Which constitution for what kind of Europe?

Discussion of the pros and cons of an EU constitution tends to focus upon two issues. On the one hand, proponents and opponents of reform seek to legitimate the EU as a 'regime', or form of governance. For example, strengthening the powers of the European Parliament is hoped to improve democratic accountability, while incorporating the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU is suggested as a way of enhancing legal integrity and the rule of law. On the other hand, debate centres on the EU's status as a 'polity', and the degree to which a Constitution might allow a clear demarcation of what is the EU's area of competence and what remains the domain of domestic governments and legal systems. These two issues are inter-related. Yet, neither politicians nor many academics explicitly address the connections between them. Some focus on 'regime' considerations and seek, almost as an after thought, to tailor them to their preferred view of the EU polity. Others, especially Eurosceptics, treat the very discussion of the EU as having a regime, as an undesirable move in the direction of acknowledging it as a polity. In this piece I wish to suggest that both approaches are misguided. Regime and polity interact, with the latter constraining (without determining) the former. I shall explore the three dominant models of constitutionalism to be found within European political discourse: a rights-based model, a popular sovereignty model and a common law model that employs elements of each. Whilst the first two are the most frequently employed by proponents of constitutional reform, I shall suggest that it is the third that best represents the actually existing EU constitution. Moreover, it has been the key to the successful integration of Europe hitherto precisely because it has allowed both the 'regime', and 'polity', dimensions of the EU to develop in tandem

Book review: Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept

Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept Reiner Robert , Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept, Polity: Cambridge, 2016; 272 pp.: 9780745660301, £50.00 (hbk)

Cliophysics: Socio-political Reliability Theory, Polity Duration and African Political (In)stabilities

Quantification of historical sociological processes have recently gained attention among theoreticians in the effort of providing a solid theoretical understanding of the behaviors and regularities present in sociopolitical dynamics. Here we present a reliability theory of polity processes with emphases on individual political dynamics of African countries. We found that the structural properties of polity failure rates successfully capture the risk of political vulnerability and instabilities in which 87.50%, 75%, 71.43%, and 0% of the countries with monotonically increasing, unimodal, U-shaped and monotonically decreasing polity failure rates, respectively, have high level of state fragility indices. The quasi-U-shape relationship between average polity duration and regime types corroborates historical precedents and explains the stability of the autocracies and democracies.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

The Dual World Polity: Fragmentation and Integration in the Network of Intergovernmental Organizations

A growing body of research demonstrates powerful effects of international organizations on national policy, and the literature on international conflict is increasingly adopting a network perspective on international organizations, but we still know little about the network structure of the world polity itself. This is surprising in light of the theoretical implications of world polity theory, world systems theory, and the world civilizations approach to the structure of the world polity. Using data on a set of prominent intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), along with a comparison to the complete population of IGOs, this study examines the world polity as a network structured by symbolic and material conflict. Network analysis reveals a contradictory duality in the structure of the world polity: while states are densely interconnected through international organizations, these international organizations are only sparsely interconnected. Contrary to world polity theory, world system position and world civilization predict position in the world polity. These results show that, in neglecting the network structure of the world polity, previous research has underestimated the extent of structural inequality in the world polity. Because embeddedness in the world polity has such powerful effects on state policies, international trade, and international conflict, the centralization and fragmentation of the world polity may have disintegrative implications for world politics.Sociolog

European Integration and the State

European Commission; implementation; integration theory; multilevel governance; national interest; Nation-state; neo-functionalism; polity building; Single Market; Treaty on European Union

National Security, Religious Anarchism and the Politics of Amnesty in Nigeria

The Nigerian state is caught in the crossfire of national insecurity arising from the insurgency of various rogue groups. The most prominent of these groups, and one whose activities have had far -reaching destabilising effect on the polity, is the Boko Haram sect. The Boko Haram sect, which uses the Taliban - and al-Qaeda-style terrorist tactics of suicide bombing and targeted assassination, is responsible for between 3000 and 4000 deaths since it declared war and engaged in armed insurgency in 2009. The sect has targeted and bombed state institutions, the United Nations building as well as many Christian worship centres in furtherance of its avowed objective of deploying terror to achieve the islamisation of the Nigerian state. Relying on secondary sources of data, the paper interrogates the force theory that underpins Nigeria’s security engineering and contends that the continued insecurity in the polity is a demonstration of its ineffectiveness. The paper also contends that the proposition by the Federal Government to grant amnesty to the Boko Haram sect is not as simplistic as it appears as it transcends the narrow definitional criteria of bartering forgiveness for peace. While the paper is critical of the proposed amnesty programme, it advocates a holistic approach that incorporates other issues that are promotive of justice, morality and ethicalness in the polity

Institutions and Economic Outcomes: A Dominance Based Analysis of Causality and Multivariate Welfare With Discrete and Continuous Variables

One of the central issues in welfare economics is the measurement of overall wellbeing and, to this end, the interaction between institutions (polity) and growth is paramount. Individual welfare depends on both economic and political factors but the continuous nature of economic variables combined with the discrete nature of political ones renders conventional multivariate techniques problematic. In this paper, we propose a multivariate dominance test based on the comparison of mixtures of continuous and discrete distributions to examine changes in welfare. Our results suggest that, while economic growth exerted a positive impact from 1960 to 2000, declines in polity over the earlier part of this period were sufficient to produce a decline in overall wellbeing until the mid-1970s. Subsequent increases in polity then reversed the trend and, ultimately, wellbeing in 2000 was higher than that in 1960. To be sure, economic and political variables are correlated and, based on the dominance of polity in our multivariate results, we conjecture that this correlation is predominantly due to a causal link from polity to growth. While the development literature is rife with debates over whether it is institutions that cause growth or growth that causes institutions, we argue that the relevant question is not which hypothesis is correct but, rather, which hypothesis dominates. Since standard regression techniques have difficulty capturing non-linear dependence, especially when one of the variables is an index with limited variation, we propose a causality dominance test to examine this aspect of the growth-institutions nexus and indeed find evidence that the causal effects of polity on growth dominate those of growth on polity, particularly when the data are population weighted.Growth, Polity, Causality, Multivariate Wellbeing

Sultan, dynasty & state in the Ottoman Empire: political institutions in the 16th century

From its inception around 1300, 'the House of Osman' maintained the ancient Eurasian steppe tradition which kept the system of suc cession open. At a sultan's death, the throne went to the best candidate to emerge in a contest. By the end of sixteenth century, dynastic strug gles, amounting to civil war and the killing of all the brothers of a successful prince, had caused disquiet in Ottoman polity. Subse quently, rules of succession favoured seniority due to circumstances of the age and lifespan of sultans. Also in the sixteenth century, the grand vezir established a personal administration. By the end of the century, the sultan, though himself no longer a charismatic military leader, curtailed the emergence of a minister in charge of policy. Ot toman polity remained a dynastic empire to its end which deliberately curtailed the emergence of independent political institutions