While scholars today are well‐acquainted with how the European Community preliminary reference process works, little research has been done to investigate strategic court interaction – that is, intentional, procedural court behaviour employed to influence the substantive direction of legal evolution, within that process. The present investigation, which is part of a larger project examining such court behaviour throughout the referral process, focuses on the initial stage: the decision to refer. Within that stage lies the opportunity for national courts to stack the interpretive deck for the entire decision‐making process via a preemptive opinion, the submission of which is neither required, suggested nor prohibited by written procedural guidelines. It is assumed that courts are strategic institutions that seek to maximize their policy objectives, and therefore, national courts submit preemptive opinions to obtain that goal. Such strategic behaviour, however, is influenced by intervening factors – namely the acceptance of European Court of Justice intervention, national judicial procedure, issue complexity and individual court experience.

This article considers the activity of the Spanish Cortes in law production and the control of the executive during the six parliaments of the democratic government. It mainly examines the output of the lower chamber due to the asymmetrical bicameralism and weak status of the Senate. In Spain, the legislative output has been dependent on different situations of party government. In general terms, the Cortes have been always very active in controlling the executive and its participation in law‐making was highly relevant when there was a minority government. Because parties are central actors in parliament and due to the strong party discipline in the Spanish case, the author mainly studied parliament output from the viewpoint of strategies of opposition parties. Sometimes parties behaved in parliament procedures in a competitive way, while in others they behave cooperatively. There was a great variety of patterns of strategic behaviour on account of the different situations of party government and the diverse opposition parties. Half of the parliaments had minority governments in which minority parties played a very important role by supporting the government in parliament; however, the main opposition party was never the same since there were two changes of government.

Individual voters’ identification with a political party is believed to be a highly stable core of the political personality, and an ‘unmoved mover’ of political behaviour. In this article, the authors take advantage of a unique longitudinal database – the German Socio‐Economic Panel (GSOEP) – to test the basic premise of partisanship's high persistence. Analysing individual‐level data from 18 annual panel waves conducted in West Germany between 1984 and 2001, it was found that only a minority of the electorate appears steadfast with regard to partisanship over the entire period. Using event history analysis, the authors demonstrate how movements from partisanship into independence and changes between parties are affected by: personal attributes of voters, especially cognitive mobilisation; by properties of their social contexts, in particular spousal relationships and family constellations; by situational contexts, specifically election campaigns; and by the type of party with which voters identify.

This article sets out how the public sphere can be studied through an analysis of the content of a specific debate. A public discourse can be said to pertain to a European Union‐wide public sphere where the discourse within the EU is significantly different from that developed in non‐EU countries, where such differences are not nationally defined, and where the debates in individual newspapers (which provide the fora for a public sphere) should be connected on the basis of some underlying factors. These conditions are tested with a quantitative analysis of the newspaper debate in 1999 and 2000 on the sanctions of the EU‐14 against Austria. To the extent that the conditions are found, it can be concluded that there exists a European public opinion. The objective of studying this specific case is to demonstrate that, as far as an EU issue is concerned, there are already signs of an EU transnational political community.

Perhaps the strongest empirical finding in political science is ‘Gamson's Law’: the near‐perfect relationship that exists in parliamentary systems between a coalition party's seat contribution to the government and its quantitative allocation of cabinet portfolios. Nevertheless, doubts remain. What would happen if the salience or importance of the various portfolios was also taken into account? Should it not be the case that payoffs correspond with bargaining power rather than seat contributions? And perhaps most significantly, would addressing these issues produce evidence that the parties designated to form governments extract disproportionately large payoffs for themselves, as predicted by ‘proposer’ models of bargaining? Utilizing the results of a new expert survey of portfolio salience in 14 Western European countries, the authors of this article explore each of these questions. Their basic finding is that salience‐weighted portfolios payoffs overwhelmingly mirror seat contributions, contra proposer models and any other models based on bargaining power. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for formal models of bargaining.

The French two‐round system of presidential elections forces candidates to choose strategies designed to maximize their votes in two different, potentially conflicting strategic contexts: a first round contest between many candidates, and a second round between (typically) a left‐ and a right‐oriented candidate. Following a constitutional change in 2000, furthermore, presidential elections are synchronized with legislative elections, more tightly linking presidential candidates to the policy platforms of the parties they represent. This article examines the consequences of policy positioning by presidential candidates, measuring, comparing and assessing positioning in the legislative elections and in the first and second presidential election rounds. The measures come from an expert survey taken in 2002, from content analysis of party manifestos and presidential speeches, and from the 2002 French National Election Survey. The findings provide hard empirical confirmation of two commonly perceived propositions: first, that Jospin's first‐round loss resulted from strategic error in moving too close to the policy centre, and second, that Chirac's won an overwhelming second‐round victory because he collected all of the voters from candidates eliminated in the first round.

Supporters of representative democracy tend to be critical of referendums. They argue that referendums give citizens more responsibility for political decisions than they have either the capacity or the competence to take. Moreover, they argue that referendums may undermine representatives' accountability. In this article, these arguments about responsibility and accountability are analyzed in the light of normative theories of democracy, especially the theory of deliberative democracy. Furthermore, different institutional forms of referendum are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the following aspects: the extent to which governments control the use of referendums, how referendums interact with parliamentary decision making, and whether referendums are advisory or binding. It is argued that sometimes governments indeed use their control over referendums to avoid taking stands on difficult issues. More importantly, however, current forms of government‐initiated referendums tend to weaken the accountability of the representatives, at least when interpreted in terms of liberal and deliberative democracy, and to distort parliamentary deliberations. Since delegation is a necessity in modern democracies, referendums should not undermine the mechanisms of representative democracy. In addition to the issues of citizens' capacity and competence, this viewpoint should be taken into account when designing referendum institutions.