Stefano Bartolini argues that, despite the growth of a large theoretical literature about institutions and institutionalism over the last thirty years, the specific nature of political institutions has been relatively neglected. Political institutions have been subsumed into the broader problems of the emergence, persistence, change and functions of all types of institutions. The author defines political institutions strictly as norms and rules of 'conferral', to be distinguished from norm...

EU Federalism and Constitutionalism: The Legacy of Altiero Spinelli, edited by Andrew Glencross and Alexander H. Trechsel, represents the first book-length study of the travails of the implementation of federalism at the European level from the perspective of Altiero Spinelli's ideas and his political life, which were both devoted to a federally united Europe. It is also a timely publication given the protracted struggle to implement a new EU institutional architecture—the 2009 Lisbon Trea...

For a long time analyses of political parties were framed within the usual context of democracy and of the historical transformation of the forms of democratic government. More recently several authors, among which eminently Peter Mair, progressively began to question the relationship between the normative definition of democratic government and the actual operation of parties. These new concerns are well epitomized by the tension between ‘responsiveness’ and ‘responsibility’ that gives th...