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Economic Knowledge in Regulation
It is conventional to argue that the autonomy and reputation of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) depend on their expertise. Yet, studies on how IRAs create and deploy their knowledge capacity are few and far apart. By addressing the underexplored question of the role of economics in regulatory policy making, this book fills a gap in two different strands of literature: on IRAs and on knowledge utilisation respectively. Only a few authors have taken a somewhat comparable approach (eg McGarity 1991, Morgenstern 1997, Jennings and Hall 2011), but their work focuses on US regulators. Conversely, little has been written on their European counterparts. This book also proposes an innovative solution to operationalise hypotheses on the role of expertise in policy making, and makes this contribution particularly relevant for recent debates on evidence-based policy making. Finally, it takes a close look at specific regulatory decisions by one of the oldest and most authoritative regulators.
Economic Knowledge in Regulation
Mapping public debates about Europe in online media, this book provides evidence of a growing convergence towards Euroscepticism in the public discourse of a variety of EU member states, old and new. A multitude of professional websites and blogs is studied during the European parliament elections of 2009 to uncover how politicians and citizens evaluate the EU on interactive news websites.
Coping with Complexity
When parties undergo abrupt organisational changes between elections - such as when they fuse, split, join or abandon party lists - they alter profoundly the organisation and supply of electoral information to voters. The alternatives on the ballot are no longer fixed but need to be actively sought out instead. This book examines how voters cope with the complexity triggered by party instability. Breaking with previous literature, it suggests that voters are versatile and ingenious decision-makers. They adapt to informational complexity with a set of cognitively less costly heuristics uniquely suited to the challenges they face. A closer look at the impact of party instability on the vote advances and qualifies quintessential theories of vote choice, including proximity voting, direction-intensity appeals, economic voting and the use of cognitive heuristics. The rich and nuanced findings illustrate that political parties hold a key to understanding voter behaviour and representation in modern democracy.
Parties, Governments and Voters in Finland
Finland's modern, technologically advanced welfare state is, in fact, a fairly recent creation, because the social changes that led to it occurred in Finland much later than elsewhere in the West. Once underway, however, such changes took place with unprecedented speed. This book is the story of what happens to parties, governments and voters when the fundamental features that conditioned party formation and voter alignments undergo rapid change. It is this that makes the Finnish case interesting and, as far as possible, this book examines Finland in a comparative perspective. Karvonen's study is based on a wealth of new primary evidence. It demonstrates that Finland is indeed a special case in certain respects, especially when it comes to the attenuation of ideological rivalry and the recurrent waves of populist protest.
Functional Representation and Democracy in the EU
Involving civil society – in particular affected stakeholders – is often seen as a solution to democratic deficits. High expectations ride on the promise of participation in new modes of governance at the EU, such as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). But its results have been modest, and it is unclear who should participate where, and how. Corinna Wolff offers a consistent framework to assess participation from the perspective of democratic legitimacy, conceptualising it as functional representation. She reviews recent theories of representation, develops them into a tool to deal with complex governance settings, then applies this framework to functional representation at the European Commission in EU social policy. The results indicate that far from being a panacea, functional representation raises fundamental questions about the possibilities for democratic European governance.
Conditional Democracy
Little is known about the political views of non-dissident Chinese intellectuals. For this book, Émilie Frenkiel has been granted unprecedented access to the discussions of politically committed Chinese who have been part of the intellectual debate on post-Tiananmen reform. Her in-depth research elicits lively views that reflect the yearnings and fears of the country’s political elite, and reveal the diversity of approaches to China’s democratisation.
The Nordic Voter
The Nordic Voter is the first book-length comparative analysis of voting behaviour in the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. Leading scholars from national election studies teams present a detailed account of voter turnout, party identification, satisfaction with democracy, preferential voting, government support and party choice. The five-nation study is based on a comparative data set prepared uniquely for this book that allows for comprehensive analysis of the diversity in voting behaviour in the Nordic countries, as well as discrepancies between Nordic and non‑Nordic countries. The book counters the widespread tendency for comparative analyses to lump...
Greece in the Euro
Greece banked on EMU. Entry into the eurozone was its ticket to macroeconomic stability, its modernisation jacket and its gateway to global markets. So how did such a promising start turn to dust so quickly? Was Greece the delinquent eurozone member whose fiscal downfall nearly brought down some of the world's strongest economies? Or was it the first victim of the euro’s system failure? An original approach to understanding how national institutions affect economic performance, diluting and disrupting single currency pressures for convergence and adjustment.
Transnational Policy Innovation
This book analyses the role of the OECD in diffusing policy innovations. Through the case study of regulatory impact analysis (RIA), this study shows how transnational networks have an impact on national policy process. The analytical framework encompasses the institutional features as well as internal and international determinants of a policy innovation such as RIA. Drawing on original data sets, three empirical analyses assess to what extent government decisions to adopt, implement, and evaluate RIA was driven by the OECD. Transnational Policy Innovation argues that concepts of policy innovation diffusion provide a useful framework for understanding the dynamics of transnational governance. It shows that the OECD has been successful in framing and diffusing a template of evidence-based decision making. However, downplaying RIA as an instrument of political control has limited the influence of the OECD's peer review and comparative indicators on the administrative and institutional setting.
Integrating Indifference
Have European citizens become increasingly Eurosceptic over the last two decades, turning their backs on European integration? Though many journalists, politicians and academics argue that they have, this book suggests that reactions to European integration cannot be reduced uniquely to a rise in Euroscepticism, but that indifference and ambivalence need also to be brought into the picture when studying EU legitimacy and its politicisation. Drawing on new evidence from survey data from eight founding member states, and focus groups conducted in francophone Belgium, France and Great Britain, Integrating Indifference explores the various faces of citizens’ indifference, from fatalism, to detachment, via sheer indecision. This book adopts a pioneering mixed-methods approach to analysing the middle-of-the-road attitudes of ordinary citizens who consider themselves neither Europhiles nor Eurosceptics. Complementing existing quantitative and qualitative literature in the field, it opens up new perspectives on attitudes towards European integration.
