What explains the variation in public support for European integration? While the existing literature has predominantly focused on economic, cultural and political factors, the influence of geography has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by examining the impact of residing in the European Union (EU) border regions on voters' perceptions and attitudes towards the EU. Contrary to previous research, our study reveals a remarkable pattern, indicating that individuals living in border regions exhibit a higher propensity to vote for Eurosceptic parties and hold negative views on the EU. Through the utilization of both behavioural and attitudinal indicators in years ranging between 1999 and 2021 and employing statistical matching, our analysis robustly supports this finding. Moreover, we delve into the underlying mechanisms driving these negative attitudes in border regions, highlighting the significance of institutional factors. A mediation analysis reveals an interesting and previously unexplored theoretical twist: We find that residing in a border region is associated with lower trust in national political institutions, which translates into distrust in the EU. These findings suggest that it might be policymakers residing in the capital of the country rather than people on the other side of the border that make borderland inhabitants' attitudes distinctly negative.

A large literature studies whether, and under what circumstances, voters will electorally punish corrupt politicians. Yet this literature has to date neglected the empirical prevalence of transnational dimensions to real‐world corruption allegations, even as corruption studies undergo a ‘transnational turn’. We use a survey experiment in the United Kingdom in 2020 to investigate whether voters differentially punish politicians associated with transnational corruption and test four different potential mechanisms: information salience, country‐based discrimination, economic nationalism and expected representation. We find evidence suggesting that voters indeed differentially punish transnational corruption, but only when it involves countries perceived negatively by the public (i.e. a ‘Moscow‐based firm’). This is most consistent with a mechanism of country‐based discrimination, while we find no evidence consistent with any other mechanism. These results suggest that existing experimental studies might understate the potential for electoral accountability by neglecting real‐world corruption allegations’ frequent transnational dimension.

Audience expectations of election campaign messages in Belgium, Britain and France are treated in this study as a point of departure for the comparative analysis of different political communication systems. Broad cross-national similarities in voters’ priorities of communication need at election time are traced. In each case television is the most favoured medium of election information. Sub-group analysis, however, discloses large variations in the forces shaping voters’ motives for following a campaign in the different countries. Demographic factors are mainly influential in Britain, political affiliations in France, and regional/linguistic divisions in Belgium.

The theory of consociational democracy has emphasized the internal conditions under which elites in “segmented pluralist” countries may choose such a strategy. This article suggests a distinction between genetic and sustaining conditions of this type of conflict management and, with the aid of this distinction, seeks to analyze the complex relationships between the internal structure of consociational democracies and their position in the international system. Consociationalism serves as a strategy for the settlement of international conflict (and may be imposed from outside) or for the preservation of national integrity in a situation of international conflict. On the other hand a reduction of foreign policy loads may contribute to the stabilization of consociational democracy; this may explain why most consociational democracies are small countries.

This article develops a novel approach for studying the influence of supranational institutions in international cooperation. While earlier research tends to treat member states as a collective yielding influence on supranational institutions, we unpack this collective to explore differentiated supranational influence. To this end, the article makes three contributions. First, it develops a method for measuring differentiated supranational influence that makes it possible to identify which member states give ground when a supranational institution is influential. Second, it theorizes the sources of differentiated supranational influence, arguing that states are more likely to accommodate a supranational institution when they are more dependent on the resources of this institution. Third, it illustrates the usefulness of this approach empirically through an analysis of the influence of the European Commission in European Union bargaining. The analysis suggests that our approach can measure and explain differentiated supranational influence under conditions of both heightened crisis and everyday politics.

‘I retire like a sportsman at the height of his career’. These were the words spoken by 58-year-old Adolf Ogi, Swiss President and head of the Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sports, as he handed in his resignation in October 2000. Although this announcement caused much debate on cabinet composition in Switzerland, its fundamental structure was not questioned. The Swiss People’s Party did not request significant changes such as the cancellation of the magic formula, nor did the Radicals or the Christian Democrats call into question the power-sharing model.

Do salient episodes of state violence affect citizens' willingness to pay taxes for different social purposes in the long run? In this article, I answer this question using an original dataset that geolocates individuals who were seriously injured during the anti‐communist Romanian revolution of 1989. Using the number of casualties within different regions as a source of quasi‐exogenous variation, I show that the places from which more casualties come have systematically lower levels of tax morale. I argue that these results arise because there has been no clear break with the authoritarian past in Romania, and many citizens still associate the current political elites with the former communist rulers who perpetrated the violence of December 1989.

The life expectancy of all political systems depends, among other factors, on the ability to resist military pressure and other means of coercion, that is, to mount and sustain a sufficient ‘security-related effort’(SRE). Yet over the last decades, SRE in the West has increasingly fallen short of what is required, especially vis-à-vis the main systemic competitor, the Soviet bloc. This trend can be explained by the interplay of two kinds of long-term change in Western societies. The first is the gradual penetrating and remoulding of their structures by capitalism, replacing both threat and integrative relations by exchange as a social organizer and thus delegitimizing the military (and other means of organized coercion), and at the same time rendering war much more destructive and costly by harnessing modern science and technology to the design and production of weaponry. The second process is the diffusion of representative, subsequently democratized, systems of government: decision-making by representative assemblies generates, via the mechanism of log-rolling, allocative decisions biased towards providing private goods (e.g. by tax reductions), merit goods, and transfer payments, and consequently disfavouring public goods such as deterrence of potential aggressors.

Though much research has focused on major political and humanitarian consequences of economic sanctions, little is known about how economic sanctions affect economic rights and freedoms in target countries. Often, sanctions work is divided into two main theoretical camps: direct economic effects and indirect human rights effects. These two bodies of work have significantly expanded our cumulative knowledge around economic coercion, but scholars in each camp primarily speak past one another while rarely drawing together the interrelated threads of direct and indirect sanctions effects. We challenge this common division by examining the extent to which economic sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States or the United Nations affect labour rights practices. We posit that sanctions, as a direct shock to target economies, will prompt more labour rights violations at the workplace, such as arbitrary firings and the use of child or forced labour. We maintain that sanctions also undermine labour conditions via adverse indirect effects on human rights, civil society and bureaucratic capacity. Results from a time‐series cross‐national analysis lend strong support for the proposition that sanctions are significantly and directly related to worsened labour rights conditions. We further show that sanctions also indirectly contribute to labour rights violations through negative effects on human rights conditions and reduced bureaucratic capacity in target countries. Overall, our study deepens our understanding of the complicated outcomes of sanctions on individuals in target states and illustrates the need for further exploration into the interwoven effects of this popular policy tool.

Scholars have recently begun to examine how authoritarian rulers cooperate with each other in order to fend off popular challenges to their power. During the Arab Spring the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) supported fellow authoritarian regimes in some cases while backing opposition movements in others. Existing theoretical approaches fail to explain this variation. Advancing the study on authoritarian cooperation, this article develops a theoretical approach that sets out to explain how authoritarian regimes reach their decisions. Drawing on poliheuristic foreign policy analysis, it argues that perceptions of similarity serve as a filter for estimating threats to regime survival at home. If regimes perceive the situation in other countries as similar to their own, supporting other authoritarian regimes becomes the only acceptable strategy. In contrast, if perceptions of similarity are low, regimes also consider other options and evaluate their implications beyond the domestic political arena. Applying this framework to the example of the GCC states during the Arab Spring, the analysis reveals covariation between perceptions of similarity and threat among GCC regimes, on the one hand, and their strategies, on the other.

While representing the next generation of democratic citizens, research on process preferences of adolescents is in its infancy. To analyse what institutional designs adolescents favour, we conducted a conjoint experiment with a unique, representative sample of 1,970 German pupils between the age of 14–17. We find that adolescents in general are ‘status quo’– democrats, preferring a parliament (representing the central institution of the existing representative system) to alternative institutions, namely citizen forums and an assertive leader. However, support for the status quo comes with several qualifications, namely expert input, slow and considerate political processes and a final referendum. Furthermore, we find differences between subgroups, whereby dissatisfied adolescents are more open to citizen forums and an assertive leader than satisfied adolescents. By contrast, more sophisticated adolescents have stronger preferences for the parliament as the main institution. Overall, our results suggest that a major overhaul of the democratic infrastructure does not seem to be a priority for the next generation of citizens, although there is some desire for innovation, namely the ‘blending’ of representative institutions with more citizen participation.

Robert Rubin announced his resignation as Secretary of the Treasury on 12 May, sending shivers through the stock and currency markets. These were eased when it was immediately announced that he would be succeeded by his Deputy Secretary of the previous four years, Lawrence Summers. Summers’ confirmation was delayed in June, as was the confirmation of Richard Holbrooke to be Ambassador to the United Nations (after an earlier delay caused by an eight month Justice Department investigation), by a Republican threat to delay all presidential nominations indefinitely. This threat was in response to the recess appointment of James C. Hormel as Ambassador to Luxembourg during the Memorial Day recess. Hormel, an openly gay man, was first named to the post in October 1997, but his nomination was blocked by Senate conservatives, led by Republican leader Trent Lott; the recess appointment would allow Hormel to serve as ambassador through the end of the next session of Congress without Senate approval. Janet Yellen resigned as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to return to teaching at the University of California. She was replaced by Martin N. Baily.

As reported in the 1999 yearbook, British local government can appear complex and unwieldy. It is certainly not structured uniformly across either Britain or England. The most straightforward description of British local government is that it is of two types. The first consists of single tier, multi-purpose authorities (London Boroughs, six other Metropolitan Boroughs and fortysix non-metropolitan Unitary Authorities in England, thirty-six in Wales and thirty-two Unitary Councils in Scotland). The second consists of a two-tier system, with power divided between thirty-four County (upper-tier) and 238 Shire District (lower-tier) councils. The electoral cycles of different authorities vary considerably. Suffice to say that in England, there are generally annual elections for at least a proportion of the councils in the Metropolitan Boroughs, Shire District Councils and Unitary Authorities. In 2000, there were only local elections in England, the results of which are summarised in Table 3. Labour performed badly, although it should be noted that this particular cycle of elections was likely to favour the Conservatives to some extent. Overall, Labour lost an estimated 601 local council seats on a vote share of 32.4 percent The Conservatives were the main beneficiaries, making a net estimated gain of 610 seats and gaining 37.2 percent of the vote. The Liberal Democrats’ position was largely unchanged, though they managed to gain 24.3 percent of the vote. Turnout continued to be low.

The year 1999 was dominated by debates about taxation reform, whether Australia should become a republic and the future of East Timor. In all three cases there appeared to be a conclusion to a debate going back some 20 years, or more. The outcome was in favour of taxation reform, against Australia becoming a republic (at least by the target date, 1 January 2001, the centenary of Federation) and in favour of Australia assisting its neighbour East Timor to declare its independence from Indonesia.

Simultaneous interpreting (SI), a challenging task enabled by bilingualism, is claimed to distinctly tax working memory (WM). However, causal designs are missing, limiting our understanding of the phenomenon. We recruited 50 Chinese-English bilinguals and assessed their WM performance (alongside inhibitory and fluency outcomes) before and after L1–L2 SI or a control task (text comprehension). WM scores (especially under high-demand, multimodal conditions) increased after text comprehension but not after SI, adjusting for age of L2 appropriation, years of L2 use, L2 proficiency and SI competence. Of note, WM was assessed immediately before and after SI, ruling out other cognitive influences. Conversely, no distinct patterns were observed on inhibitory or fluency tasks. Briefly, this activity seems to hinder practice-related WM gains – a finding that expands contemporary accounts of interpreting.

Under what conditions is decentralisation a salient issue for state‐wide political parties? It is argued in this article that the extent to which state‐wide parties emphasise decentralisation depends on their strategic considerations: on their overall ideology, on the electoral incentives created by the context in which they compete, and on the interaction between the two. The results of the analysis of party manifestos in 31 countries since 1945 are as follows. First, parties that pay greater attention to cultural matters relative to economic matters tend to talk more about decentralisation. Second, the systemic salience of decentralisation also encourages parties to talk more about decentralisation. Third, the larger the regionally based ethnic groups within a country, the more salience all state‐wide political parties will attach to decentralisation. Finally, only parties that put greater relative emphasis on cultural matters tend to respond to the electoral threat of regionalist parties. The influence of territorial diversity on the salience of decentralisation thus works through two channels and is partly conditioned by political parties’ ideological profile.

This research note investigates the scope of regional variations in levels of affective polarization across Europe and contrasts it with national scores to highlight the theoretical and empirical interest of a disaggregated approach. Using all waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) dataset, we compute an affective polarization score for 143,857 individuals and aggregate these scores in 190 regions nested in 30 countries, across a period ranging from 1996 to 2019, covering 105 elections. We map variations in affective polarization across regions, both cross‐sectionally and longitudinally. Our results reveal that the range of scores is larger across regions than between countries and that approximately half of the variation in affective polarization scores can be attributed to within‐country heterogeneity. Second, we find that some countries display rather homogeneous regional patterns, while others display heterogeneous scores. Third, we show how the increase in the affective polarization scores over time at the national level can be driven by sharp changes in some regions only, while other regions remain stable. Overall, these results point to the added value of adopting a regional approach to the study of affective polarization.