The dimensionality of the EU policy space: the European elections of 1999

In any full-grown democracy, parties must confront voters with real choices that matter. The European Union is often said to be devoid of these choices owing to minor policy differences between parties. The manifestos issued at European Parliament elections by party groups are often perceived as being bland and indistinguishable from each other. How correct is this perception? In this article, the diversity of policy positions within and between the main European party groups is analyzed by means of the European election manifestos of 1999. The content analysis of these manifestos shows that there are significant differences both within and between the party groups. These differences indicate that these groups are (potentially) able to present meaningful choices to voters. © 2002, Sage Publications. All rights reserved

Fuzzy sets and social research

four in-depth methodological discussions of the use of fuzzy sets in social research. They have in common that they confront and compare fuzzy set methods with mainstream techniques. These contributions should not be read as introductions to fuzzy set analysis (see Smithson 1987; Ragin 2000) but as attempts to validate this new methodology and demonstrate some of its strengths by comparing it with estab-lished approaches. In brief, fuzzy sets extend Boolean or “crisp ” sets by permitting membership scores in the interval between 0 and 1. With crisp sets, cases are perceived only as members or nonmembers of a set. The problem is that many core concepts in social research are best under-stood as graded sets. Examples include such dichotomies as coordi-nated versus uncoordinated economies, national versus international politics, the public versus the private sector, states versus markets, consensus versus majoritarian systems, democratic versus nondemo-cratic, federal versus nonfederal, employed versus unemployed, male versus female, high versus low, established versus nonestablished, rich versus poor, and so on (see Pennings 2003). At a theoretical level, most researchers are fully aware of the problematic aspects of using these concepts as simple dichotomies. But this awareness has not been translated into the application of methodologies that are fully equipped to study diversity and complexity in a set-theoretic manner. Fuzzy sets can help social scientists conceptualize social and political phenomena as sets with imprecise boundaries betwee

Choice versus sensitivity : Party reactions to public concerns

Most discussions of democratic theory assume that parties should offer clear choices to voters but also show themselves sensitive to public concerns. Under certain circumstances, however, party convergence on these may preclude electoral choice, thus creating conflict between two democratic 'goods'. We examine possible tradeoffs between choice and responsiveness, and see which actually occur in 16 postwar democracies. Party policy positions turn out to be more strongly related to party ideology than popular concerns, thus privileging differentiation and choice over sensitivity and responsiveness. Implications for democratic theory and practice are considered

Exploring variations in the political discourse on public sector reforms, 1981-2005

This article explores the patterned variations in the references in election manifestos of political parties in OECD countries to marketoriented reforms of the public sector, irrespective whether these references are in favour of these reforms or not. It is expected that these variations are structured by institutional features which are related to national, partisan and sectoral differences. The empirical analysis shows that the national differences between parties are influenced by their membership of 'families of nations' since the adoption of market principles is expected to be ideologically more acceptable in, for example, the Anglo-Saxon world than in Scandinavia. The recent differences between the main party groups are modest, which means that these reforms have become equally 'important' for the established party families that dominate the governments in the selected OECD countries. The differences between policy sectors are partly due to their relation with the welfare state. Most references to reforms are made in the policy sector infrastructure which reflects the numerous attempts to liberalize and privatize this sector. The increase of references to reforms in some sectors that are related to the welfare state (e.g. social affairs and health care) does not coincide with less public expenditures due to the path dependency of spending in these sectors. The diffusion of public sector reforms does not lead to convergence between parties in the sense that national, partisan and sectoral differences become smaller over time. © 2010 Taylor & Francis