Different worlds of contention? Protest in Northwestern,Southern and Eastern Europe

Despite the voluminous literature on the ‘normalisation of protest’, the protest arena is seen as a bastion of left-wing mobilisation. While citizens on the left readily turn to the streets, citizens on the right only settle for it as a ‘second best option’. However, most studies are based on aggregated cross-national comparisons or only include Northwestern Europe. We contend the aggregate-level perspective hides different dynamics of protest across Europe. Based on individual-level data from the European Social Survey (2002–2016), we investigate the relationship between ideology and protest as a key component of the normalisation of protest. Using hierarchical logistic regression models, we show that while protest is becoming more common, citizens with different ideological views are not equal in their protest participation across the three European regions. Instead of a general left predominance, we find that in Eastern European countries, right-wing citizens are more likely to protest than those on the left. In Northwestern and Southern European countries, we find the reverse relationship, left-wing citizens are more likely to protest than their right-wing counterparts. Lessons drawn from the protest experience in Northwestern Europe characterised by historical mobilisation by the New Left are of limited use for explaining the ideological composition of protest in the Southern and Eastern European countries. We identify historical and contemporary regime access as the mechanism underlying regional patterns: citizens with ideological views that were historically in opposition are more likely to protest. In terms of contemporary regime access, we find that partisanship enhances the effect of ideology, while ideological distance from the government has a different effect in the three regions. As protest gains in importance as a form of participation, the paper contributes to our understanding of regional divergence in the extent to which citizens with varying ideological views use this tool.     

Why accommodate minorities asymmetrically? A theory of ideological authority insulation

Tensions between regionalist claimants and state-wide governments remain the primary source of violent conflicts. Existing theories cannot systematically explain why and when state-wide governments accede to such claims. Building on the partisan approaches developed so far, a theory of ideological authority insulation is constructed in this article. It is argued that the willingness of state-wide parties to transfer authority to specific territorial entities is predominantly informed by ideological proximity to those entities. In a nutshell, the dominant conflict dimension in a country superimposes partisan rationales on the territorial dimension. A new dataset has been compiled with roughly 4,300 region-cabinet dyads between 1945 and 2015, including electoral data, party positions and regional ‘centres of gravity’. Using panel rare-events regressions, it is found that ideological proximity systematically explains the accommodation of minority demand controlling for alternative explanations from the partisan and ethnic conflict literature. The empirical evidence therefore supports adding ideological insulation and superimposition to the toolbox of partisan and conflict researchers. Additionally, the findings encourage the application of arguments from the conflict literature in established democracies and the testing of insights from partisan researchers in less democratic environments.     

Accounting for Changing Earnings Inequality in Costa Rica, 1980–99

After declining from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, inequality in monthly earnings in Costa Rica stabilised from 1987 to 1992 and then increased from 1992 to 1999. In this article, we use recently developed techniques to measure the extent to which these changes in earnings inequality were the result of changes associated with the distributions of personal and workplace characteristics of workers or the earnings differences associated with those characteristics. We present evidence that the most important cause of the fall in inequality prior to 1987 was a decline in returns to education. Inequality stopped falling in Costa Rica in the 1990s in part because returns to education stopped falling. The most important cause of rising inequality in monthly earnings in the 1990s was an increase in the proportion of workers working a non-standard work week (part-time or over-time).     

Electoral reforms,entry barriers and the structure of political markets: A comparative analysis

This article investigates the impact of electoral reforms on entry barriers in political markets. The discussion starts by delineating the theoretical boundaries of various political markets, such as those for participation, parties and government. By taking a cue from industrial organisation theory, the article offers an analysis of entry barriers, both hard and soft, along with their operationalisation for empirical research. Based on this theoretical framework, a single hypothesis is investigated. It posits that the modification of the entry barriers in the market for parties leads to changes in the concentration of the popular vote for party lists. An observable implication of this relationship would be if an electoral reform that raises entry barriers led to subsequent increases in the Herfindahl index (a measure of market concentration), and vice versa. This proposition is empirically tested by a comparative analysis of a new database covering Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The analysis offers support for the following proposition: in most cases the changes in the entry barriers led to a corresponding change of concentration in the market for parties.     

Institutional constraints on cabinet formation: Veto points and party system dynamics

Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies has presented contradicting evidence on the role of political veto institutions and parliamentary polarization on the formation of cabinet types. Institutional rules may either provide significant leeway for political parties or seriously constrain them when forming sustainable coalitions. In contrast to previous studies we argue that the effect of political institutions is conditional on the degree of polarization in parliament. We test our hypotheses using original data on 842 cabinet formations in 33 advanced democracies between 1945–2018. In line with previous research, we find that the institutional rules have a pronounced effect on the type of cabinet formed, but that institutional rules moderate the effect of party system polarization. Thus, our findings provide important new insights on cabinet formation which are particularly relevant for today's increasingly polarized parliaments.