double status undermines loyalty towards the state, understood as identification with and political participation in the country of residence. We analyze whether there are systematic differences between dual citizens, mono citizens, and foreign residents in this respect, based on data from a 2013 survey of dual citizens in Switzerland with very different migration backgrounds. The results reveal that controlling for migration-related and socio-demographic factors, dual citizens are more loyal in many respects than foreign residents, but there are no significant differences between dual citizens and mono citizens in their level of identification with Switzerland and political participation there. They are even more likely than mono citizens to participate in serving its interests. In addition, there is no trade-off between these forms of loyalty to the country of residence and identification and political participation in the country of descent. On the contrary, they are positively related. Transnational loyalties seem to co-exist or even to be mutually reinforcing. Thus, dual citizenship does not seem to diminish loyalty to the country of residence and countries therefore do not stand to lose anything by allowing it.

How do China, Russia, and the European Union (EU) facilitate or hinder political liberalization in Belarus? In this paper, using the qualitative case study method, I primarily highlight the competition that the EU faces with the Russian active autocracy promotion in Belarus. The EU provides aid only in exchange for promise of democratic and economic reforms, which might be very costly and danger the persistence of ruling elites. Russia, at the same time, offers economic and diplomatic support to Belarus, which is, however, conditioned by privatization of the Belarusian strategic assets in favor of Russian stakeholders. I also claim that China, with growing international ambitions, passively supports autocracy in Belarus, by providing financial aid without interfering with internal political affairs. For Belarus, whose leadership still enjoys legitimation by a large part of the population due to the economic stability, losing major state enterprises might weaken sovereignty. Thus, diversification of economic partners is of crucial importance for Belarus. I argue that Belarusian ruling elites may have found an escape away from democratic and autocratic pushes from the EU and Russia, respectively, by increasing linkages with China. To promote effectively democracy in its neighborhood, the EU ought to reconsider interactions with external non-democratic actors. The paper concludes by providing some policy recommendations for the EU.

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.

This article offers a contextualization of the recently introduced leadership capital concept within the wider field of political leadership research, and a demonstration of its usefulness for studying leadership performances and patterns in different institutional and political contexts. At the centre of this piece, is an application of the leadership capital approach to studying the conditions and manifestations of executive leadership in the Federal Republic of Germany, which is being considered a classic case of a compound democracy. As the inquiry into the German case suggests, the politics of leadership capital is in fact strongly shaped by the institutional framework of a regime. That said, institutions do not determine the accumulation and spending of leadership capital, and after all, even within a given institutional context, different leaders lead by making different choices. As a case study on Helmut Kohl, the Federal Republic’s longest serving chancellor, demonstrates, the leadership capital approach marks a useful and meaningful conceptual device for a deeper analytical understanding of a leader’s performance. An inquiry carried out along these lines suggests in particular that informality was one of Kohl’s key strengths across all three dimensions of leadership capital (skills, relations, and reputation), which effectively ‘freed’ him to some considerable extent from the supposedly vital ‘performative’ parts of the office of chief executive.

Political parties play a major role in democratic processes around the world. Recent empirical research suggests that parties are increasingly less important to citizens. Simultaneously, classic and contemporary theories of representative democracy specifically still minimally incorporate accounts of party benefit. This article attempts to reconcile normative political theory on democratic representation with party politics literature. It evaluates party democracy’s value in comparison with its next best theoretical alternative – pluralist democracy with individual representatives – along two different paths. It argues that parties are not flawless, but party democracy is preferable over pluralist democracy. Parties increase predictability and the transparency of policy outcomes. This, in turn, facilitates better accountability between voters and their representatives. In addition, parties save politics from becoming a dispersed and even possibly a contradictory set of actions.

Conventional wisdom holds that in order to evade electoral punishment governments obfuscate welfare state retrenchment. However, governments do not uniformly lose votes in elections after they cut back on welfare benefits or services. Recent evidence indicates that some of these unpopular reforms are in fact vote-winners for the government. Our study of eight Danish labor marked related reforms uses insights from experimental framing studies to evaluate the impact of welfare state retrenchment on government popularity. We hypothesize that communicating retrenchment is a better strategy than obfuscating retrenchment measures. In addition, we hypothesize that the opposition’s choice between arguing against the retrenchment measure, or staying silent on the issue, affects the government’s popularity. Thus, the study presents a novel theoretical model of the popularity effects of welfare state retrenchment. In order to evaluate our propositions, we move beyond the standard measure in the literature and use monthly opinion polls to reduce the number of other factors that might affect government popularity. We demonstrate that governments can evade popular punishment by communication. They can even gain popularity if the opposition chooses not to attack. On the other hand, government popularity declines if the government obfuscates – and the decline is even larger if the opposition chooses to attack.

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.

Inclusiveness is essential to deliberative democracy, but factors influencing citizens’ willingness to participate in deliberation need to be better understood. In the case of deliberative minipublics, demographic, and attitudinal attributes demonstrably correlate with willingness to participate, and thus arguably affect the inclusiveness of deliberative events. Similarly, features of deliberative situations also influence participation – whether it will be decisive, for example. However, what is lacking is a framework for how individual and situational characteristics interact, and the role of background political and cultural settings in influencing this dynamic. Advances in personality psychology offers a useful framework for addressing this lacuna, as well as providing tools for understanding how effective participation can be enhanced. In this article, I explore how personality interacts with situational features to influence patterns of deliberative participation, as well as the motivations that are associated. These effects are illustrated by drawing on data from a field experiment, involving minipublic deliberation in Sweden on the issue of begging by internal EU migrants. The findings support the relevance of personality as a predictor of participation in deliberation, which interacts with features of deliberative situations to induce particular motivations to either participate or refuse.

The institutional architecture of the European Union is based on two fundamentally competing ideas: supranational rule and national sovereignty. These two underlying ideas are not reconcilable and work at different levels in the background of the policy debate. While on the normative level public sentiments remain strongly linked to the idea of state autonomy, on the cognitive level the paradigm of a functional necessity to cooperate is decisive for actual policy making. Only in some policy domains, such as the single market program, have policy-makers attempted to re-couple normative and cognitive ideas. In contrast to this, the central argument is that policy-makers mostly adhere to an alternative strategy: the systematic decoupling of normative and cognitive ideas. Focusing on public administration, it is shown how deft policy instrumentation allows actors to realize program ideas that satisfy demands for increased supranational governance. At the same time, however, these instruments are in dissonance with how policies are framed against the background of public sentiments that assume domestic bureaucratic independence.

Many democracies are witnessing the rise and continuing success of parties and politicians who oppose fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Recent research finds that voters support illiberal politicians, because they trade off policy congruence against attitudes toward liberal democracy. Other studies, however, suggest that authoritarian and populist voters might actually have a preference to vote for illiberal candidates. We argue that both factors interact: Authoritarian and populist voters are more willing to trade off policy representation against support for liberal democracy. To test this mechanism, we rely on a survey experiment conducted in Germany. The results clearly demonstrate that voters indeed trade off policy congruence against liberal democracy. Moreover, this effect is particularly strong for populist and authoritarian voters. Overall, the results have important implications for understanding when and which voters support or oppose liberal democracy.

This article contributes to a burgeoning literature on parliamentary war powers by investigating the case of the US Congress drawing on both International Relations (IR) research and traditional war powers studies. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and case study method, we examine the conditions shaping congressional assertiveness. The article shows that the lack of national security interests and divided government are important conditions for members of Congress to criticize presidential intervention policies. While previous US war powers studies focused on the influence of partisanship, this article holds that domestic as well as international factors influence congressional behavior. A short comparative case study of two US military interventions (Libya 2011, ISIS 2014–15) during the Obama presidency serves to illustrate the findings.

Political science is the product of modernity and the nation-state. A dominant tradition within it has striven for a positivistic and universal form of understanding, based on the individual actor. Developments in recent years have questioned our understanding of modernity, universalism, science, and the nation-state. Political science has responded in two ways: by reinforcing the positivist approach, or by adopting various forms of intepretivism. This has created an artificial division within the discipline. Political scientists can overcome this artificial divide by looking outside the discipline. There are promising developments in this direction but these are inhibited by trying to confine them within the dominant positivist mode. They have also responded by borrowing from neighbouring disciplines, but in doing so, they have too often appropriated concepts in simplified form or coined empty concepts. They need to take neighbouring disciplines more seriously and work across disciplinary boundaries. A pluralistic approach is possible, which neither seeks a grand synthesis of all the social sciences, nor sees them as independent and self-standing, but which encourages cross-fertilization and combinations of approaches. The existence of distinct European national and disciplinary traditions, far from being an obstacle to the development of the discipline, gives European political scientists an advantage.

The article analyses the public attribution of blame and the use of presentational strategies of blame avoidance in complex delegation structures. We theorize and empirically demonstrate that complex delegation structures result in the diffusion of blame to multiple actors so that a clear allocation of responsibility becomes more difficult. The article shows that public attribution of blame follows a distinct temporal pattern in which politicians only gradually move into the centre of the blame storm. We also find that blame-takers deploy sequential patterns of presentational management and use blame shifting to other actors as a dominant strategy. However, the analysis suggests that complex delegation structures impose limitations on blame-takers’ use of blame avoidance strategies, and that sequential presentational management becomes less useful over time. The article uses media content analysis to study blame games during a major crisis of the public transport system in Berlin, Germany.

This paper addresses the relationship between political legitimacy arising from a link with the ‘will of the people’, and political legitimacy arising from beneficial consequences for them. Questioning the common assumption of an inherent trade-off between ‘input’ and ‘output legitimacy’, it suggests that the two necessarily go together, and that their relationship is continuously reconstructed through discursive contestation. These claims are first substantiated conceptually, in reference to the legitimacy literature in European Union (EU) Studies, which is situated in the broader fields of Political Theory and Comparative Politics. In a second step, the argument is developed on the grounds of empirical case material: an interpretive, non-quantitative reconstruction of the changing discourses on EU legitimacy by the European institutions from the 1950s to the early 2000s.

This paper discusses the hypothesis that democracy hurts economic growth and development, also known as the Lee thesis, and discusses why one could expect dictatorship to be particularly beneficial for growth in the Asian context. Three general theoretical arguments in support of the Lee thesis are then presented. However, the empirical results, based on panel data analysis on more than 20 Asian countries, do not support the hypothesis that dictatorship increases economic growth in Asia. There is no significant, average effect of democracy on growth. Asian dictatorships do invest a larger fraction of their GDP than democracies, but they are worse at generating high enrollment ratios in education after primary school.

This article builds on V.O. Key’s postulate that voters are not fools and that they function as an echo chamber reflecting the clarity of alternatives presented to them. We first propose a reassessment of Key’s claim by examining whether and to what extent the impact of issue preferences on the vote choice depends on the clarity of parties’ profile on these issues. Our empirical tests are based on data from the 2007 Swiss election study and cover three different issues that voters may use as decision-making criteria. Our results confirm that the clearer a party’s profile on a given issue, the higher the impact of that issue on the vote for the party. Second, we offer a refinement of Key’s argument by arguing that voters’ political sophistication conditions the strength of issue voting. Empirical evidence supports this argument, but shows that the effect of political sophistication is curvilinear: sophistication exerts a stronger mediating role when a party has a moderately clear profile than when it has a low or high profile.

Do public attitudes concerning the European Union affect the speed with which member states transpose European directives? It is posited in this article that member state governments do respond to public attitudes regarding the EU when transposing European directives. Specifically, it is hypothesized that member state governments slow transposition of directives when aggregate public Euroskepticism is greater. This expectation is tested using extended Cox proportional hazard modeling and data derived from the EU’s legislative archives, the official journals of EU member states, and the Eurobarometer survey series. It is found that member state governments do slow transposition in response to higher aggregate public Euroskepticism. These findings have important implications for the study of European policy implementation, as well as for our understanding of political responsiveness in the EU.

Institutionalizing civilian control over the military is a crucial challenge for newly democratized nations. This paper aims to answer the question under which conditions civilian control can be established after the transition to democracy, and under which conditions civilian control fails. To answer this question, we draw on original data on civil–military relations in 28 new democracies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America and run a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. We find that no single explanatory factor can be considered necessary for the success or failure of civilian control in new democracies, but identify a number of sufficient variable combinations to explain the development of civil–military relations after the transition to democracy.