Political corruption in the land sector is pervasive, but difficult to document and effectively prosecute. This article provides new evidence on political land corruption in Malta, the European Union’s smallest member state and one of the world’s most densely populated countries. It shows how the country’s highly restrictive zoning laws, along with a de jure independent regulator, have created opportunities for extensive and endemic corruption in the granting of land development permits in zones that are outside development. It provides an example of governments creating institutions as rent-collection instruments – not to correct market failures, but to create opportunities for corruption. The unique underlying data set was collected through an automated web-scraping program as the regulator first turned down then ignored freedom of information requests for the data.

This article tackles the question of how bureaucratic structures condition frontline implementers’ use of European Union (EU) migration law. Adopting an organisational perspective, the study expects that only under discretion do implementers draw independently on original EU law. Empirically, the article draws on qualitative interviews with migration law implementers in the Netherlands and the German Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia. The analysis reveals that in the nondiscretionary Dutch structure, frontline implementers only rely on EU law when receiving instructions from higher administrative levels. The use of EU law is more diverse in the German discretionary structure. Under legal tension, several German frontline implementers use EU law parallel to national law. However, not all German respondents feel comfortable in interpreting original EU law and jurisprudence. Although structural discretion conditions uses of EU law, the variation of the German case suggests that microlevel factors complement explanations for frontline uses of EU law.

A country is on the carbon efficiency frontier if its per-capita emissions of CO2 are at least as low as any state that was at least as economically developed at a period when technology was no more advanced. Building on earlier work employing Data Envelopment Analysis to benchmark performance, we argue that a useful measure of whether a state adopts “good practice” in relation to climate change is how near it is to this frontier. We calculate efficiency scores for a sample of developed countries between 1994 and 2011, and model the impact of green taxation, next to a series of political and economic controls, on performance. We find that higher levels of environmental tax revenue are positively and significantly associated with higher carbon efficiency. The central contributions of this research are the introduction of an innovative measure for environmental quality and assessing how this is driven by green taxation.

European energy security has recently emerged as an important topic of scholarly attention. Many studies have scrutinised the political and institutional innovations triggered by the establishment of the European Union internal energy market and external energy policy. However, the literature indicates a particularly striking gap between growing research and concept development, and only recently have efforts been made to analyse this current dynamic more accurately. By focussing on the security of gas supply and liquefied natural gas development in France, Italy and Spain, and extending the model of the catalytic state to the energy-security realm, this article contributes to the empirical and conceptual debate. In particular, the article argues that the catalytic state model, which emphasises the active role of governments in a liberalised market structure and their wide participation in a networked pattern of energy diplomacy, is better equipped than the regulatory state model to capture the new European politics of energy security.

Theories of public policy change, despite their differences, converge on one point of strong agreement: the relationship between policy and its causes can and does change over time. This consensus yields numerous empirical implications, but our standard analytical tools are inadequate for testing them. As a result, the dynamic and transformative relationships predicted by policy theories have been left largely unexplored in time series analysis of public policy. This article introduces dynamic linear modelling (DLM) as a useful statistical tool for exploring time-varying relationships in public policy. The article offers a detailed exposition of the DLM approach and illustrates its usefulness with a time series analysis of United States defense policy from 1957 to 2010. The results point the way for a new attention to dynamics in the policy process, and the article concludes with a discussion of how this research programme can profit from applying DLMs.