This article investigates the relationships between particular social trust, general social trust, and political trust and tests a variety of political, social-psychological, and social capital theories of them. This sort of research has not been carried out before because until the World Values Survey of 2005–07 there has been, to our knowledge, no comparative survey that includes measures of particular and other forms of trust. The new data challenge a common assumption that particular social trust is either harmful or of little importance in modern democracies and shows that it has strong, positive associations with other forms of trust. However, the relationships are not symmetrical and particular social trust seems to be a necessary but not sufficient cause of general social trust, and both forms of social trust appear to be necessary, but not sufficient conditions for political trust. Strong evidence of mutual associations between different forms of trust at both the individual micro level and the contextual macro level supports theories of rainmaker effects, the importance of political institutions, and the significance of social trust for political trust. In more ways than one, social trust, not least of a particular type, seems to have an important bearing on social and political stability.

Defence cooperation between Western European countries has increased considerably since the end of the Cold War. An analytical distinction can be made between political and economic cooperation, the latter having been neglected by political scientists. This study advances the debate on economic cooperation by identifying sources of variation in the European Union (EU)-15 countries’ membership rate in cooperative armaments fora aimed at restructuring the demand side of European defence from 1996 to 2006. By combining six models from three different schools of thought, the risk of confirmation bias through intra-paradigmatic reasoning is reduced. At the same time, fuzzy-set analysis opens up the space for data-driven combination effects. Two distinct combinations form sufficient paths leading to high rates of membership. Most importantly, intentions to create collective defence technological and industrial benefits combine with trust in partners’ ability and integrity to form an essential combination of conditions for governments to pursue cooperation on armaments.

This paper tests whether the social information provided by the internet affects the decision to participate in politics. In a field experiment, subjects could choose to sign petitions and donate money to support causes. Participants were randomized into treatment groups that received varying information about how many other people had participated and a control group receiving no social information. Results show that social information has a varying effect according to the numbers provided, which is strongest when there are more than a million other participants, supporting claims about critical mass, and tipping points in political participation.

Diversity has powerful advantages, but may also generate internal tensions and low interpersonal trust. Despite extensive attention to these questions, the relationship between diversity and trust is often misunderstood and findings methodologically flawed. In this article, we specify two different mechanisms and adherent hypotheses. An individual might base her decision to trust on her perceived social similarity in relation to others in the community, that is, a similarity hypothesis. However, in a homogenous context, she might expect trustworthy behavior irrespective of her own social position due to signals of low degrees of social conflict and dense social networks, that is, a homogeneity hypothesis. Prior research has pinpointed only one of these mechanisms. The homogeneity hypothesis has not been explicated, and when the intention has been to test the similarity hypothesis, the homogeneity hypothesis has unintentionally been tested instead. The results are straightforward. While the homogeneity hypothesis is strongly supported, the findings speak against the similarity hypothesis.

The ‘challenge of convergence’ has become a core element of the European policy-making agenda. Many programs have been initiated by European institutions with a view to ensure uniformity in administrative actions and structures. In this article, we will investigate the formation of a ‘European administrative space’ as a result of a process of convergence toward a common European model, looking, in particular, at the role of communication and information technologies. As numerous policy documents produced by the European Commission indicate, new technologies have the potential to create administrative systems that are integrated across the European context in terms of their semantic, organizational, and technical content. We will pay close attention to the role of technological standardization in promoting economic development and competitiveness, as well as considering security policy as an example of ‘homogenization through technology’.

Ongoing changes in social structures, orientation, and value systems confront us with the growing necessity to address and understand transforming patterns of tolerance as well as specific aspects, such as social tolerance. Based on hierarchical analyses of the latest World Values Survey (2005–08) and national statistics for 28 countries, we assess both individual and contextual aspects that influence an individual's perception of different social groupings. Using a social tolerance index that captures personal attitudes toward these groupings, we present an institutional theory of social tolerance. Our results show that specific institutional qualities, which reduce status anxiety, such as inclusiveness, universality, and fairness, prevail over traditional socio-economic, societal, cultural, and democratic explanations.

This paper argues that the impact of devolution has been largely misperceived in both liberal intergovernmentalist (LI) and multi-level governance (MLG) accounts of European Union (EU) politics. To address the shortcomings of both LI and MLG, a new data set measuring institutionalized regional involvement in the domestic EU policy-shaping process in the EU-27 is presented. Analysis shows that the relationship between devolution and institutionalized regional involvement is overall positive but non-linear, with a strong threshold effect that is best captured by a quadratic function. The causal nature of the link between devolution and institutionalized regional involvement is ascertained through qualitative means using process tracing and Mill’s method of difference. The article concludes with the necessary updating of MLG and LI frameworks to account for the impact of devolution on EU policy-shaping.

This article examines the conditions under which governments increase spending on active labor market policies (ALMPs), as the European Union and the organization of economic co-operation and development recommend. Given that ALMPs are usually expensive and unlikely to win a government many votes, this study hypothesizes that an improving socio-economic situation is a necessary condition for increased spending. On the basis of the data of 53 governments from 18 established democracies between 1985 and 2003, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis shows that there are different combinations of conditions, or routes, toward activation and that an improving socio-economic situation is needed for each of them. Specifically, the analysis reveals that governments activate under decreasing unemployment combined with (1) trade openness, or (2) the absence of corporatism in the case of leftist governments, or (3) the presence of corporatism in the case of rightist governments. These findings advance our understanding of the politics of labor market reform.

During the latest decade, empirical research on the causes and consequences of the rule of law has expanded and, in the process, become extremely influential. However, we show that a number of widely used indices of the rule of law are not interchangeable. This lack of interchangeability is reflected in the fact that they are based on different defining attributes, to some extent cover distinct empirical scopes, do not correlate highly with each other, and support different explanatory factors. Until a consensus has been established with respect to the conceptualization of the rule of law, scholars are thus not free to opt for the measure that fits their data requirements best regarding spatial and/or temporal scope. Instead, they must carefully assess the content validity vis-à-vis their stipulated definition of the rule of law. Given the amount of money and time poured into the rule of law agenda, the problems identified reflect the lack of maturity of ‘good governance’ research.

Two currents can be distinguished in the literature regarding the domestic consequences of globalization. One perspective holds that globalization depoliticizes extra-parliamentary protest activity despite the presence of democracy. Another perspective suggests that globalization has contributed to the repoliticization of protest, especially when democracy is present. Using cross-sectional time-series data in a global sample for the 1970–2006 period, the paper examines the effect of globalization on extra-parliamentary protest activity in the context of democracy. The paper further tests these relationships cross-regionally comparing East Asia with Latin America – arguably the two regions in the world where dual transitions to economic and political liberalization have been in full force since 1970s. The results reveal distinct patterns of protest activity cross-regionally, whereby East Asia approximates the depoliticization trend from the global sample. In contrast, the results for Latin America provide confirming evidence for the repoliticization perspective. These findings remain robust across a number of control variables, and different measures of democracy and estimation techniques. Overall, the paper shows that democracy influences the relationship between globalization and extra-parliamentary protest activity – a relationship that up to now has remained systematically untested.

In the United Kingdom, the transmission between policy promises and statutes is assumed to be both rapid and efficient because of the tradition of party discipline, relative stability of government, absence of coalitions, and the limited powers of legislative revision in the second chamber. Even in the United Kingdom, the transmission is not perfect since legislative priorities and outputs are susceptible to changes in public opinion or media coverage, unanticipated events in the external world, backbench rebellions, changes in the political parties, and the practical constraints of administering policies or programmes. This paper investigates the strength of the connection between executive priorities and legislative outputs measured by the Speech from the Throne and Acts of Parliament from 1911 to 2008. These are categorized according to the policy content coding system of the UK Policy Agendas Project (www.policyagendas.org.uk). Time series cross-sectional analyses show that there is transmission of the policy agenda from the speech to acts. However, the relationship differs by party, strengthening over time for Conservative governments and declining over time for Labour and other governments.

It is often supposed that the European Union (EU) can be legitimated as a Pareto-improving bargain between its member states. This paper explores the assumptions of social choice and political philosophy that lie behind that claim. Starting out from a republican view that a polity needs to satisfy standards of non-arbitrariness if it is to be legitimate, the paper begins by explaining why ‘Coasian’ assumptions of Pareto improvement are so important to arguments for the continued indirect legitimacy of the EU by its member states. The paper then identifies four reasons from the social choice literature why attempts to follow a ‘Coasian’ pathway to Pareto improvement may fail to deliver forms of collective choice at the European level that are non-arbitrary from the point of view of all member state governments: non-neutral starting points, preference drift, indivisibilities, and multiple equilibria. These problems are, in turn, used to identify difficulties that mechanisms of indirect legitimation are likely to encounter in meeting two key conditions political philosophers specify for the non-arbitrary exercise of political power, namely, political justice and ‘democratic self-legislation’.

The famous dictum that ‘war makes states’ has received renewed interest with the experience of state failure and state collapse in many parts of the Developing World. Historical studies have shown that the activity of war-making was an essential ingredient of the process of state-making in early modern Europe. The history of state-making in the Arab Middle East shows that rentier states defy the ‘war makes states’ theory. This article compares four states from the Arab world, two having been exposed to the experience of war-making (Iraq and Jordan) and two not (the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia). The comparison of these four states shows that rentierism serves as an obstacle to the formation of legitimate and institutionalized states. However, the availability of external rents also allows state institutions and patronage channels to continue providing general welfare. Thus, rentierism produces a twin phenomenon of state weakness and life support for potentially failed states. It is only when war-making is employed in rentier states as a strategy of state-making that states fail and break.

Despite a sizable literature on the elite mass linkage, few of these studies are cross-national. In this paper, I apply multilevel ordered logit models to investigate public opinion toward redistribution in 23 European countries. I test whether these views depend on: (1) the policies of the government (i.e. the bandwagon effect) and (2) personal interest, as indicated by income and education. Briefly, the bandwagon effect appears when people’s perception of strong support for one line of thinking leads to their adopting this reasoning. The self-interest argument states that those who would benefit from a redistributive policy are likely to support it. In addition, I argue that higher education has a dual nature, consisting of an interest in providing one’s own self-interest as well as a critical thinking component. Elite opinion is quantified from the party manifestos of incumbent parties and tested against data from the European Social Survey. I find no significant direct effect of political elite views on public opinion. On the other hand, there is strong support for the self-interest argument, and yet the rightist tendency for higher educated persons is significantly smaller if their government is economically conservative. This finding is attributed to the critical thinking argument as well as to the reasoning that higher education makes people better able to filter political information, thus countering the bandwagon effect.

This article examines changes in the electoral relevance of traditional social cleavage groups in eight West European democracies, where electoral relevance is defined as group contributions to party vote shares. The approach presented here demonstrates the critical importance of both the electoral behaviour and the size of the cleavage group when electoral outcomes are of interest. The findings from analyses of the behaviour and size of working class and religious citizens (1975–2002) reveal significant declines in the contributions of these groups to party vote shares. Analyses of the sources of these declines point to the importance of group size, suggesting that the changes we observe in election results and party strategies are likely to be long-lasting alterations in the electoral landscape of Western democracies.

In recent years, a growing literature has argued that European Union (EU) member states have undergone a profound transformation caused by international institutions and by the EU, in particular. However, the state core – the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force, embodied by the police – seemed to remain intact. The literature has argued that in this area, international institutions are weak, and cooperation has remained informal and intergovernmental. We take issue with these claims and evaluate the strength of international institutions in two core areas of policing (terrorism and drugs) over time. We find that in terms of decision-making, precision, and adjudication, international institutions have become considerably stronger over time. Even when international institutions remain intergovernmental they strongly regulate how EU member states exercise their monopoly of force. Member states are even further constrained because adjudication is delegated to the European Court of Justice. Thus, even the state core is undergoing a significant transformation.

This article presents an analytical platform for discussing and analyzing administrative reforms in terms of democracy. First, we present the democratic theory positions represented by output democracy and input democracy. These two positions are used to classify different types of reform. The second explanatory approach on democracy and reforms is transformative, and it applies a mixture of external features, domestic administrative culture, and polity features to understand variations in the democratic aspects of public sector reforms. Central issues are whether these reforms can be seen as alternatives or whether they complement each other in terms of layering processes. Third, we take a broad overview of New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM reforms and carry out an in-depth analysis of a new administrative policy report by the Norwegian centre-left government. Finally, we discuss briefly the broader comparative implications of our findings.

Early analyses of the impact of donor assistance for NGOs across post-socialist Eurasia documented the extent to which the ubiquitous new NGOs were disconnected from indigenous networks, lacked sustainable resources and capacity, and were accountable to donors rather than citizens and governments. Although this article does not entirely contest such conclusions, it examines the role of NGOs from a different normative perspective based on their role as conduits of change rather than as emblems of democratic participation or liberal representation. However, in its critique, the research does contend that there are three fundamental problems with the earlier, somewhat negative analysis: (i) too much was being expected of NGOs and donor assistance; (ii) scholars were attempting to judge the impact of the intervention far too quickly; and (iii) the focus on democracy and civil society obscured the critical ‘governance’ impact that certain NGOs were having in terms of transforming decision-making and state power ‘behind the scenes’. From the empirical perspective of environmental NGOs in post-conflict Bosnia and Serbia, the paper uses a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to ascertain better the impact of external assistance in terms of particular development skills and strategies employed by recipients. The conclusion reached is that donor funding seems to be exerting a positive longer-term impact on the transactional capacities of a small core of environmental NGOs in both locations. Organizations with the most developed transactional capacities, and the few organizations now able to engage transnationally, have obtained a succession of grants over a number of years and have had their transactional activities have been funded specifically by international donors via block grants. Although this does not necessarily prove a positive relationship between donor funding and transactional capacity, it nevertheless challenges more negative assessments in the existing literature.