Europe's 'political space,' its dimensionality and its impact on European policies have received increased academic attention lately. Yet, one very basic element of this political space, the party composition of EU member states' governments, has never been studied in a systematic way in the...

The complexity of the multi-level European polity is not adequately represented by the single-level theoretical concepts of competing “intergovernmentalist” and “supranationalist” approaches. By contrast, empirical research focusing on multilevel interactions tends either to emphasize...

Voting behavior in elections to the European Parliament seems to follow a regular pattern, as many EP-election studies have found: Parties in government at the national level tend to lose vote shares in EP-elections as compared to the last domestic electoral contest; small and ideologically more...

Empirical studies have shown that US politics is heavily tilted in favor of the better off, as political decisions tend to reflect the preferences of the rich while largely ignoring those of the poor and middle classes. These findings have prompted a lively debate about potential mechanisms that...

Eight years after the onset of the "Great Recession," the eurozone is deeply split between "Northern" EMU economies that seem to be doing reasonably well and "Southern" countries that continue to struggle with socioeconomic catastrophe. This paper argues that the continuing malaise is a...

The article analyzes the integration of Central and Eastern European (CEE) trade unions in European policy-making. With reference to transnational cooperation in two fields of European-level decision making (issues concerning freedom of services and a European minimum wage), it investigates the...

In the course of European integration, national trade unions in Europe founded the umbrella organization of the European Trade Union Confederation in order to establish common political positions. Drawing on the case of supranational politics of services regulation, this study shows how...

European social policy changed with the evolution of European and global capitalism, the scope and shape of European-level international institutions, the size and heterogeneity of "Europe" as a polity, and the politics of the European national welfare state. The paper outlines the long-term...

This paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, based on case studies of Sweden and Germany, it argues for a generalized liberalization trend in industrial relations, affecting not just "liberal" but also "coordinated" forms of capitalism. In coordinated economies, liberalization has not...