This Element compares crisis-specific policymaking, its causes and consequences, at the two levels of the EU polity during the COVID-19 and the refugee crisis 2015–16. In both crises, EU policymaking responded to exogenous pressure and was dominated by executive decision-making. Still, it also differed in three critical aspects: it was much more salient, consensual, and effective during the COVID-19 than the refugee crisis. The present study accounts for both similarities and differences, ...

Direct Democratic Choice sets out to understand how the citizens actually decide in direct-democratic votes. Author Hanspeter Kriesi has analyzed nearly twenty years of post-election surveys in Switzerland (1981-1999), which he has contextualized according to the various political issues and the relevant arguments provided by the political elites. This book's core argument is that the citizens who participate in direct-democratic votes make competent choices. Kriesi's extensive em...

In 2020, the European Union faced the COVID-19 crisis. This book tells the unlikely story of how the European Union survived a crisis that arrived on the heels of a difficult decade during which the EU wrestled with repeated crises, from the Euro Area, to refugees, populism, and geopolitics. Against all odds, a divided polity with a weak centre and low competences in crucial policy domains, managed to overcome powerful disincentives to coordinate its way out of the pandemic and create cent...

The refugee crisis which hit the European Union and its member states during 2015–16 was just one in a series of recent crises, but perhaps the most critical for the EU's resilience. This book shows how policymakers in the EU polity have tried to come to terms with it. To explain how they reacted to the crisis domestically and jointly at the EU-level, the study relies on an original method to analyze political processes. It argues that the policy-specific institutional context and the spec...

Dialogues on Migration Policy brings together leading American and European scholars of immigration politics to address migration policy. Editors Marco Giugni and Florence Passy's aim to present a number of informed "dialogues" addressing three main theoretical concerns in this field: the role of the national state in a globalizing world, the determinants of policy change, and the role of collective interests in migration policy. Adopting an unconventional format, the novelty of

What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. Whil...

Popular protests are on the rise in China. However, since protesters rely on existing channels of participation and on patronage by elite backers, the state has been able to stymie attempts to generalize resistance and no large scale political movements have significantly challenged party rule. Yet the Chinese state is not monolithic. Decentralization has increased the power of local authorities, creating space for policy innovations and opening up the political opportunity structure. Popu...

First published in 1996. This study is the product of a collaborative effort that has lasted for more than seven years. This is a project on the comparative analysis of new social movements in Western Europe.

In 2012 How Europeans View and Evaluate Democracy assessed the Europeans' views and evaluations of the state of democracy after one of the deepest economic and financial crises worldwide. Against the most pessimistic “Zeitgeist,” the book found that there was overwhelming support for democracy in Europe, even if the breadth and scope of the citizens' demands for their democratic systems varied within and between countries. Importantly, with very few exceptions, the implementation ...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors develop a rigorous conceptual framework that focuses on the interactions between three types of participants in contentious politics: governmen...

Based on a new data-set covering 29 European and neighboring countries, this volume shows how, Europeans view and evaluate democracy: what are their conceptions of democracy, how do they assess the quality of democracy in their own country, and to what extent do they consider their country's democracy as legitimate? The study shows that Europeans share a common view of liberal democracy, which is complemented by elements of social and direct democracy, which go beyond the basic liberal mod...

This is the first comprehensive overview of the waves of protest mobilization that spread across Europe in the wake of the Great Recession. Documenting the extent of these protests in a study covering thirty countries, including the issues they addressed and the degree to which they replicated each other, this book maps the prevalence and nature of protest across Europe, and explains the interactions between economic and political grievances that lead to protest mobilization. The authors a...