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.
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.
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.
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.
Most countries around the globe have one or two levels of regional or intermediate government, yet we have little systematic idea of how much authority they wield, or how this has changed over time.
...This book measures and explains the formal authority of intermediate or regional government in 42 advanced democracies, including the 27 EU member states. It tracks regional authority on an annual basis from 1950 to 2006. The measure reveals wide variation both cross-sectionally and over time. The authors examine four influences – functional pressures, democratization, European integration, and identity – to explain regionalization over the past half-century.
This unique and comprehensive volume will be a vital resource for students and scholars of comparative politics, public administration and public management, federalism, democratization, nationalism, and multilevel governance.
1. Measuring Regional Authority 2. Operationalizing Regional Authority 3. Validation of the Regional Authority Index 4. An Era of Regionalization Appendix A: Profiles of Regional Reform in 42 Countries (1950–2006) Appendix B: Country and Regional Scores
Liesbet Hooghe is Zachary Taylor Smith Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Chair in Multilevel Governance at the Free University of Amsterdam. She was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Humboldt Visiting Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung in Berlin, and Fellow at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, and held visiting professorships at Sciences Po, Konstanz, and Pompeu Fabra. She is the former chair of the European Politics and Society Organized Section of the American Political Science Association, and current president (2007–2009) of the European Union Studies Association.
Gary Marks is Burton–Craige Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Chair in Multilevel Governance at the Free University of Amsterdam. Marks has been National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Visiting Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, and Fellow at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst (Germany). He has held visiting professorships at Sciences Po, Konstanz University, the University of Twente, Pompeu Fabra, and the Hooker Visiting Professorship at McMaster University. In 1997–1999 Marks served as Chair of the European Community Studies Association.
Arjan H. Schakel is a Newton International Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (2009 - 2011) where he works on a project entitled 'Regional Reform and Territorialization of Party Systems'. Schakel is interested in federlaism, decentralization, regional government and regional party politics and has published several articles in journals such as Regional and Federal Studies , Acta Politica and Governance (forthcoming).
"This book represents a major advance in the study of regional government and spatial rescaling. It is a fascinating study in its own right, but also an invaluable data set for scholars of comparative government and politics." - Michael Keating, Professor of Politics, University of Aberdeen
"This book is a must for any scholar, student and politician who want to know more about how governments are structured. It combines cutting-edge methodology with the authors’ deep knowledge of regions." - Beate Kohler-Koch, Professor at the International Graduate School of the Social Sciences, Bremen
"The Regional Authority Index will shape debates and analysis in the field of regional governance and decentralization for years to come. This book is its definitive exposition and offers a unique rich source for understanding cross-national variation in the role of subnational government." - Edward C. Page, Sidney and Beatrice Webb Professor of Public Policy, London School of Economics
"This is by far the most thorough attempt to measure the powers of regional governments in a large sample of countries. Given the growing importance of regional authorities around the world, it is a timely contribution to the literature, and the careful documentation of coding decisions will make it a valuable resource to scholars for years to come." - Jonathan Rodden, Associate Professor in Political Science, Stanford University
"For years, the study of political decentralization has been bedeviled by the paucity of credible, precise measures of how authority is divided among the various levels within the world's states. In a book sure to become a vital resource for empirical scholars, Hooghe, Marks, and Schakel provide the most meticulous measures available of regional powers in the largest countries. A model of transparency and attention to nuance, the book synthesizes and transcends previous scholarship in this area, and offers the most compelling portrait to date of the current trend towards regional autonomy." - Daniel Treisman, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
"The study of decentralized governance, multi-level politics and regional governance is of mounting importance in a broad swath of the social sciences. To date, researchers have been stuck with very dissatisfying public finance data from the IMF, horrible indicators from the Polity data set and sundry other sources of dubious value. This book fills a gaping hole in that literature." - Erik Wibbels, Duke University
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.
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
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.
Schools' socioeconomic status (SES) has been claimed as an important influence on student performance and there are calls for a policy response. However, there is an extensive literature which for ...various reasons casts doubt on the veracity of school-SES effects. This paper investigates school-SES effects with population data from a longitudinal cohort of school students which includes achievement measures in Years 3, 5 and 7. Estimates for school-SES are unstable under differing model and measurement specifications. School-SES effects are trivial controlling for student- and school-level prior ability. Inconsistent with theoretical explanations, school-SES effects were stronger with weaker SES measures. Furthermore, school-SES effects differ somewhat by achievement domain. Also contrary to expectations, there were school-SES effects on Year 7 achievement in secondary school for the primary schools students attended in Year 5. In each of five domains of achievement, fixed effect models show a small negative effect for school-SES and a small positive effect for school-level prior ability. The large school-SES effects prominent in some research and policy literatures are statistical artefacts.
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