Combating Terrorism by Constraining Charities? Charity and Counterterrorism Legislation Before and After 9/11

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.How does counter-terrorism legislation – enacted in democratic states – impact upon charities, intentionally or unintentionally? To address this question, we present a new analytical framework that allows us to compare, across established democracies, how charity and counterterrorism legislation are connected, enabling us to assess how charities’ legal environments have changed since 9/11. Comparing legislation across six long-lived democracies (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland), we distinguish between three types of legislative connection: overlap, direct intersection and indirect intersection. These categories differ in terms of the visibility of the connection established between the two areas of law. As high profile reform exercises, both overlap and direct intersections have been predominantly introduced post-9/11. But it is through indirect intersections that intensified post 9/11 which are most vague and difficult to manoeuvre, that the day-to-day activities of charities are most likely to be affected, with important empirical and normative repercussions.This research has received funding from a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SG-132160) and from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–13)/ERC grant agreement 335890 STATORG). This support is gratefully acknowledged

New party performance after breakthrough: Party origin, building and leadership

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.Parliamentary entry on the national level is a crucial achievement for any new party. But its repercussions are not necessarily beneficial. This article assesses the electoral consequences of parliamentary breakthrough by theorizing factors that shape (a) a new party organization’s capacity to cope with pressures generated by parliamentary entry and (b) the relative intensity of the new functional pressures a new party is exposed to after breakthrough. To test our hypotheses derived from these two rationales, we apply multilevel analyses to a new data set covering 135 organizationally new parties that entered national parliament across 17 advanced democracies over nearly five decades (1968–2015). Our findings stress the importance of party organizational characteristics (party origin, time for party building and leadership continuity) for parties’ capacity to sustain electoral support after breakthrough. In contrast, the intensity of functional pressures as generated by government participation immediately after breakthrough does not have significant effects on parties’ performance at the follow-up election.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–13)/ERC grant agreement 335890 STATORG). This support is gratefully acknowledged

Why Groups Are Politically Active: An Incentive-Theoretical Approach

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordPolitical activity is conventionally considered a constitutive feature of interest groups, underpinning an impressive literature on the strategies groups employ to exercise political influence. Whether and how intensely voluntary membership groups engage in political activities to start with, however, is rarely examined. We present a new incentive-theoretical perspective on group political activity, considering both member demands and leadership constraints. We argue that investments in political activities (one way of generating collective incentives) as a means to prevent member exit are more or less important depending on a group’s composition. Simultaneously, the extent to which leaders are incentivized to cater to members’ demands when trying to balance these against conflicting demands, depends on communication channels between leaders and members and the importance of membership fees. Applying Bayesian ordered logit models to data from two group surveys supports our perspective and stresses the importance of considering how intra-organizational dynamics steer groups’ external activities

Editorial: Party Entry and Exit in Times of Crisis

The mobilization and representation of societal demands and grievances is a central function of political parties and party systems in democratic regimes (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). Sudden crises can disrupt it and act as a catalyst for party system change, leading to the entry of new parties in elections and parliaments (e.g., Hobolt and Tilley, 2016; Vidal, 2018; Casal Bértoa and Weber, 2019). This special issue is interested in the link between democracies' crisis exposure and patterns of party entry and survival as well as the latter's short- and long-term consequences for democracy. We are interested in two main questions: How have newcomers (successfully) exploited major crises? Did new entries stay around and introduce significant change in party systems or did they vanish after a short period of turmoil leaving traditional patterns of inter-party competition intact

Party institutionalization as multilevel concept: base- versus elite-level routinization

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this record.This article adds to the refinement of the concept of party institutionalization by focusing on its multilevel character, capturing possible variation between the institutionalization of the party elite and a party’s base. Hence, we argue that debates around party institutionalization as an analytical concept can profit from clarifying whose behavior we actually theorize when specifying and operationalizing the concept’s various dimensions. We illustrate this by focusing on different configurations of the internal property of routinization, more specifically, the presence or absence of elite-level and of base-level routinization. We hypothesize that distinct combinations influence whether and to which extent a party’s overall organization can be considered routinized or not, which, in turn, affects intra-organizational dynamics. We illustrate the usefulness of our conceptual distinctions using comparative case studies of parties characterized by either elite-level or base-level routinization—from both established and new democracies—to illustrate each dimension’s distinct implications for patterns of intra-party conflict and stability.European Commissio

Conflict of interest regulation in European parliaments: Studying the evolution of complex regulatory regimes

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.The growing complexity of parliamentary ethics regulation adopted over the last decades makes the systematic examination of its nature and the rationales underpinning regulatory choices an important endeavor. In this paper we introduce conceptualizations and measurements of conflict of interest (COI) regulation directed toward assuring the impartial and unbiased decisionmaking of national parliamentarians. We distinguish the strictness of rules, the nature of enforcement, sanctions, and transparency requirements as core elements defining COI regimes. Applying our framework to 27 European democracies, we select two cases for in-depth analysis in which legislators chose very different solutions in response to growing pressures to regulate themselves, to inductively explore the drivers underpinning the choice of COI mechanisms: the United Kingdom, which adopted a highly transparency-oriented regime, and Belgium, which adopted a highly sanction-oriented COI regime. Echoing neo-institutionalist perspectives, the longitudinal analyses indicate how the two democracies’ different institutional environments shape distinct answers to similar functional pressures.European Research CouncilCollege of Social Sciences and International Studies, University of Exete

Political Party Mortality in Established Party Systems:A Hierarchical Competing Risks Approach

Existing scholarship offers few answers to fundamental questions about the mortality of political parties in established party systems. Linking party research to the organization literature, we conceptualize two types of party death, dissolution and merger, reflecting distinct theoretical rationales. They underpin a new framework on party organizational mortality theorizing three sets of factors: those shaping mortality generally and those shaping dissolution or merger death exclusively. We test this framework on a new data set covering the complete life cycles of 184 parties that entered 21 consolidated party systems over the last five decades, resorting to multilevel competing risks models to estimate the impact of party and country characteristics on the hazards of both types of death. Our findings not only show that dissolution and merger death are driven by distinct factors, but also that they represent separate logics not intrinsically related at either the party or systemic level

Constitutional dynamics and partisan conflict:A comparative assessment of multi-level systems in Europe

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleThe case studies revealed that the constitutional nature of a multi-level system indeed shapes its modes of day-to-day intergovernmental coordination and, with it, the way competences are (re)allocated in the longer term. Both in federal arrangements and in confederations, the ‘subunits’ – whose status is constitutionally protected – could more easily defend their decision-making capacity within their areas of jurisdiction because they can veto changes in the allocation of competences, an advantage lower-level governments in regionalized systems do not enjoy. Similarly, in federal and confederal systems day-to-day interaction in Inter Governmental Relations (IGR) predominantly took place in multilateral structures, while in regionalized systems bilateralism was more pronounced. The relative influence of party-political (in)congruence on IGR, in contrast, was more varied than theoretically expected

Not Just Efficiency: Insolvency Law in the EU and Its Political Dimension

Certain insolvency law rules, like creditors’ priorities and set-off rights, have a distributive impact on creditors. Distributional rules reflect the hierarchies of values and interests in each jurisdiction and, as a result, have high political relevance and pose an obstacle to reforming the EU Insolvency Regulation. This paper will show the difficulty of reform by addressing two alternative options to regulate cross-border insolvencies in the European Union. The first one is the ‘choice model’, under which companies can select the insolvency law they prefer. Although such a model would allow distressed firms to select the most efficient insolvency law, it would also displace Member States’ power to protect local constituencies. The choice model therefore produces negative externalities and raises legitimacy concerns. The opposite solution is full harmonisation of insolvency law at EU level, including distributional rules. Full harmonisation would have the advantage of internalising all externalities produced by cross-border insolvencies. However, the EU legislative process, which is still based on negotiations between states, is not apt to decide on distributive insolvency rules; additionally, if harmonisation includes such rules, it will indirectly modify national social security strategies and equilibria. This debate shows that the choice regarding power allocation over bankruptcies in the EU depends on the progress of European integration and is mainly a matter of political legitimacy, not only of efficiency