Welcome Guest User. You are not logged in.

EUDO Working Paper Series

 EUDO Working Paper Series

  • The EUDO working paper series started in December 2009 and is a core element of EUDO's effort in disseminating high-quality research. The working papers cover a broad range of issues, which the four EUDO Observatories deal with. Not only the directors of the Observatories, but also EUDO fellows and external experts as well as other scholars and practitioners are welcome to participate in the series.
  • EUDO working papers are published online on this webpage and in the RSCAS Series  of the European University Institute. 
  • If you would like to publish an essay as a working paper, you can either send the full text or a short abstract or paper proposal to t his e-mail address  EUDOsecr@eui.eu .  We will respond to paper proposals by indicating whether the topic fits our series.

 

wpkeading 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series 
Issue Date
2009
Title
When Parties (also) Position Themselves: An Introduction to the EU Profiler
by
TRECHSEL , Alexander H. and MAIR, Peter 
Abstract
This paper is intended to frame and describe a novel method of political party positioning within the European Union and beyond. Ever since the groundbreaking work by Downs in the 1950s, political scientists have derived a variety of methods to empirically determine the position of parties on dimensions measuring differences in policies or ideologies. Today, two sets of techniques dominate this research domain: expert surveys and manifesto/ programme coding. What is common to both techniques is that the positioning is done by qualified scholars and other experts outside the parties, and that it is not always possible to trace the grounds on which a party was coded in one way rather than another. The EU Profiler project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary and pan-European research endeavour, takes a step beyond these established methods by using party self-positioning and by offering full documentation. That is, and in addition to conventional expert coding, some 300 political parties in Europe have been invited to place themselves on 30 issue dimensions. Moreover, and in so far as it proved possible, each coded position for each party is fully documented with extracts from party manifestos, party leaders’ speeches, or relevant press or policy statements. The resulting data offer unique opportunities for comparing the accuracy and efficiency among party positioning techniques, exploring for the first time and in a systematic way the auto-positioning of political parties throughout Europe, and offering close textual documentation for the positions taken on each issue dimension. [...]
View Full Text  
wpkeading 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series
Issue Date
2009 
Title
Public Television, Private Television and Citizens’ Political Knowledge 
by
TOKA, Gabor and POPESCU, Marina
Abstract
This paper examines cross-national variance in the impact of public and commercial television on citizens’ political knowledge level and whether and how that variance may be related to differences in the content of public television broadcast. Multilevel models are used to link micro-level information on citizen knowledge from the European Election Studies of 1999 and 2004 to macro-level information about media systems and how public television operates in different contexts that we compiled from a variety of information sources. We find that exposure to news programs on public and private television channels are both positively associated with political knowledge after stringent controls for possible shared determinants of news exposure and knowledge, but only among less interested citizens. While exposure to news on public television appears to have, on average, a more positive effect than exposure to news on private channels, the difference is not significant and varies greatly across contexts. Public television seems more effective in informing citizens in countries where public television is largely independent of commercial revenue and uses its public funding to provide a particularly large amount of news and information programs for a politically very heterogeneous audience. However, private television appears to have the advantage in countries characterized by the opposite characteristics and relatively lower levels of press freedom. The discussion relates our findings to debates about the virtues of public broadcasting. [...]
View Full Text 

 

wpkeading 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series 
Issue Date
2010
Title
 Agency and the Structure of Party Competition: Alignment, Stability and the Role of Political Elites
by
DEEGAN-KRAUSE, Kevin and ENYEDI, Zsolt
Abstract
The study of cleavages focuses primarily on constraints imposed by socio-demographic factors. While scholars have not ignored the agency of political elites, such scholarship remains fragmented among sub-fields and lacks a coherent conceptual framework. This article explores both temporal stability and positional alignments linking vote choice with socio-demographic characteristics, values and group identity to distinguish among particular kinds of structural constraints. On the basis of those distinctions, it identifies various methods by which elites reshape structures, and it links those to a broader framework that allows more comprehensive research connecting political agents and structural constraints in the electoral realm. [...]
View Full Text  

 

wpkeading 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series
Issue Date
2010
Title
The Crisis of the Eurozone 
by
BOHLE, Dorothee 
Abstract
An important tension had been underlying the first decade of the European Monetary Union. On the one hand, governments had embraced a revolutionary prospect when designing its institutions. They called on market forces and supranational institutions to limit popular democracy and scale back the interventionist state. On the other hand, they were unprepared to live up to this prospect. Hence the accumulation of large economic imbalances and their culmination in the Greek crisis and the instability of the Union’s periphery. These developments have given governments pause. With breathtaking speed, elites have agreed on the need for austerity. But it is difficult to see how the current attempt to return to the spirit of Maastricht would fare any better than before. Permanent austerity is fraught with economic irresponsibility and political risks. Europe therefore needs a new political debate about how much it wants to allow markets to determine the fate of its citizens and countries.[...]
View Full Text 

 

wpkeading 
Communities & collections
 EUDO Working Paper Series
Issue Date
2010 
Title
Beyond "Position" and "Valence". A Unified Framework for the Analysis of Political Issues 
by
 DE SIO, Lorenzo
Abstract
Starting from a review of models of positional and valence issues, the paper – by tapping into the original definition of valence issue – introduces a classification of issues based on their level of overall, dychotomic agreement. This allows the placement of both positional and valence issues on a same continuum. A second dimension is then introduced, which identifies how much specific issues are over- or undersupported within a specific party. A visual classification of issues based on these two dimensions (the AP diagram) is then introduced, highlighting risks and opportunities for a party in campaigning on specific issues. Specific indicators (namely, issue yield) and hypotheses derived from the AP model are tested on survey data from the EU Profiler project, which collected issue profiles of Internet users from the 27 EU Countries before the EP 2009 Elections. The results show that the suggested dimensions and indicators identify a wide cross-country and cross-issue variance. Also, indicators generated by the AP model are powerful predictors of issue saliency, even subsuming traditional Downsean indicators.[...]
View Full Text 
wpkeading 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series
Issue Date
2010
Title
The Execution of Delegated Powers after Lisbon. A Timely Analysis of the Regulatory Procedure with Scrutiny and its Lessons for Delegated Acts
by
KAEDING, Michael and HALAN, Ardacre
Abstract
 The history of comitology – the system of implementation committees that control the Commission in the execution of delegated powers – has been characterised by institutional tensions. The crux of these tensions has often been the role of the European Parliament and its quest to be granted powers equal to those of the Council. Over time this tension has been resolved through a series of inter-institutional agreements and Comitology Decisions, essentially giving the Parliament incremental increases in power. This process came to a head with the 2006 Comitology reform and the introduction of the regulatory procedure with scrutiny (RPS). After just over three years of experience with the RPS procedure, and having revised the entire acquis communautaire, the Treaty of Lisbon made has made it redundant through the creation of Delegated Acts (Article 290 TFEU), which gives the Parliament equal rights of oversight. This article aims to evaluate the practical implications that Delegated Acts will entail for the Parliament, principally by using the four years of experience with the RPS to better understand the challenges ahead. This analysis will be of interest to those following the study of comitology, formal and informal interinstitutional relations, and also to practitioners who will have to work with Delegated Acts in the future.[...]
View Full Text 

 

petermairwp  
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series 
Issue Date
2011 
Title
Bini Smaghi vs. the Parties: Representative Government and Institutional Constraints
by
MAIR, Peter
Abstract
Although it is generally seen as desirable that parties in government are both responsive and responsible, these two characteristics are now in increasing tension with one another. Prudence and consistency in government, as well as accountability, requires that governments conform to external constraints and past legacies, and not just answer to public opinion, and while these external constraints and legacies have grown in weight in recent years, public opinion, in its turn, has become harder and harder for governments to read and process. Meanwhile, because of changes in their organizations and in their relationship with civil society, parties in government are no longer in a position to bridge or ‘manage’ this gap, or even to persuade voters to accept it as a necessary element in political life. This problem is illustrated by extensive reference to the current fiscal crisis in Ireland, and is also used to question some of the assumptions that are involved in principal-agent treatments of the parliamentary chain of delegation.[...]
View Full Text 

 

wpkeading 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series
Issue Date
2011 
Title
Electoral Representation at the European level and its Institutional Design: A Reappraisal of Recent Reform Plans
by
LEHMANN, Wilhelm
Abstract
The double role of national political parties in both national and European politics is an important explanatory factor for the dilatory development of European democracy. This paper contends that the present institutional design of electoral procedures has political costs and is one of the main reasons for this two-faced representation. The argument proceeds in four steps. In the first part, the paper recapitulates that representation is a concept closely related to issues of accountability and responsiveness. Its practical application at the European level depends very much on the definition of the 'object' of representation. The second part demonstrates that democracy has not been a legalnormative notion during the early stages of European integration. However, since the signing of the Maastricht treaty genuine attempts have been made to go beyond regulatory matters and to create a political system with democratic credentials. Thirdly, the essay analyses new approaches in the design of electoral rules and evaluates the functioning of European political parties in view of the construction of a transnational political community. The final section addresses the knotty question whether it is desirable or even necessary for the European Union to become a more politicized governance system[...]
View Full Text  

 

petermairwp 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series 
Issue Date
2011 
Title
Party Patronage in Contemporary Europe: Principles and Practices  
by
KOPECKÝ, Petr and MAIR, Peter 
Abstract
This paper is based on the concluding chapter of a forthcoming volume reporting the results of a research project that has investigated the principles and practices of party patronage in contemporary European democracies on a systematic cross-national basis. Despite sometimes substantial theoretical interest in this topic in the past, there has been a persistent lack of comparable data with which to gauge its extent, and hence also a persistent shortfall in cross-national empirical research efforts. At the same time, much of the theoretical work in this area has also been limited by virtue of the tendency to link the concept of patronage to exchange politics, thus ignoring its potential relevance as a party organizational resource in contemporary systems of multi-level governance. This project has aimed to fill an important empirical void in the literature on contemporary European polities. It has also aimed to use this new robust empirical evidence to theorize about party patronage within the context of party organisational development and transformation, on the one hand, and political-institutional transformations of modern state, on the other[...]
View Full Text 

 

wpkeading 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series
Issue Date
2011 
Title
Four Funerals and a Party? The Political Repertoire of the Italian Radicals 
by
RADAELLI, Claudio M. and DOSSI Samuele
Abstract
The transformations brought about by changing patterns of representation, the role of the media in politics, and processes of Europeanization and globalization have challenged the political parties of the West-European Left - and Italy is no exception to this trend. At the policy level, the four transformations have constrained the classic repertoire of the left. At the level of identities, they have pushed some parties to re-invent their core beliefs and re-shuffle their electoral strongholds, whilst other less successful parties have practically withered away. By contrast, right-wing and neo-populist parties have benefited from these four historical trends. These changes are somewhat congenial to them. For Left-wing parties, however, these changing patterns have led to ‘funerals’ of traditional practices and repertoires. In this article we look at the political repertoire of the Radical Party - established as Partito Radicale in 1955 in Italy and known today as Non-violent, Transparty, Transnational Radical Party. The Radicals have been able to theorize and approach the four challenges quite pro-actively, possibly because most of these transformations were already in their genetic code. The party, grounded in political liberalism, has produced a repertoire embracing global Gandhian transnational action on human rights, anti-militarism, sustainability and the fight against prohibitionist policies; a libertarian approach to scientific ‘disorganization’ of the classic party apparatus; and a notion of federalism grounded in the critique of the state as institution detrimental to liberties and welfare. We illustrate this original political repertoire and appraise its achievements. We finally critically discuss the repertoire in the broader context of Italian and European politics.[...]
View Full Text 

 

wpkeading 
Communities & collections
 EUDO Working Paper Series
Issue Date
2011 
Title
Towards Policy-Seeking Europarties? The Development of European Political Foundations
by
GAGATEK, Wojciech and VAN HECKE, Steven
Abstract
Political parties at the European level – Europarties – do not only seek to be represented in the institutions of the EU (office-seeking) and to strengthen their role in the European Parliament elections (vote-seeking). Also, they try to colour the politics and policies of the Union, through the dissemination of ideas and the promotion of values linked to their political ideologies. In contrast to political groups in the European Parliament, until recently, Europarties were lacking resources enabling them to follow closely the substance of the EU policy process. However, the recent creation and funding of European political foundations affiliated to Europarties has been seen as a chance to provide them with the tools to become more policy-oriented. Currently, no less than eleven European political foundations are active in Brussels and beyond, and the total EU grant available to them for 2011 amounts to more than 11 million EURO. This paper investigates, for the first time, these European political foundations. It does so empirically and comparatively, based on the study of primary resources and a number of semistructured interviews, alongside existing research. The topic is addressed through a focus on the establishment of European political foundations, their organisation and their ‘transnational’ character (as networks of national political foundations). The central questions are: What are the key features of European political foundations? What purposes do they serve? And how should their relationship with Europarties be understood? Answers to these questions will shed light on one of the most recent innovations in the development of Europarties, and thus contribute to a new research agenda on EU party politics.[...]
View Full Text 
wpkeading 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series  
Issue Date
2011 
Title
Political Charisma Revisited, and Reclaimed for Political Science
by
PAPPAS, Takis S.
Abstract
This paper, initially prompted by the puzzles raised from the atypical emergence of charismatic politics in the otherwise ordinary political system that our contemporary democracy is supposed to be, seeks to bring political charisma back into the study of comparative politics by reconstructing the concept and rendering it applicable to empirical research. Unlike previous approaches, which have suffered from either individual or structural reductionism, the present study examines charisma as a pure power term by focusing on what makes it appear in ordinary democratic politics as an extraordinary phenomenon, namely, its personal (as opposed to impersonal) character of leadership and the pursuit of a politically radical (as opposed to moderate) program. Accordingly, political charisma is defined as a distinct type of legitimate leadership that is personal and aims at the radical transformation of an established institutional order. Such an understanding of political charisma enables us to further analyze the core features of charismatic leadership and construct an “index of charismaticness” ready to be put under comparative empirical investigation. Sampling from postwar and contemporary European politics, a number of charismatic leaders are examined and then contrasted to non-charismatic ones. It is argued that, once reclaimed for political science, charisma may prove a useful concept with surprising analytical potential. Renewed interest in political charisma is expected to offer valuable clues in such important research areas as political leadership, populism, and contentious politics[...]
View Full Text 
WorkingPaperRSCAS201157 
Communities & collections
EUDO Working Paper Series  
Issue Date
2012 
Title
Populism Emergent: a Framework for Analyzing its Contexts, Mechanics, and Outcomes
by
PAPPAS, Takis S.
Abstract
This paper, based on cross-regional empirical research, provides an integrated analytical framework for understanding the emergence of populism in seemingly different political contexts in both Europe (including Greece, France and the Netherlands) and Latin America (including Peru and Venezuela). It is found that, given an appropriate context, political leadership is the most important factor for setting in motion a number of interdependent causal mechanisms that may produce populism. Those mechanisms include the politicization of social resentment, the formation of new cleavage lines, and intense polarization. When successfully emergent, populism’s first and foremost outcome is the creation of new parties, or movements, of a distinctly personalist appeal. The causal explanation proposed in this paper is both parsimonious and credible. It also points to specific research themes related to successfully emergent populism[...]
View Full Text  
Latest News

Debating the Hungarian Constitution 

Debating the Hungarian Constitution 

Description
SPS/EUDO Roundtable, 2 March 2012, Theatre, Badia, EUI, 15.30-17.30
Date:
17/02/2012
New Post on EUDO cafe 

New Post on EUDO cafe 

Description
by Dieter Fuchs on Cultural Diversity, European Identity and the Legitimacy of the EU
Date:
17/02/2012
Launch of the Puzzled by Policy Platform 

Launch of the Puzzled by Policy Platform 

Description
Influence Immigration Policy in just a few clicks!
Date:
10/02/2012

All News