The current economic crisis has hit all European countries hard, but some are much more severely affected others. The problems manifest in European peripheral countries, especially Ireland, Spain, and Greece, have roots in domestic policy mistakes. However, the European context of these policy...

The Irish economy has had one of the worst experiences of economic crisis within the EU since the onset of international financial crisis in 2007/8. That the crisis has an international dimension is beyond question. What needs to be explored further is the contribution of domestic political...

As with all aspects of public management, the control, financing and regulation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are matters subject to changing international trends and domestic political imperatives (OECD 2005). What the effects of the global financial crisis will be on the ownership and...

Given the raft of upcoming referendums on the new EU constitution, the question of what determines voting in EU referendums is of considerable importance. Are referendums on EU treaties decided by voters’ attitudes to Europe (the ‘issue voting’ explanation) or by voters’ attitudes to...

Much scholarly writing on states and state boundaries assumes that these form or at least condition the bounds of identity. The ‘institutionalisation’ process is said to be one where the boundaries of the state become the boundaries of everyday life and imagined community. In an...

This paper, via the analysis of stated preferences from a nationwide representative survey of 1,100 adults, examines the determinants of preference for overall government expenditure and estimates a Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) model of demand for the three major categories of public...