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| 1 |
ID:
091082
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
What impact has the 2004 enlargement had on legislative decision making in the European Union (EU)? This study answers this question by examining the controversies raised by a broad selection of legislative proposals from before and after the 2004 enlargement. The analyses focus on the alignments of decision-making actors found on those controversies. Member State representatives, the European Commission and the European Parliament vary considerably in the positions they take on controversial issues before and after enlargement. Consistent patterns in actor alignments are found for only a minority of controversial issues. To the extent that consistent patterns are found, the most common involve differences in the positions of Northern and Southern Member States and old and new Member States. The North-South alignment was more common in the EU-15 and reflected Northern Member States' preference for low levels of regulatory intervention. The new-old alignment that has been evident in the post-2004 EU reflects new Member States' preference for higher levels of financial subsidies. This study argues that the persistent diversity in actor alignments contributes to the EU's capacity to cope with enlargement.
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| 2 |
ID:
091084
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Various strands of literature in comparative politics regard governments as the only noteworthy initiators and mainsprings of legislative policy making in parliamentary democracies. Opposition activity in policy making is more often associated with the intention to prevent, rather than to shape, policy. Does this perception reflect real-life politics? To answer this question, this article discusses different arguments that link institutional and policy-related characteristics to the incentives and constraints of different government and parliamentary actors to initiate or co-sponsor legislative bills. More specifically, it relates policy-, office- and vote-related incentives, as well as institutional and resource constraints of legislative actors, to the likelihood that these actors will take the lead in legislative agenda-setting. These arguments are confronted with original data on the universe of all legislative bills in four parliamentary systems over one and a half decades. The article concludes that opposition and, in particular, bipartisan agenda-setting is indeed rare. Yet, in contrast to widely held maxims, it is neither absent nor spurious, but related to the allocation of power and the intensity of ideological conflict both within and between the (coalition) government and parliament.
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| 3 |
ID:
091079
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why are some countries able to defend their currencies when there are speculative attacks, while others fail to do so and devalue their currencies? This article suggests that intragovernment factors as well as government-legislature relations should be considered because many of the policy responses to speculative attacks do not require legislative acquiescence, so that intragovernment attributes will have more substantial effects on the policy responses than those of government-legislature relations. This article suggests that cleavages within government and its instability have a negative effect on decisiveness. Data regarding speculative attacks in developed countries from the 1970s to the 1990s and the Heckman selection model show that governments with many veto players and with less durability have had difficulty in defending their currencies in the face of speculative attacks. The article also finds that governmental institutional effects can be constrained by central bank independence. The effects become substantially smaller and statistically insignificant when central banks are very independent. The overall results imply that policy indecisiveness induced by some political factors makes governments less able to adopt a new policy equilibrium that is necessary to respond to an exogenous shock such as speculative attack.
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| 4 |
ID:
091085
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Voting and coalitions in the Council of Ministers in the enlarged European Union are analysed for the period during which the EU had 25 Member States, based on Council's roll call records. In terms of frequency of voting in the Council, the new EU Member States did not differ from their older counterparts in any significant way. However, enlargement has had an impact on the Council interaction. A spatial roll call model shows that the Council's political space is comprised of two main dimensions. The first reflects the north-south cleavage found in the Council even before the 2004 enlargement, while the second is related to enlargement and indicates a cleavage between the new and old Member States. Thus in the enlarged Union, the north-south dimension is replaced by a north-south-east pattern.
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| 5 |
ID:
091083
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
While the literature on trust has produced various conceptual models, there is also some confusion concerning different types of trust and their formation. In this article, three contested points are empirically clarified. First, are there really different forms of trust as much of the literature suggests? Second, if so, then how are these different types of trust related to each other? Third, what are the foundations of these different forms of trust? Relying on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, it is concluded that two types of trust can be empirically identified: an intimate trust in people close to the truster, as well as an abstract trust in people in general. Although these types of trust constitute separate dimensions, they are positively related to each other. Furthermore, this article challenges the widely held assumption that experiences are most relevant for particularised trust, while generalised trust is based on psychological predispositions. It is argued instead for a sphere-specific logic of trust formation: It is the radius of experiences and predispositions that matters for the radius of trust. Finally, the analysis goes beyond the existing research by highlighting hitherto unknown conditions under which trust in familiar domains is more or less likely to extend to generalised trust.
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| 6 |
ID:
091076
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the responses of ministers facing high levels of blame in the press after serious failures in the public exam system for school-leavers in Scotland in 2000 and England in 2002. It develops a method for systematic analysis and comparison of the behaviour of officeholders facing blame, tests the hypothesis that ministers will accept personal culpability only after other ways of handling blame have been exhausted and uses time series intervention models to show how one can estimate the impact of strategies on the next day's blame level. The basic sequencing hypothesis is partially upheld by the observed behaviour in these cases, though many other kinds of blame responses do not display a clear sequence. The intervention analysis also raises questions about the claimed effectiveness of presentational strategies for managing blame.
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