The European Union is in a state of emergency. The crisis it is facing today is a global one, rather than merely sector-specific as in the past. It therefore requires a global response, in other words at a political level. This is the central message conveyed by this selection of texts. Having presented some of the main challenges, both internal and external, with which the Union is contending, the author maintains the need for a European political authority subject to democratic control, in particular with regard to currency, foreign, defence and security policy and migration. He puts forward the case for a federative core within the Eurozone which at first could take the form of “enhanced cooperation” between a certain number of countries favourable to the idea, while allowing other Member States the possibility to join them. He also stresses the need to break with austerity policies, a breeding ground for populism, and to promote solidarity as a guiding principle for future actions. As a result an unprecedented European federalism could be developed which would provide the European continent with the means to defend its values and to continue to play its part as a major peacekeeper in the 21st century.
Welfare states provide individuals with an insurance against a variety of risks. Therefore, how much an individual is exposed to these risks is expected to influence their support for social spending. In this chapter, we focus on the evolution of perceived unemployment risk and its relationship with attitudes towards social policy in Switzerland over the 1999–2014 period. Aggregate analyses of data from the Swiss Household Panel reveal a slight increase in the share of Swiss residents who feel insecure. However, this trend coincides with a decrease in aggregate support for social spending, whereas the share of respondents supporting higher taxation for the rich has seen a marginal increase. At the individual-level, we do find some evidence for a link between objective unemployment risk, the perception of this risk, and support for unemployment benefits. But the relation between objective risk and policy preferences is mainly explained by structural factors such as education and income rather than the perception of risk. These findings can help explain the relative stability of public opinion despite changes in economic conditions.
Whereas some recent studies underline interest groups’ strategy to specialize in certain venues when lobbying, we investigate under which conditions groups develop a multi-venue strategy. This study examines and compares groups' advocacy activities during three issues that were each debated in California and Switzerland. Empirical evidence shows that the policy issue at stake influences the diversity of groups that mobilize to influence an issue, while institutional factors and group types are key to explain the level of multi-venue advocacy. Multi-venue groups are propotionally more numerous in the Swiss neo-corporatist system than in the Californian pluralist system. And citizen groups are more frequently multi-venue players than business groups, regardless of the policy sector or the political system. These findings demonstrate the added value of a research design encompassing advocacy activities in all venues visited during a policy process and, furthermore, comparing these advocacy activities across political systems and policy domains.
This article focuses on the role of plant size for working class vote. We argue that workplace size does matter for political behaviour. Workers in smaller plants are less unionised and therefore base their voting decisions more strongly on their cultural attitudes, which undermines the support for social democratic parties. Using data from the European Social Survey (2002-2010), we find that workers in small plants have more right-wing attitudes and, consequently, vote for new and old right parties, contrarily to workers in larger plants. Our research points towards important structural explanations of working class support for the right and its cross-national differences.
This paper studies the respective influences of intergenerational transmission and the environment in shaping individual trust. Focusing on second generation immigrants in Australia and the United States, we exploit the variation in the home country and in the host country to separate the effect of cultural transmission from that of the social and economic conditions on individual trust. Our results indicate that trust in the home country contributes to the trust of second generation immigrants in both of the host countries, and marginally more in the United States. Social and economic conditions in the host country also affect individual trust.
In psychology as elsewhere, the main statistical inference strategy to establish empirical effects is null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST). The recent failure to replicate allegedly well-established NHST-results, however, implies that such results lack sufficient statistical power, and thus feature unacceptably high error-rates. Using data-simulation to estimate the error-rates of NHST-results, we advocate the research program strategy (RPS) as a superior methodology. RPS integrates Frequentist with Bayesian inference elements, and leads from a preliminary discovery against a (random) H0-hypothesis to a statistical H1-verification. Not only do RPS-results feature significantly lower error-rates than NHST-results, RPS also addresses key-deficits of a “pure” Frequentist and a standard Bayesian approach. In particular, RPS aggregates underpowered results safely. RPS therefore provides a tool to regain the trust the discipline had lost during the ongoing replicability-crisis.
