Political Science

Basic public pension schemes and cut backs in earnings-related public pensions led to an increasing role of supplementary pensions such as pension funds for old-age incomes. In addition to demographic changes that challenge public pensions, private pensions face financial market risks. To what extent are the scope of pension fund capitalism and the impact of financial crises on pension funds related to different institutional arrangements? Given that different production regimes reflect different pension systems, we expect systematic diversities with regard to the public-private pension mix and the specific design of supplementary pensions. These varieties should be mirrored in different forms of vulnerability of pension funds to financial market crises. We hypothesize a higher scope of pension fund capitalism and vulnerability to financial market crises in countries with predominant market-based coordination mechanisms and short term strategies on financial markets (i.e. Liberal Market Economies).

The study of policy change has been receiving increasing scholarly attention. Despite the growing number of empirical studies on policy change, the definition and measurement of the concept has made limited progress. In comparative environmental policy research, for instance, most existing large n studies rely on impact data such as pollutant emissions to approximate processes of policy change, often without discussing the conceptual implications of this measurement approach. Against this background, this article proposes a new measurement concept for empirically assessing environmental policy change, which conceives of policy change in terms of changes in policy outputs. We illustrate our measurement concept on the basis of an original dataset covering the evolution of clean air policies in 24 advanced democracies over a period of almost three decades (1976-2003). In a second step, we evaluate the relationship between our measurement of environmental policy change and standard emission data representing the most widely used proxy in the literature. Our findings suggest that clean air policies cannot be consistently associated with emission levels, therefore calling into question the viability of environmental impact data for the study of the determinants of policy change.

This paper addresses the democratically fundamental question of the inclusiveness of electorates and of its impact on citizens’ representation. While the literature has focussed on the congruence between voters and representatives, it has neglected congruence issues between citizens and representatives. The paper investigates comparatively this bias and source of newly disenfranchised citizens in a globalised society with increasing mobility. On the one hand, electoral laws vary in their inclusion or exclusion of expatriates (emigrants) and in the right to vote to non-national residents (immigrants). On the other hand, naturalisation laws vary in the maintenance of nationality for expatriates and in their inclusion of non-national residents. We illustrate levels of ―discrepancy‖ between electorate and citizenship in 22 OECD countries qualitatively, by presenting differences of electoral and nationality laws, and quantitatively, by comparing the size of citizenship with that of the electorate, and the national and resident populations. We show that shifts between political and national communities are primarily due to naturalisation laws and that electoral laws have so far been unable to correct for the discrepancy.

The paper analyzes the radical right‘s attitudes toward the EU focusing in particular on the level of congruence between the programmatic statements of the central office and the voting behavior of their MEPs. It shows that although radical right parties represent a source of opposition to the EU, within the EP they express their dissent making use of the rules of the game, voting with the opposition more than the other forces do, but voting almost as much with the majority. The party public office in the EP is inserted in the legislative process and even more collusive with the other parties of both sides of the political spectrum than the Eurosceptical rhetoric and statements of central office makes the public believe.

"Unity in Diversity" was the fortunate motto of the otherwise unfortunate Draft Constitutional Treaty. The motto did not make it into the Treaty of Lisbon. It deserves to be kept alive in a new constitutional perspective, namely the re-conceptualisation of European law as new type of conflicts law. The new type of conflicts law which the paper advocates is not concerned with selecting the proper legal system in cases with connections to various jurisdictions. It is instead meant to respond to the increasing interdependence of formerly more autonomous legal orders and to the democracy failure of constitutional states which result from the external effects of their laws and legal decisions on non-nationals. European has many means to compensate these shortcomings. It can derive its legitimacy from that compensatory potential without developing federal aspirations. The paper illustrates this approach with the help of two topical examples. The first is the conflict between European economic freedoms and national industrial relations (collective labour) law. The recent jurisprudence of the ECJ in Viking, Laval, and Rüffert in which the Court established the supremacy of the freedoms over national labour law is criticised as a counter-productive deepening of Europe‘s constitutional asymmetry and its social deficit. The second example from environmental law concerns the conflict between Austria and the Czech Republic over the Temelin nuclear power pant. The paper criticises the reasoning of the ECJ, but does not suggest an alternative outcome to the one the Court has reached. The introductory and the concluding sections generalise the perspectives of the conflicts-law approach. The introductory section takes issue with max Weber‘s national state. The concluding section suggests a three-dimensional differentiation of the approach which seeks to respond to the need for transnational regulation and governance.

This paper addresses the interactions between the extreme right and populism, looking at right wing discourses in Italy and Germany, focusing on different types of extreme right organizations (political parties, violent subcultural/young right wing groups, and political movements), and adopting a social movement perspective. Through a frame analysis conducted on several types of organizational documents (newspapers, websites, online guest books and forums, and other forms of publications), covering a period from 2000-2006, for a total of 4000 frames, it explores empirically the aspect of the conceptualization of the populism by the extreme right, showing the bridging of the appeal to the people with some traditional frames of the extreme right, such as nativism and authoritarianism, and stressing how the central populist frames (the people versus the elite) are linked to the extreme right definition of the ‗us‘ and the ‗them‘, when developing diagnoses, prognoses and motivations to action. A political opportunity and discursive approach will be useful in explaining the different configurations of populist frames depending on country and organizational type.

This paper examines the political mechanisms of welfare state policymaking in two countries with differing levels of institutional and political constraints, Germany and Ireland. The study analyzes the joint impact of political constraints and varying party governments on different dimensions of labor market policymaking. It comes to the conclusion that left-wing governments must cut spending more to accommodate the conservative opposition and gain its support when political and institutional constraints are high. To simultaneously ensure the support from pivotal extra-parliamentary actors, namely labor unions that are closely linked to the governing party, the left has to further compensate the unions’ prime constituency, which is the well-integrated core workforce. The privileged treatment of labor market ‘insiders’ by left-wing governments in countries with high political constraints comes at the expenses of labor market ‘outsiders’. Left-wing party governments in countries where political constraints are low are better able to address the needs of broader segments of society.

Studies on the role of regions in the EU policy process concentrate mainly on policy formulation and implementation of regional funds. In this article, we redress this bias by investigating the formal role of subnational authorities in the implementation of EU regulatory policies, specifically in the transposition of directives. Subnational authorities play a secondary, but increasingly important, role in the application of these measures. Their impact is greater on environmental and social policies, as also on public contract legislation. More decentralized states display higher levels of subnational involvement but, in these states, regional participation in national policymaking and a high number of regional authorities decrease the likelihood of finding subnational measures of transposition. There is also more subnational involvement in states with territories that have both an elected government as well as special arrangements regulating their relations with the EU. Finally, subnational involvement tends to prolong the process of transposition.

What explains contemporary intra-party dissent on EU issues? This article develops a cleavage theory model of internal party dissent over European integration. Drawing on Lipset and Rokkan’s classic model of political cleavages and on its applications to party positioning on European integration, I argue that if one seeks to understand when, where, and to what extent internal divisions manifest themselves, one must look to the particular historical vulnerabilities of political parties. Using expert survey data, I demonstrate that the ease with which political parties are able to assimilate the issue of European integration is influenced by the legacy of past political tensions and the extent to which the economic and political aspects of the EU reactivate pre-existing cleavages.

Research in the field of EU transposition studies has often been divided about the nature and number of independent variables that would be needed to understand actual patterns of “differential” transposition across Europe. In turn, extant approaches can only partially explain the observed transposition and implementation gap in the European Union. One of the most common, yet most contentious independent variables used in the discipline is the so-called “misfit hypothesis”. The misfit looks at how much EU requirements match the domestic status quo and, in turn, how this match impacts upon transposition processes and outcomes. Empirically, however, the argument has proven inconclusive. A vibrant debate has recently been launched among proponents and detractors of the argument. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by proposing a comprehensive theoretical re-evaluation of the hypothesis, both from a conceptual and operational perspective. Only by “cutting through the jungle” of existing misfit definitions and operationalisations can a path be cleared for a future, more successful use of the hypothesis. The paper presents a novel conceptualisation of the hypothesis, relevant for the study of transposition processes and outcomes. The conceptualisation is illustrated through the Austrian transposition experience of two EU Anti-discrimination directives.