Recent reforms to the Canadian Senate removed senators from the Liberal Party caucus and changed the appointment process to be more nonpartisan. This article asks: to what extent did the reforms affect legislative oversight in the Senate? By studying the Senate's legislative amendments, I find that the reformed Senate is more willing to amend bills than it was previously. The reforms led to sharp increases in the Senate's amendment rate, the number of amendments moved and the percentage of successful motions in amendment. In interviews, senators revealed that they see oversight differently following the reforms. Senators no longer have opportunities to advise the government in caucus, so they have begun using amendments to exercise oversight. This article concludes that the reforms shifted senators’ understanding of their function of oversight, leading to a higher amendment rate and increased visible scrutiny of government by the Senate.

Despite its numerous valuable contributions to Arctic governance, throughout its history the Arctic Council (AC) has been subject to criticism and reform proposals from academic, non-governmental and practitioner communities alike. In order to inform this ongoing debate, the paper evaluates the proposals that have been presented for the AC thus far. The proposals are grouped into three clusters: legal reforms, organisational reforms and functional reforms. Each of them is examined in terms of its applicability and usefulness to the case of the AC, and specifically its suitability given the prevailing conditions in the Arctic. What the conducted analysis reveals is that the ideas regarding means to enhance the AC’s effectiveness can be largely attributed to the assumptions their proponents make—oftentimes implicitly—about the nature of state actors and international relations more broadly, without attending to the particular conditions of the case study at hand. This is an important inference, given the unrelenting change happening in both Arctic and global socio-environmental settings that calls into question the usefulness of past modes of thinking and forms of international cooperation. Far from offering solutions, their continuous application in particular circumstances might even impede progress in addressing present and future challenges.

The paper investigates and theorises different forms and patterns of resistance to international courts (ICs) and develops an analytical framework for explaining their variability. In order to make intelligible the resistance that many ICs are currently facing, the paper first unpacks the concept of resistance. It then introduces a key distinction between mere pushback from individual Member States or other actors, seeking to influence the future direction of a court's case-law, and actual backlash – a critique triggering significant institutional reform or even the dismantling of tribunals. On the basis on the proposed theoretical framework, the paper provides a roadmap for empirical studies of resistance to ICs, considering the key contextual factors necessary to take into account in such studies.

If institutions are important for regulating violence, can institutional reforms make societies less violent? This article examines the north-east Brazilian state of Pernambuco primarily between 2007 and 2013, proposing that patterns of declining lethal violence can be explained by changes in both the accountability and effectiveness of formal state institutions and informal social norms. Drawing on two months of qualitative fieldwork, findings suggest that social and political mobilisation enabled a political coalition to initiate substantial changes under the Pacto pela Vida (Pact for Life) public-security programme, which improved the legitimacy and operational effectiveness of the criminal justice system, and coincided with a marked reduction in homicide rates. While showing that these reforms were central in reducing lethal violence in Pernambuco between 2007 and 2013, the article concludes by discussing the challenges of policy continuity in light of increasing rates of lethal violence since 2014.

In the 1990s, there was a lot of concern in studies of post-communism about communist-era managers stalling institutional reforms due to their ability to gain long-term advantages through institutional capture. By influencing market governance rules (corporate governance, bankruptcy, competition laws), managers could protect and amplify initial economic gains from liberalization, entrenching economic inequality. Yet in the 2000s, even the laggards of transition have implemented significant market governance reforms and have enjoyed rapid economic growth. Moreover, business perceptions of state capture (from BEEPS) have dropped substantially. The paper examines this surprising turnaround with evidence from the Romanian case. I argue that contrary to expectations, business interests have failed to capture market governance institutions. In spite of benefiting from shady privatization deals and other advantages based on political connections, the new Romanian entrepreneurs were not threatened by sophisticated market governance laws. This argument based on the preferences of business actors is a necessary addition to explanations of institutional reforms that rely on international conditionality or on economic crisis.

Current theories on institutional change tend to interpret it either as the result of long-term gradual trends, or of disrupting shocks following periods of punctuated equilibrium. Less is known about the moments in which change is more frequent. Focusing on the short-term determinants of reforms of core democratic rules in consolidated democracies, the article shows that proximate shifts in the electoral arena have a distinctive impact on the number of institutional reforms that are adopted in a legislature. Using the empirical and theoretical findings of the literature on electoral reform, the article develops a model tested in statistical analyses aggregating a large sample of institutional reforms in Western European democracies between 1990 and 2010. The results show that rising electoral uncertainty measured by volatility, and the change of preferences of the actors in power measured by the advent of new forces in government lead to the adoption of more institutional reforms. These results appear consistent when some categories of reform are added or subtracted, giving confidence that this model can be applied to a wide range of institutional reforms.

The difficulties of implementing large institutional reforms are legendary. Reform programs may face strong resistance from designated losers, falter at successive veto points, or stall when multiple decision makers have diverse goals. Institutional theories have successfully accounted for failure of reform in many settings, but scholars have paid less attention to how the strategic design of a reform process can have a positive effect on reform initiatives. We seek to fill this gap by studying the impact of planned ambiguity in reform processes. We hypothesize that reform proposals are more likely to succeed when policy entrepreneurs strategically hide the cost-benefit profile of a reform proposal behind a veil of vagueness until the final stages of the process. Designated losers with limited information about the impact of proposed reforms are less likely to succeed in thwarting the reform. We test the theory on four institutional reforms or reform attempts in Denmark.

In the article we report on the findings of an EU-funded research project, Paganini (Participatory Governance and Institutional Innovation), that investigated the question of whether ‘politics of life’ themes have led to the emergence of new forms of governance in Europe. The focus of our research was on human embryonic stem cell research, genetic testing, GM crops, and BSE in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and on the EU level—hotly contested topics at the intersection of society, politics, nature and the human body. We argue that, in the domain of life-political issues, the notions of participation and governance have become intermingled to an unusual extent. Our case studies demonstrate that the concept of participation needs to be rethought. While ‘spontaneous’ public participation certainly still is a political fact, increasingly participation has turned into a ‘technology’ that is based on the construction of publics. Different participatory technologies are linked to a changing landscape of political subjects considered relevant to the debate. As the case studies have shown, the design of any formal participatory arrangement involves a considerable amount of ‘engineering’, including arrangements seeking to invite a ‘representative’, disinterested, ‘pure’ public. There is no such thing as ‘the public’ waiting for pure representation. Formal participatory arrangements are inevitably based on a process of active construction, involving goal setting, selection, decision making and prioritization, including the decision to prioritize the pure public at the expense of engaged publics. What seems to be occurring today is that ‘old’ definitions of social order no longer hold and various groups try to impose new (partial) definitions of a new order on others. A new, postmodernist logic seems to be spinning new relations among citizens/consumers and scientists and administrators. Thus, there is no single New Way of governing Europe.

In the aftermath of the economic crisis of 1997–1998, South Korea undertook a number of reforms in financial supervision. Questions have been raised, however, as to whether Korea has in fact succeeded in creating a system of financial supervision capable of dealing with certain risks and responding to new challenges. This article examines Korea's recent experience in financial instability resulting from misconduct by credit card companies as a case in point and argues that the postcrisis reform in financial supervision was limited to changing formal institutions for financial supervision and that further reforms will have to be undertaken in other related institutions if Korea is to improve its financial supervision.