The year 1999 began with continuing turmoil and chaos in public secondary schools, promoted by both the KKE and ND, and provoked by the reforms and tactics of Minister of Education G. Arsenis. Ironically, when this frustrated aspirant to the PASOK leadership had been moved by Simitis, in 1996, from National Defense to Education, he was presumably expected to do less damage in his new post (see Yearbook 1997, p. 381). Nevertheless, in January Arsenis survived a personal motion of no confidence in Parliament (a procedure rarely invoked against individual ministers).

Investments in education and retraining, or research and development have become essential in today's knowledge‐intensive economies. While private actors often underprovided such knowledge‐based capital due to various market failures, there is also considerable variation in the extent to which governments invest in knowledge‐based capital due to cross‐sectional and intertemporal trade‐offs. I argue that in trying to account for this variation, corporatist institutions are a neglected but crucial factor. By necessitating and facilitating cooperation and compensation, corporatism creates a more collaborative style of policy making and a sense of common ownership of policy problems that helps overcome the trade‐offs associated with investments in knowledge‐based capital. Using within‐between mixed‐effects models on a novel time‐series‐cross‐sectional dataset, I find strong support for this argument. Corporatist countries invest a lot more in knowledge‐based capital, and corporatism also affects how countries react to deindustrialization. This is an important finding given the key role of long‐term policy making in areas like climate change politics, pandemic preparedness or responding to the digital transformation.

The Covid‐19 pandemic brought unprecedented governmental restrictions to personal and political freedoms. This article investigates individual‐level differences in mass support for the restriction of civil liberties during the first wave of the Covid‐19 pandemic. Employing theories of affect and decision making, it assesses the extent to which different emotional reactions toward the pandemic influenced attitudes toward mobile phone surveillance and the implementation of curfews. We test our hypotheses in five advanced European democracies using panel data which allow us to identify the role of emotions in support for restrictive policies controlling for individual heterogeneity. The results suggest that experiencing fear about Covid‐19 had a strong positive impact on supporting these measures, while hope and anger only played a minimal role. Importantly, the findings indicate that emotions moderate the impact of trust toward the government, a key variable for supporting the restriction of civil liberties during the pandemic. Specifically, experiencing fear was associated with higher acceptance of civil liberty restrictions. Further, experiencing fear substantially decreased the effect of trust in the government, rendering those who lack trust toward the government more supportive of civil liberty restrictions. These findings help us understand the psychological mechanisms that leads citizens to swiftly decide to sacrifice their civil liberties in the light of threat. Further, they offer empirical support for the causal role of affect in political decision‐making.

Men's numerical over-representation in politics leads to complacency regarding their substantive representation. Yet the men in politics are not descriptively representative of most men and are drawn disproportionately from the most socially privileged groups. Building on theories of representation, intersectionality and masculinities, I argue that men have gendered representational needs that are not adequately met. Power structures among men leave many men marginalized and/or subordinated, and disincentivize the privileged men in power from defending disadvantaged men's interests. Masculinist cultures within politics inhibit discussion of male vulnerability and further undermine the substantive representation of men. I make the case for why we should study men's substantive representation and then show how we could do so. I propose a groundbreaking research agenda for identifying and measuring men's diverse representational needs, recognizing how these are shaped by gender and its intersection with other identities. Combining insights from objectivist, constructivist and intersectional approaches, I develop a framework for measuring the substantive representation of men that explores who represents men, which ideology informs their claims, which men are included and excluded and whether the goals of representation are to transform or uphold the status quo. I offer several illuminations of policies where different men have distinct gendered needs, and offer an extended example using educational outcomes in the United Kingdom to illustrate how privileged men are not effective representatives of disadvantaged men. This article builds the normative case and offers the theoretical tools for addressing an important gap in the study of representation.

Law‐making is a core function of parliaments in democratic systems. Yet, we still know little about the extent to which parliaments influence legislation and the reasons why MPs modify some bills more than others. We analyse the degree of bill amendments operated by parliament, by comparing bills before and after parliamentary deliberations with a text reuse approach. We postulate that MPs attempt to overcome the problem of limited processing capacity by prioritising certain bills over others. To this end, they use considerations related to institutional rules, attention dynamics and partisan politics. Empirically, we apply zero‐inflated beta regressions on a dataset covering about 1,700 bills adopted from 1995 to 2015 in the Swiss Parliament. Moreover, we address the problem of observational equivalence affecting analyses of parliament's impact on law‐making, by taking into account the government's anticipation strategy. Results highlight a reasonably high amendment activity, but with strong variations across bills. MPs change bills more if they are subject to direct democracy, rank high on the parliamentary agenda or if they attract media attention. The influence of the electoral cycle and coalition politics is not confirmed.

The paper considers the powers, or more correctly the lack of powers, of the European Parliament. Attention is focused on the legislative powers of the Parliament; its financial powers following the revision of Article 203 of the Treaty of Rome; and its control, or oversight, powers. Comparisons are made between the powers of the European Parliament and those of the national parliaments of the European Community's nine Member States. The detailed examination of the powers of the European Parliament reveals that in no widely accepted comparative sense can it be considered a parliament as it fails to meet a series of basic political, constitutional, and decision-making requirements concerning the performance of legislative, financial, and control functions.

The national election was the main issue during the first two months of 2000. After two minority legislatures, the election had a clear outcome. The Popular Party won an absolute majority (see general election report). Nevertheless, in his investiture Aznar also received the parliamentary support of two nationalists parliamentary groups (Catalans and Canary). The electoral results facilitated the formation of the new cabinet a month after the election. The cabinet of Aznar II has two more ministries and introduced several institutional changes (see report); half of the ministers were continued from Aznar I, although in different ministries.

Although federal arrangements adopt a multiplicity of forms across and within federations, this article suggests that some models of power division are better than others at enhancing clarity of responsibility and electoral accountability. This conclusion is the result of exploring responsibility attribution and economic voting in a state where decentralisation arrangements vary across regions: the Spanish State of Autonomies. Using electoral surveys and aggregated economic data for the 1982–2012 period, the empirical analysis shows that regional economic voting is most pronounced in regions where decentralisation design concentrated authority and resources at one level of government, whereas it is inexistent in regions where devolution followed a more intertwined model of power distribution. The implication of the empirical findings is that the specific design of intergovernmental arrangements is crucial to make electoral accountability work in federations.

This paper applies a conjoint experiment to assess the sources of contemporary social status hierarchies in Western Europe. Social status has become a popular concept in political science to explain resentment against economic and cultural transformations. However, we do not know whether cultural sources like race and gender have an independent causal effect on social status perceptions. Furthermore, these characteristics may be more contested between societal subgroups and thus have a weaker stratifying effect than income or occupation. This study employs an innovative conjoint experiment, conducted in Switzerland, to systematically assess the multidimensional sources of status. The design asks respondents to place profiles with randomized criteria and thus captures intersubjective status perceptions. In contrast to evaluating one's own placement on the social status hierarchy, placing others provides more accurate insights about the structural force of social status. The results show that both economic and cultural sources strongly shape social status, with occupation, race/ethnicity and income being most important. Furthermore, different subgroups agree on the hierarchy no matter their own status. This study helps to understand the structural roots of political resentment by showing that both cultural and economic inequalities are recognized.

Affective polarization – that is, antipathy towards political opponents – sits high on the academic and political agenda. This is because it is thought to have a multitude of damaging consequences, both for how citizens view and approach each other and for how they relate to the political system. This study investigates some of the most mentioned and worrying potential consequences of affective polarization at the individual level. Zooming in on Europe, it sheds light on the substantive relationship between partisan antipathy and three kinds of norm‐breaking escalation in the form of avoidance, intolerance and support for violence against party supporters. Methodologically, it unpacks the affective component of polarization, testing to what extent the traditional feeling thermometer performs as a predictor of these three potential outcomes. It then tests alternative expectations of the antecedents of such escalation derived from the intergroup emotions’ literature and the study of political radicalization. This is done using a broad range of both established and new survey items fielded in nationally representative panels between May and November 2020 in two contexts that score relatively low (Norway) and high (the United Kingdom) on affective polarization. They reveal that avoidance, intolerance and support for political violence can be validly measured, and are manifest, in these two European countries, but that they are only weakly correlated to mere dislike of the outgroup. Instead, more severe forms of norm‐breaking escalation depend on the specific nature of the discrete emotions induced beyond dislike (anger, fear or disgust) and are rooted in factors such as relative deprivation, Manicheanism, and dark personality traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism). We discuss the implications for the way polarization is theorized and measured.

How the recent creation, re‐invention or reinforcement of regional levels of political decision making across Europe compounds political representation is one of the key issues of contemporary democratic government. Despite growing scholarly interest, the critical question as to whether the regional institutional setting has brought about distinct representational roles among sub‐state legislators has yet to be addressed. To advance research in this field, this study bridges the literature on multilevel politics and legislative studies that to date have developed in isolation. Using innovative survey data from 14 statewide and 56 regional legislatures across Europe, it provides the first comprehensive test of how the state structure affects a legislator's views on representation. The results highlight that, relative to legislators in unitary states and national legislators in multilevel states, legislators at the regional level are more constituency‐oriented. Moreover, this heightened responsiveness to constituents at the regional level is not offset by weaker collective representation operating through political parties. Beyond these findings’ immediate relevance to scholars of federalism/regionalisation and parliaments, they also speak to the wider normative debate about the quality of political representation and public policy.

This article contributes to our understanding of the formation of policy networks. Research suggests that organisations collaborate with those that are perceived to be influential in order to access scarce political resources. Other studies show that organisations prefer to interact with those that share core policy beliefs on the basis of trust. This article seeks to develop new analytical tools for testing these alternative hypotheses. First, it measures whether perceptions of reputational leadership affect the likelihood of an organisation being the target or instigator of collaboration with others. Second, it tests whether the degree of preference similarity between two organisations makes them more or less likely to collaborate. The article adopts a mixed‐methods approach, combining exponential random graph models (ERGM) with qualitative interviews, to analyse and explain organisational collaboration around United Kingdom banking reform. It is found that reputational leadership and preference similarity exert a strong, positive and complementary effect on network formation. In particular, leadership is significant whether this is measured as an organisational attribute or as an individually held perception. Evidence is also found of closed or clique‐like network structures, and heterophily effects based on organisational type. These results offer significant new insights into the formation of policy networks in the banking sector and the drivers of collaboration between financial organisations.

What explains far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena? After decades of growing electoral support and policy influence, the far right is experiencing an increase in grassroots mobilisation. Scholars of social movements and political parties have devoted little attention to the determinants of far‐right protest mobilisation in Europe. In this article, we bridge previous research on the far right and social movements to advance hypotheses on the drivers of far‐right protest mobilisation based on grievances, opportunities and resource mobilisation models. We use an original dataset combining novel data on 4,845 far‐right protest events in 11 East and West European countries (2008–2018), with existing measures accounting for the (political, economic and cultural) context of mobilisation. We find that classical approaches to collective action can be fruitfully applied to the study of the far right. Cultural grievances, notably concerns about immigration, as well as the availability of institutional access points in contexts characterised by divided government increase far‐right protest mobilisation. But far‐right protest mobilisation also rests on the organisational resources available to nativist collective actors, that is, the network in which they are embedded, their visibility in the media and elected officials. These findings have important implications to understand far‐right success in advanced democracies. They show that far‐right mobilisation in the protest arena not only rests on favourable circumstances, but also on whether far‐right actors can profit from them. More broadly, the study links party politics and social movement research to grasp the far right's modes of political contestation, locating research on this phenomenon at the intersection of political sociology and comparative politics.

Considerable attention has been paid to the properties of electoral mechanisms used in Western democracies to determine who formally exercises political power. However, attempts to justify preferences among different electoral mechanisms are generally underdeveloped and piecemeal. What is needed is an explicit emphasis on procedural justice as a benchmark for determining the most appropriate means of electing democratic governments. In this paper, concepts of procedural justice are described and applied to electoral systems. It is argued that procedural justice demands recognition of the criteria of representativeness, proportionality, unbiasedness, correctability, and initiative. These criteria imply that constituencies for the election of legislators should be territorial, and that they should be drawn in accordance with communities of conflict, which afford candidates strong incentives to seek and articulate imaginative solutions to major conflicts. These properties of procedural justice are consistent with empirical evidence that citizens demand more decentralized and participation-oriented approaches to representative democracy.

Over the past two decades, extreme parties have gained increasing electoral success in European party systems. While this party polarization is often associated with its negative consequences, recent studies have suggested its potential benefit for remobilizing the electorate by offering clear political alternatives. However, it remains unclear which groups of citizens may be mobilized by broader supply and whether this positive effect is generalizable to multiparty systems. This article contributes to this debate arguing that the system multidimensionality matters when assessing the relationship between polarization and voter turnout. Through a multilevel analysis and two studies at the aggregate and individual levels, this article provides evidence that party polarization is associated with increased turnout only when parties polarize on the cultural dimension of party competition. This effect is moderated by the party system unidimensionality and mobilizes voters at large, regardless of their level of extremism, political awareness or partisanship. These findings support previous research suggesting a ‘realignment’ of party systems, meaning that the main line of political conflict for parties and voters is shifting towards the cultural dimension of party competition across Europe.

While current research shows that the government dominates the policy agenda in parliamentary democracies, little is known about the role of the opposition in challenging this dominance. Taking a closer look at the parliamentary policy‐making process, we examine whether opposition support for partisan control of committee chairmanship makes challenges to government bills through amendment proposals more or less likely. By analysing about 7400 government bills from three parliamentary democracies over 35 years, our results show that, under opposition chairmanship, a high likelihood of opposition support fosters amendment proposals, but, under coalition partner chairmanship, the likelihood of government bills being challenged only increases when the likelihood of opposition support is low. This suggests that a unified opposition not only makes challenges to the government's agenda more likely but also conditions how coalition partners manage collective governance.

This paper presents the results of a conjoint survey experiment in which Swiss citizens were asked to choose among parliamentary candidates with different class profiles determined by occupation, education and income. Existing survey‐experimental literature on this topic suggests that respondents are indifferent to the class profiles of candidates or biased against candidates with high‐status occupations and high incomes. We find that respondents are biased against upper middle‐class candidates as well as routine working‐class candidates. While the bias against upper middle‐class candidates is primarily a bias among working‐class individuals, the bias against routine working‐class candidates is most pronounced among middle‐class individuals. Our supplementary analysis of observational data confirms the bias against routine working‐class candidates, but not the bias against upper middle‐class candidates.