This article argues that the perforation of national states by immigration, integration and trade may signify a critical juncture in the political development of Europe no less consequential for ...political parties and party systems than the previous junctures that Lipset and Rokkan detect in their classic article. We present evidence suggesting that (1) party systems are determined in episodic breaks from the past; (2) political parties are programmatically inflexible; and, (3) as a consequence, party system change comes in the form of rising parties.
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Over the past half-century, Europe has experienced the most radical reallocation of authority that has ever taken place in peace-time, yet the ideological conflicts that will emerge from this are ...only now becoming apparent. The editors of this 2004 volume, Gary Marks and Marco Steenbergen, have brought together a formidable group of scholars of European and comparative politics to investigate patterns of conflict that are arising in the European Union. Using diverse sources of data, and examining a range of actors, including citizens, political parties, members of the European Parliament, social movements, and interest groups, the authors of this volume conclude that political contestation concerning European integration is indeed rooted in the basic conflicts that have shaped political life in Western Europe for many years. This comprehensive volume provides an analysis of political conflict in the European Union.
This paper sets the scene for a JEPP special issue entitled 'Re-engaging Grand Theory: European Integration in the Twenty-first Century.' The special issue engages three theories - neofunctionalism, ...intergovernmentalism, and postfunctionalism - that have their intellectual roots squarely in the study of European integration. The purpose of this article is to describe the genesis of each school and outline what is distinctive about its approach in relation to four landmark events of the past decade: the Eurocrisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, and illiberalism.
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International Large-Scale Assessments (LSA) allow comparisons of education systems' effectiveness in promoting student learning in specific domains, such as reading, mathematics, and science. ...However, it has been argued that students' scores in International LSAs mostly reflect general cognitive ability (g). This study examines the extent to which students' scores in reading, mathematics, science, and a Raven's Progressive Matrices test reflect general ability g and domain-specific abilities with data from 3,472 Polish students who participated in the OECD's 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and who were retested with the same PISA instruments, but with a different item set, in 2010. Variance in students' responses to test items is explained better by with a bifactor Item Response Theory (IRT) model than by the multidimensional IRT model routinely used to scale PISA and other LSAs. The bifactor IRT model assumes that non-g factors (reading, math, science, and Raven's test) are uncorrelated with g and with each other. The bifactor model generates specific ability factors with more theoretically credible relationships with criterion variables than the multidimensional standard model. Further analyses of the bifactor model indicate that the domain-specific factors are not reliable enough to be interpreted meaningfully. They lie somewhere between unreliable measures of domain-specific abilities and nuisance factors reflecting measurement error. The finding that PISA achievement scores reflect mostly g, which may arise because PISA aims to test broad abilities in a variety of contexts or may be a general characteristic of LSAs and national achievement tests.
Educational Impact and Implications StatementThis study analyzes Programme for International Student Assessment data from Poland to establish how much the achievement of secondary school students in reading, mathematics, science and in a Raven's Progressive Matrices test reflects general ability and how much it reflects domain-specific abilities. Findings indicate that a scaling model that accounts for general ability, fit the data better than models typically employed in large scale assessments that ignore the influence of general ability on student achievement. The finding that students' responses to PISA test items reflect general ability rather than domain-specific abilities, if replicated to other countries, could have important implications for the design of large-scale assessments and the interpretation of analyses of large-scale assessment data.
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We conceive authority of an international organization as latent in two independent dimensions: delegation by states to international agents and pooling in collective decision making bodies. We ...theorize that delegation and pooling are empirically as well as conceptually different. Delegation is an effort to deal with the transaction costs of cooperation which are greater in larger, broader, and correspondingly more complex organizations. Pooling reflects the tension between protecting or surrendering the national veto. This paper theorizes that delegation and pooling are constrained by two basic design features: a) the scope of an IO’s policy portfolio and b) the scale of its membership. We test these hypotheses with a new cross-sectional dataset that provides detailed and reliable information on IO decision making. Our major finding is that the design of international organizations is framed by stark and intelligible choices, but in surprising ways. Large membership organizations tend to have both more delegation and more pooling. The broader the policy scope of an IO, the more willing are its members to delegate, but the less willing they are to pool authority.
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CEKLJ, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
There is an enduring issue on whether student‐ and school‐level covariates should be included in value‐added school effects models, in addition to prior achievement. Proponents argue that the ...addition of covariates allows fairer comparisons of schools, whereas opponents argue that it excuses poorly performing schools and obscures policy‐relevant school differences. School‐level covariates are problematic statistically, but it has been argued that mean school prior achievement should be included in school effects analyses to reduce error. This article reports on school effects analyses of Australia‐wide data of approximately 1.5 million students in both primary and secondary schools that took national assessments in five achievement domains between 2013 and 2018. With appropriate controls for prior achievement, school effects are generally small and most often not statistically significant. The addition of student‐level covariates: further reduces school effects, since part of the school effects is absorbed by the effects of the covariates, which are unlikely to reflect causal social processes; reduces the proportion of schools with significant school effects; does not improve predictive power; increases the amount of missing data; and further reduces the consistency of school effects between domains and their stability over time. Mean school prior achievement did not improve consistency or stability. Incorporating covariates in school effects analyses opens a Pandora’s Box of specification and measurement issues, undermining the legitimacy of school comparisons. It is concluded that researchers and administrators of educational jurisdictions should focus mainly on simpler models based on prior achievement.
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Prior achievement is essential to estimating the role of schools and school factors on student outcomes because it measures students' pre-existing knowledge and skills. However, its very strong ...effects and their implications for research and policy are not widely appreciated. Analyses of student achievement in five domains shows that prior achievement, measured 2 years before, has overwhelming effects, albeit with domain and year-level (grade) differences. When considering prior achievement, only a small minority of schools have effects that significantly differ from the average school effect on student performance. The variation in school effects is quite limited, and there are only trivial jurisdictional differences in school effects. The contemporaneous effects of parents' occupational group and education - factors prominent in school funding in Australia - are negligible. These findings are likely to pertain to other educational contexts since prior achievement typically has strong, or very strong, relationships with achievement.
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The influences on children's success in education remain a profoundly important topic of enquiry. The dominant view is that socioeconomic background (SES) is critical. This study examines the ...influences on student performance in the General Certificate of School Education (GSCE) taken at age 16 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland analysing data from the Millennium Cohort Study. The GSCE results of 8303 students were converted to a numerical score. Two psychological factors – cognitive ability and their level of conscientiousness – could explain almost as much of the variation in exam attainment as all measures, and far more than a model of socio-economic factors. The power of psychological traits in influencing key educational outcomes is underestimated.
•Antecedents of educational attainment of great interest•Dominant paradigm focuses on SES of children.•Cognitive ability and conscientiousness have stronger record in research findings.•Using new UK MCS longitudinal survey data, GCSE state exam performance assessed•Cognitive ability and conscientiousness explained far more than SES measures
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Recently in this journal, Sciffer, Perry, and McConney (
2020
) argued that school socioeconomic-background (SES) compositional effects are important for both research and policy. In response, this ...commentary argues that realistic school SES effects can only be identified in properly specified models. Otherwise, the estimated school effects are very likely to be spurious due to the correlation between school SES and important, but omitted, individual-level influences, most notably prior achievement. In properly specified models with reliable student-level measures, school SES effects are either small or very small. This commentary includes an empirical demonstration of moderate school SES effects becoming small or very small with appropriate controls.
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In this journal, Sciffer et al. (Large-scale Assessments in Education 10:1–22, 2022), hereafter SP&M, conclude that school socioeconomic compositional (SEC) or school socioeconomic status ...(school-SES) effects in Australia are substantial and substantively important for research and policy. This paper demonstrates that these claims are unwarranted. Their SEC estimates are much larger than estimates from comparable studies and a metastudy. Despite plausible theoretical reasons and empirical evidence, SP&M do not consider that school academic composition is a significant predictor of student achievement independent of SEC. SEC effects are confounded by academic composition and are typically trivial when considering academic composition. The second part of this paper compares SP&M’s estimates with analysis of the same data, from the Australian National Assessments in Performance—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). In a model corresponding to SP&M analyses comprising demographics, SES, school-SES, and student-level prior achievement, the effects of school-SES are small, with standardized effects mostly less than 0.10. With the addition of academic composition measured by school-level prior achievement, school-SES effects are effectively zero. In contrast, academic composition has significant, albeit small, impacts on student achievement. Therefore, contrary to SP&M’s (2022) conclusion, school-SES effects on student achievement in NAPLAN are negligible, whereas school-level prior achievement has small effects. That is not to say that school-SES is always irrelevant, but any assessment of its importance must consider both student- and school-level prior achievement.
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