According to BRUNETTI ET AL. (Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, 134/1,1998) economic interests are of crucial importance for individual behaviour in popular votes on European integration in Switzerland. Compensation of losers might be a feasible strategy in creating majorities for...

How can we explain the decline in support for the European Union (EU) and the idea of European integration after the onset of the great recession in the fall of 2007? Did the economic crisis and the austerity policies that the EU imposed—in tandem with the IMF—on several member...

The question whether and how warfare has influenced the development of advanced Western welfare states is contested. So far, scholarly work either focused on the trade-off between military and social spending or on case studies of individual countries. What is missing, however, is a systematic...

For many years, comparative welfare state research has been afflicted with a sort of methodological nationalism in the sense that countries were treated as independent units. In line with the recent spatial turn in comparative public policy studies, this paper examines with regard to three...