This article analyses the effects of sectoral political lobbies on the Romanian and Bulgarian governments’ efforts to reform their economies for European Union accession. The progress of restructuring and retrenchment is crucially dependent on the coincidence of which groups are adversely affected by accession‐motivated reforms, and which groups are sufficiently mobilised at the domestic level to block international‐level deals. In turn, the political power of the agricultural and industrial sectors is determined by workplace‐level and national‐level variables. At the workplace level, it is easier to organise people in a small number of large firms than a large number of small firms, and to organise employees in public‐owned or insider‐privatised enterprises compared to other types. At the national level, monopolistic sectoral associations whose members have no exit option may be bought off by government side payments to the leadership, while representation that is overly fragmented will be ineffectual.

This article examines the role of courts in the creation of immigrant rights. Immigrant rights are located within a broader ‘new constitutionalism’ (especially in postwar Europe), in which courts have abandoned their traditional passiveness toward the political process and taken on the role of de facto legislator. Analyzing the immigration jurisprudence of the French Conseil Constitutionnel, we argue that courts are torn between two opposite imperatives: to protect an especially vulnerable category of people from the enormous police powers of the modern administrative state; and to respect an elementary exigency of sovereign stateness – that is, the capacity to draw a distinction between ‘citizens’ and ‘aliens’ as differently situated persons without a right of entry and permanence.

Most discussions of democratic theory assume that parties should offer clear choices to voters but also show themselves sensitive to public concerns. Under certain circumstances, however, party convergence on these may preclude electoral choice, thus creating conflict between two democratic ‘goods’. We examine possible tradeoffs between choice and responsiveness, and see which actually occur in 16 postwar democracies. Party policy positions turn out to be more strongly related to party ideology than popular concerns, thus privileging differentiation and choice over sensitivity and responsiveness. Implications for democratic theory and practice are considered.

This article provides a systematic comparative overview of party governments in 11 Central Eastern European countries. The review is based on the compilation of a cross‐national data set on post‐communist party governments from 1990 to 2003. The presentation of the data is organised in the same way as the party government data for Western democracies presented by Woldendorp et al. in 1998. Thus, the data provide empirical grounds for further comparative research on party governments in Central Eastern European countries, as well as among Central Eastern and Western Europe.

Opposition to the European integration project can stem from many different sources, but one that appears to be fairly fundamental is the threat that the European Union (EU) poses to long‐established national identities. This contention may in fact appear to be so trivial as to make it uninteresting to the social science community. However, this article analyses the degree to which EU citizens do indeed feel their national identities to be under threat by the EU and the effect of such fear on general feelings about the integration process. The impact of fear of loss of national identity due to integration is then compared to the impact of other potential sources of variation in support for the integration project. The results indicate that while large proportions of EU citizens do indeed fear that the EU is threatening their national identity and culture, the effect of this fear on attitudes toward the EU is not all that substantial and other factors play an equal or greater role in explaining individual‐level opposition to the EU.