The enforcement of EU state aid rules is often portrayed as mainly driven by technocratic standards, but there are indications that political factors also play a role. However, their exact impact and relationship with technocratic factors remain unknown. This article studies under which technocratic and political conditions the Commission approves or does not approve state aid to national airlines. Based on a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of all 14 cases of alleged state aid to national airlines between 2004 and 2019, the article shows that both the approval and non-approval of aid are predominantly dependent upon the Commission’s technocratic assessment: a low degree of market distortion turns out to be a sufficient condition for the approval of aid, whereas a high degree of market distortion is a necessary condition for the non-approval of aid. However, in some cases, political factors are decisive in determining enforcement outcomes.

The literature on carbon pricing offers competing explanations for the introduction of carbon taxation. This article contributes to the field by highlighting the interaction of dynamic political factors and external pressures in explaining the timing of the adoption of carbon taxes. Focusing on the second wave of European countries, the study combines the multiple streams framework with qualitative comparative analysis to identify conditions favourable to the introduction of carbon taxes. Additional case studies on Ireland and Portugal serve to illuminate the reform process, especially the role of policy entrepreneurs. This approach yields three insights. First, fiscal crises provide political actors with an opportunity to raise environmental taxes. Second, the introduction of carbon taxation is most likely when push and pull factors come together, i.e. when high problem pressure coincides with governments receptive to environmental issues. Finally, the prospects of “green” policy entrepreneurs are strongly determined by their standing within the government.

This paper explores the contextual and government response factors to the first-wave of the COVID-19 pandemic for 25 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. It considers configurations of: obesity rates; proportions of elderly people; inequality rates; country travel openness and COVID-19 testing regimes, against outcomes of COVID-19 mortality and case rates. It finds COVID-19 testing per case to be at the root of sufficient solutions for successful country responses, combined, in the most robust solutions, with either high proportions of elderly people or low international travel levels at the start of pandemic. The paper then locates its sample countries in relation to existing welfare typologies across two dimensions based on total social expenditure and proportional differences between the GINI coefficient before and after taxes and transfers. It finds that countries generally categorised as “liberal” in most existing typologies did the most poorly in their first-wave COVID-19 response.

The onset of the economic crisis more than a decade ago posed extreme challenges to health care systems that may now be repeated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting policies produced a wide range of (in some cases, even opposite) outcomes: increased or decreased public expenditures for health care. Curiously, however, countries that were considered particularly hard hit by the economic crisis showed different extremes of policy outcomes. Investigating these developments requires a dynamic view and identifying explanations for government action in one direction or the other. Using the lenses of several theoretical perspectives in public policy research, this article analyses the conditions under which public health expenditures changed in European Union member states after the financial crisis. Why did certain countries, at first sight similarly affected, show opposite outcomes? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) confirms that left-wing governments and coordinated market economies, in combination and alone, tended to increase public health expenditures in the short term, whereas countries where neither of these conditions was present decreased public health expenditures.

The main purpose of this paper is to detect the reasons for party leaders' persistence or departure from the office, starting from the moment they are selected or re-selected. More specifically, we try to assess which (if any) characteristics of the leadership race (LR) called to appoint (or re-appoint) the party leader, in combination with other conditions, could favour leadership re-selection in office at the end of the term, rather than a more or less forced early departure. To this end, we have investigated all the LRs promoted by both bigger and smaller parties in four Western European countries over the last three decades. Bridging the literature on leadership selection and leadership survival, we built a theoretical framework that allowed us to turn to an original methodological approach in the field – qualitative comparative analysis – to unravel asymmetrical, equi-final, and conjunctural causation by looking at the combinations of conditions leading to the outcome, namely re-selection or departure from the office. Specifically, we identified five main conditions which are likely to affect the outcome, both alone and in combination with each other: whether there is an outgoing leader running for re-election (incumbency); a broad inclusiveness of the LR called to appoint the party leader; large victory (namely low competitiveness for contested LR or high approval rates for coronation of a single candidate); participation in government during the leadership tenure; and party electoral support (‘big’ mainstream vs. ‘small’ niche/challenger parties).

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play an important role in the representation of citizens' interests towards policymakers. However, they increasingly run their campaigns not only against policymakers, but also against corporations. While the choice among strategies has been examined either in the state (targeting policymakers) or in the market (targeting companies), the choice between the two remains unexamined. Moreover, conventional studies of advocacy have failed to comparatively assess how groups combine strategies. This study fills these gaps, examining when NGOs target their campaigns at (a) the market, (b) the state and (c) both. It examines 24 NGO campaigns in the UK and Italy using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Three main findings emerge. First, structural factors – especially the openness of the market – are most important in determining which target an NGO chooses. Second, campaigns that combine strategies tend to be either market- or state-oriented. Finally, high resources are the factor that pushes NGOs to combine strategies across the market and the state.

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.

Researchers employing qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and its variants use two-element Boolean algebra to compare cases and identify putative causal conditions. I show that the two-element Boolean algebra constrains research in three important ways: it restricts what we can say about sets and the interactions between sets, it embodies a logical language that is too weak to capture modern social science theories, and it restricts our analysis of causation to necessity and sufficiency accounts and does not allow for counterfactuals. Modern quantitative analysis suffers none of these restrictions and provides a much richer way to understand the social world.

Currently, at least three approaches to judicial governance coexist in the European continent: the judicial council model, the courts service model, and the Ministry of Justice model. Although doctrinal and case-specific literatures abound on this topic, examples of cross-country studies explaining choices on these models of judicial governance are rather scarce. More particularly, we lack so far knowledge on how different factors interact in leading to the implementation of the judicial council model. This is striking, given the importance of judicial councils for the operation of the rule of law. Furthermore, explanations on the choices of models of judicial governance are essential to understanding the intricate issue of the political rationalities underlying macrolevel design of judicial institutions. Using qualitative comparative analysis and focusing on European liberal democracies, this article contributes to the literature in the field. It is shown that judicial councils are created when postauthoritarian countries implement new constitutions either in romanistic law countries or in countries subject to Europeanizing pressures.

Governments pursue their goals by adopting various mixes of policy instruments. This article proposes a specific operationalisation of these mixes and applies it to the analysis of reforms that many Western European governments have pursued, as they have adopted a similar policy design in their higher education systems (HESs) over the last 20 years. In fact, although these policies have similar templates, performance indicators exhibit remarkable variation between countries. Thus, by applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis to a large data set containing all changes in policy instruments undertaken in the last 20 years in 12 HESs in Western Europe, this article explores the possibility that differences in performance across national HESs could be associated – ceteris paribus – with different policy mixes. This article finds not only that the common template has been applied through very different national policy mixes but also that only a few instruments are regularly linked to good teaching performance, regardless of the other components of the actual policy mix.

In any democratic system, the question of whether governments pay attention to citizens’ needs and requests represents a crucial component of democratic quality. But what conditions favour this fundamental democratic process? This article compares policy priorities identified by public opinion with the actual legislative production in Italy, Spain and the UK from 2003 to 2012. The article’s methodology is a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) in which causal conditions are represented by politico-institutional and contextual factors, while the outcome consists of the degree of overlap between public opinion priorities and legislation. Empirical analysis shows that there are four paths leading to a correspondence in priorities: first, it is linked to the combination of high government decision-making capacity and declining citizens’ trust in government; second, it is also linked to the combination of rising citizens’ trust and low government decision-making capacity. Third and fourth, priorities also correspond where there is a simultaneous absence of both trust and elections, and in the absence of both decision-making capacity and elections, respectively.

This article examines how authoritarian regimes combine various strategies of repression, co-optation and legitimation to remain in power. The contribution of the article is two-fold. First, I conceptualize the hexagon of authoritarian persistence as a framework to explain how authoritarian regimes manage to survive. The hexagon is based on Gerschewski’s (2013) three pillars of stability but proposes some crucial modifications. In contrast to the model of the three pillars, the hexagon can grasp the causal complexity of autocratic survival because it is rooted in set theory and accounts for asymmetric causal relations, conjunctural causation and equifinality. Based on this, it illuminates how authoritarian regimes use multiple, mutually non-exclusive survival strategies. The second contribution is an empirical exploration which applies the hexagon and provides a case-oriented analysis of 62 persistent and non-persistent authoritarian regimes (1991–2010). By using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, the findings of this assessment illustrate five configurations of the hexagon – called hegemonic, performance-dependent, rigid, overcompensating and adaptive authoritarianism – as those combinations of strategies which facilitate authoritarian survival.

In coalition governments, political parties are concerned not only with how many but also with which departments they control. The foreign ministry is among the most highly considered prizes in coalition negotiations. This article develops hypotheses to explain under which conditions the foreign ministry is likely to be allocated to a ‘junior coalition partner’. The factors that are hypothesized to affect the allocation are: the relative size of coalition parties; the proximity of their foreign policy positions; the party family of the junior coalition party; the salience of foreign policy to the coalition parties; and past allocations of the foreign ministry to junior coalition partners. Employing a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis, the article demonstrates that although the conjunction of the junior partner being relatively large and it having led the foreign ministry in the past is not sufficient by itself, those two factors are very influential in the junior partner being allocated the foreign ministry.

The sole purpose of the enhanced standard analysis (ESA) is to prevent so-called untenable assumptions in Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). One source of such assumptions can be statements of necessity. QCA realists, the majority of QCA researchers, have elaborated a set of criteria for meaningful claims of necessity: empirical consistency, empirical relevance, and conceptual meaningfulness. I show that once Thiem’s (2017) data mining approach to detecting supersets is constrained by adhering to those standards, no CONSOL effect of Schneider and Wagemann’s ESA exists. QCA idealists, challenging most of QCA realists’ conventions, argue that separate searches for necessary conditions are futile because the most parsimonious solution formula reveals the minimally necessary disjunction of minimally sufficient conjunctions. Engaging with this perspective, I address several unresolved empirical and theoretical issues that seem to prevent the QCA idealist position from becoming mainstream.

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.

A growing literature in public policy, comparative politics and international relations has studied how the policies of one unit (e.g. country, federal state or city) are influenced by the policies of other units – that is, how policies diffuse. This article provides a meta-analysis of 114 studies, demonstrating persisting inconsistencies in the measurement of the mechanisms driving policy diffusion processes. Different indicators are used to measure the same mechanism, and the same indicators are used to measure different mechanisms. To improve this state of affairs, this article puts forward a conceptual structure that serves as a guide for the application of diffusion arguments, a starting point for theoretical refinement and a benchmark to assess measurement validity. In addition to paying more attention to the conceptual consistency of indicators, overcoming the problems currently found in the literature requires the construction of original, innovative research designs instead of the replication of widely used templates.

Actors with joint beliefs in a decision-making process form coalitions in order to translate their goals into policy. Yet, coalitions are not formed in an institutional void, but rather institutions confer opportunities and constraints to actors. This paper studies the institutional conditions under which either coalition structures with a dominant coalition or with competing coalitions emerge. It takes into account three conditions, i.e. the degree of federalism of a project, its degree of Europeanisation and the openness of the pre-parliamentary phase of the decision-making process. The cross-sectoral comparison includes the 11 most important decision-making processes in Switzerland between 2001 and 2006 with a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Results suggest that Europeanisation or an open pre-parliamentary phase lead to a dominant coalition, whereas only a specific combination of all three conditions is able to explain a structure with competing coalitions.

Using data from The International Social Survey Programme this paper compares the social networks of those aged 50 and above in 18 countries. Two different types of networks are conceptualised: family contact and community participation. Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), international sets are established for four groups of countries. Set one includes countries that only satisfy a minimal number of social network thresholds (France, Norway, Great Britain, Denmark and the USA). Set two includes a homogeneous group of countries with above-threshold rates of marriage and community participation (Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria and Canada). Other separate sets with stronger social network features comprise Eastern European countries (set three) and Southern Europe countries (set four) in these sets, family contacts are above the international country average but community participation is less strong. Country sets with low comparative threshold scores in the QCA are argued to be likely to be in greater need of government care policy interventions.