We hypothesize that decisions to constrain government revenue may constitute an attractive strategy, especially to right-wing governments, when pursuing a preference for welfare state retrenchment. Whereas programmatic retrenchment in social policy programs imposes concentrated losses in return for diffuse gains, the distributive profile of systemic retrenchment via tax cuts might entail concentrated benefits for specified groups financed by diffuse losses for larger groups in a distant future. Consequently, the electorate may accept or even desire tax cuts and associated initiatives to curb government income relative to retrenchment measures of services and benefits. Our empirical analysis supports such theoretical propositions. In an extensive comparative analysis of all tax laws adopted by four Danish governments, we find clear partisan differences. In an in-depth study of the tax policy of the latest right-wing government, we moreover empirically support the causality of the argument as the government did in fact try to curb specific taxes in order to constrain the spending side of the welfare state in an indirect manner.

The European Union (EU) has been through many institutional transformations since the start of the integration project in the 1950s. While much of the literature has focussed on the more dramatic changes, less attention has been paid to instances of more limited institutional change. This article maps out and then accounts for the limitedness of the EU's departure from its original ‘federal blindness’ vis-à-vis regional actors. Theories of institutional change would lead one to expect that, as integration and regionalization heightened, endogenous pressures for change would trigger greater reform than that observed. Using a novel formula to estimate the EU's aggregate regionalization levels over time, the article demonstrates that it peaked between 1986 and 2003 but has since dropped to a level below that of the 1950s. Such a finding not only corrects a widespread assumption about regionalization levels in the European polity, but also provides an explanation for the pace and scope of the observed change as well as predictions about its future sources.

World politics is no longer a matter of executive multilateralism and technocratic expert decisions. What we see instead is the politicization of international institutions – a twofold process of growing resistance to and the more intensive utilization of these institutions. After providing evidence for this claim, this article develops propositions on the effects of politicization of world politics on the quality of decision making and the content of policies on both the international and national level. On the one hand, the politicization of international institutions arguably heralds a reflexive stage of global governance. The increased participation of societal actors leads to a new mode of decision making in world politics, which includes a notion of global common goods in conjunction with elements of public deliberation. By the same token, increased politicization of international institutions contradicts lamentations about the hollowing-out of national democracies and shows that political participation is in fact partly emigrating to the international level. While politicization has the inherent potential for initiating the democratization of international institutions and making new types of global policies possible, there are on the other hand several dangers associated to this process. First, it may perpetuate existing inequalities between North and South in terms of representation on the global level. Second, the politicization of world politics puts pressure on national democracy, since it moves attention away from national political matters and skews national policies towards universalist positions. Moreover, it arguably provokes the constitution of a new political cleavage, cosmopolitanism vs. communitarianism, which may possibly restructure politics in the 21st century to a large extent. These propositions on the effects of politicization will be developed with the help of empirical illustrations. However, they will not be systematically tested – the purpose of this contribution is to elaborate the analytical potential of a new concept and identify broad trends.

A growing field of discursive institutionalism has argued for the importance of ideas and discourse in policy changes. The aim of the study is to analyse framing effects empirically by examining how, and to what extent, competing frames can shape public opinion on the implementation of a specific policy change. The case study focuses on the administration of social assistance in Finland. Results indicate that the framing of ideas shapes public opinion. Analyses show that some types of frames are more effective than others. To be successful, a politician must simplify the issue and appeal to moral sentiments rather than present too many difficult ‘factual’ viewpoints. Our study also emphasizes that even frames that succeed in shaping popular opinion may fail if powerful political actors oppose reform. Therefore, we argue that the interplay between the ‘old’ power resource approach and the ‘new’ ideational approach should be taken into account when explaining institutional changes.

Despite strong evidence in the wider study of electoral behaviour that party campaigning can have important effects on performance, and a large pan-European literature on populist radical right and extreme right campaigns, we know very little about the impact of the latter on electoral performance. Drawing on a range of innovative campaign-related data at the aggregate and individual level, we examine the electoral impact of the British National Party (BNP) at the 2010 British general election. Our analysis reveals that whereas the extreme right polled strongest in working class manufacturing areas, support for the extreme right was significantly higher in areas where it ran intensive local campaigns, recruited larger numbers of members, has achieved local electoral success, and where local politics has historically been dominated by the centre-left. However, we find little evidence that the extreme right has benefited electorally in areas where the English Defence League social movement had previously demonstrated. Our aggregate level findings are also confirmed at the individual level after controlling for a battery of established attitudinal predictors of extreme right voting. Those contacted by the BNP campaign were significantly more likely to vote for the party, while campaigning by all other political parties was ineffective in reducing the probability of voting BNP.

A quarter century ago, in 1987, Charles C. Ragin published The Comparative Method, introducing a new method to the social sciences called Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). QCA is a comparative case-oriented research approach and collection of techniques based on set theory and Boolean algebra, which aims to combine some of the strengths of qualitative and quantitative research methods. Since its launch in 1987, QCA has been applied extensively in the social sciences. This review essay first sketches the origins of the ideas behind QCA. Next, the main features of the method, as presented in The Comparative Method, are introduced. A third part focuses on the early applications. A fourth part presents early criticisms and subsequent innovations. A fifth part then focuses on an era of further expansion in political science and presents some of the main applications in the discipline. In doing so, this paper seeks to provide insights and references into the origin and development of QCA, a non-technical introduction to its main features, the path travelled so far, and the diversification of applications.

The purpose of this paper is to account for varieties of organizational change. In particular, we contend that in order to explain change in international organizations (IOs) we cannot simply dichotomize between change and the lack thereof. Rather, change is best conceptualized as made up of two dimensions: speed and scope. The combination of the two dimensions leads to a taxonomy with four distinct types of policy change. The paper evaluates the emergence of different types of change by focusing on the relationship between IOs and their fields. Specifically, the position of the organization in the field helps to account for the speed of change (slow vs. rapid), whereas the openness of the organization to the inputs coming from the field helps to explain the scope of change (incremental vs. radical). We illustrate our argument by comparing the changes in the International Monetary Fund's policies in the areas of financial sector surveillance and poverty reduction.