Public Service Motivation: a rationalist critique

There has been significant and growing interest and empirical research around Public Service Motivation (PSM) in recent years. There are few critiques of the construct, and none from a rationalist perspective. Given that the origins of PSM lie in attempts by public administration scholars to counter rationalist explanations of bureaucratic behaviour, this lack of a counter-criticism is surprising. This article provides a rationalist critique of PSM. It argues that PSM is consistent with, not an alternative to, rationalist understandings of what motivates individuals. It also argues that a significant gap in the PSM literature is around how civil servants and others make decisions; decisions about the public interest, and thus how and when to allocate public resources. By seeing PSM as consistent with rationality, and specifically as a form of expressive interests, answers many of the remaining questions about PSM and addresses the substantive gaps in the construct

Party system closure and openness: conceptualization, operationalization and validation

The degree of closure of the governmental arena is a central aspect of the stabilization of party systems, and yet little systematic effort has been devoted to its operationalization. The article proposes a new index, examines its reliability and validity, and reports the ranking of 60 party systems. By redefining the units of measurement we suggest new indicators that are uniform and transparent in their logic of construction, can be applied both to specific government-changes and to time periods, and are sensitive to the degree of change. The article finds a hierarchy among the components of party system closure, dominated by coalition formula. While new and established democracies can both produced closed patterns, the analysis of inter-war European party systems shows that closed systems are less prone to authoritarian takeover. The article demonstrates the power of inertia: the completely closed configurations stand out as the most durable ones

Summary and Conclusions: Europe in Equilibrium-Unresponsive Inertia or Vibrant Resilience?

This chapter starts by describing the features of domestic, national-level and European Union-level politics that the previous chapters have sought to illuminate. It then summarizes the fundamental Europe-wide trends that have been observed in recent decades concerning the basic attitudinal and behavioural phenomena analysed in the previous chapters. The chapter restates the fundamental conclusions of the book concerning the key individual- and macro-level drivers of change and, in most cases, fundamental stability and adaptability. Finally, it discusses the implications of the findings for our understanding of the politics of European integration, also in light of the economic and financial crisis in which Europe was plunged since 2008

Citizens and the European Polity

This book provides a broad overview of the main trends in mass attitudes towards domestic politics and European integration from the 1970s until today. Particularly in the last two decades, the 'end of the permissive consensus' around European integration has forced analysts to place public opinion at the centre of their concerns. The book faces this challenge head on, and the overview it provides goes well beyond the most commonly used indicators. On the one hand, it shows how integration's deepening and enlargement involved polities and societies whose fundamental traits in terms of political culture - regime support, political engagement, ideological polarization - have remained anything but static or homogeneous. On the other hand, it addresses systematically what Scharpf (1999) has long identified as the main sources of the democratic deficits of the EU: the lack of a sense of collective identity, the lack of a Europe-wide structure for political accountability, and the lack of recognition of the EU as a legitimate political authority. In other words, it focuses on the fundamental dimensions of how Europeans relate to the EU: identity (the sense of an 'European political community'; representation (the perception that European elites and institutions articulate citizens' interests and are responsive to them); and policy scope (the legitimacy awarded to the EU as a proper locus of policy-making). It does so by employing a cohesive theoretical framework derived from the entire IntUne project, survey and macro-social data encompassing all EU member countries, and state-of-the-art methods. 7copy; The several contributors 2012

Introduction: Citizens and the European Polity

This chapter presents the volume, its fundamental motivation, and contents. It argues that the end of 'permissive consensus' and the entry of mass publics as relevant actors in the dynamics of European integration require a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of how attitudes towards domestic and European politics are linked, especially in the context of an enlarged EU. It describes the main attitudinal aspects addressed by the book chapters and the theoretical perspective that gives unity to the volume and to the entire IntUne series: a conceptualization of the subjective dimensions of European citizenship as consisting in Identity, Representation, and Policy Scope. It then outlines the main questions asked and answered in each of the volume's chapters

Support for European Integration

This chapter examines generalized support for the EU rather than attitudes towards specific institutions and policies. Theories about its origin are subjected to more comprehensive empirical tests than previous analyses attempted, using time-series cross-section data covering all member states from the 1970s to 2007. The dynamic relationship between EU-support and national economic and political developments follows a transfer, rather than substitution logic, while increasing trade with EU member states, high cognitive mobilization, low welfare spending, Catholicism and favourable labour market position all contribute to favourable dispositions towards EU-membership. Other often suggested influences on EU support appear inconsistently across nations or time, which we attribute to the nature of the EU itself that generates diverse, contradictory, and ever-changing expectations among citizens

Towards an Integrated Model of EU Citizenship and Support

This chapter explicitly models reciprocal causal effects, providing a comprehensive and integrated account of EU citizenship attitudes on EU support. While preceding explanatory chapters are all based on single-equation models, here a system of equations is estimated in which instrumental variables are employed to sharpen the understanding of the potentially reciprocal causal effects between citizenship and support. The results show that: i) among the three dimensions of EU citizenship, they key driver is people's sense of representation; ii) once the 'endogenous' links between identity, representation and scope are carefully controlled for, all four of the theoretical perspectives whose impacts have been tested throughout the book appear relevant, although the stronger influences are associated with instrumental rationality and the use of heuristics; iii) although some inter-correlation exists between citizenship and support, estimates controlling for such endogeneity show that support for the EU is dependent on people's sense of EU citizenship