Reorganising adjustment: Finland's emergence as a high technology leader

As attention has shifted to the topic of change in organised economies, Finland represents a valuable case study. The nation's leap from paper producer to high technology leader represents a unique opportunity to study restructuring within the confines of an allegedly incremental organised economy. To date, Finland's transformation has been interpreted as a product of sweeping liberal reforms in finance and corporate governance. This article, however, identifies an enduring role for collectively organised economic actors in labour market and technology policies. Cooperation in these arenas did not inhibit restructuring. On the contrary, collaborative technology policies actively facilitated the rapid redistribution of resources to an emerging ICT industry. In exploring the opportunities and constraints associated with these policies, this article not only sheds light on Finland's shift into high technology markets, but also identifies a more flexible role for coordination in the new economy.     

NATO summit: reassurance and effective responses

Events in Ukraine and northern Iraq dramatically increased the significance of NATO's September summit. It marked a turning point for the Alliance, as combat operations in Afghanistan drew to a close and members renewed their commitment to collective defence.     

Managing the NATO alliance: Congress and burdensharing

The Congress has been an active partner in the transatlantic alliance from the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty to the present day. Congressional perpectives have been substantially influenced by the desire to limit the U.S. share of the NATO burden. In recent years, U.S.—European differences over East—West relations, Third World security requirements, and other issues have intensified the burdensharng debate. Now some members of Congress are once again using the threat of unilateral U.S. troop withdrawals from Europe—the main source of congressional influence on the alliance—to pressure the Europeans to increase their defense efforts. Whether the recent focus on burdensharing will recede or grow in the next few years will depend on how the administration and the allies respond to the congressional pressure. In any case, Congress is likely to continue to insist on its due share of management rights in the NATO relationship.     

Finland's Parliamentary Election 2015: Certainty of the Result with Uncertainty of the Outcome

The winner of the Finnish parliamentary election 2015 was certain long before the elections. The Centre Party of Finland would win, but for the composition of the government and future societal changes, it was more interesting who would be the runners-up. With eight parliamentary parties and with eight different political agendas, the Finnish political system forms a hard to predict political landscape. Key issues for the Centre Party, rebounding from the catastrophic elections of 2011, were to find a coalition with trust between its members and to generate trust in getting things done. One evident societal outcome of the election is the deceleration of centralization policies furthered by the previous government. The disagreement over regional politics and devolution and related cleavages within the country brought the coalition government between the Centre Party, the National Coalition Party and the Finns Party to the verge of falling after only six months.     

Public interest lobbies: membership and influence

In this paper we examine empirically the determinants of membership in Common Cause and Public Citizen, two “public interest” lobbies. We find that the only variable significantly associated with membership in these organizations is number of college graduates in a state. We also examine voting by Congressmen on five issues on which one of the lobbies had taken a stand, and we find that in four cases the number of members in a state in the lobby is significantly associated with voting on the bill by Congressmen from the state, after adjusting for all economic variables. We interpret these results to indicate that participation by citizens does have some impact on the legislative process.     

The construction of party membership

While the collapse of party membership in the last half‐century has consumed much of the focus of party scholarship, the notion of membership itself is surprisingly under‐theorised. This article presents a tripartite framework for understanding party membership as a constructed concept: from the perspective of the state, the individual and the political party. As organisational mediators and strategic electoral actors, political parties construct varying notions of membership in order to mobilise resources and gain legitimacy, while balancing the participatory demands of citizens with the legal and normative expectations imposed by the state. Using a number of illustrative examples from Europe and beyond, the article analyses the development of supporters' networks and the extension of participatory opportunities to non‐members. Designed in part to address this membership decline and to offer individuals a different way of engaging with political parties, these initiatives are seen as a crucial step in the evolution of modern parties towards looser, more individualised and amorphous networks of affiliation.     

Burden sharing in the NATO alliance: An empirical test of alternative views

This paper undertakes an empirical test of two opposing views of interdependencies among members of military alliances. The first view, associated with Olson and Zeckhauser, argues that the public good aspect of defense induces free riding behavior by smaller alliance members, which imposes a disproportionate burden of supporting the alliance on the larger members. A second view argues that NATO defense activities produce a mix of outputs, some of which are not purely public, and some of which may be complementary across nations. Furthermore, the nature of the weapons systems and their relative use by alliance members may induce substantial cooperation by allies. The test proposed here analyzes the relationship between defense spending shares of NATO members and their population and relative wealth shares. A simple model is specified and tested using pooled time series cross sectional data. The empirical results indicate more support for the cooperative view of ally relationships than the Olson-Zeckhauser non-cooperative model.     

Citizen support for European Union membership: the role of socialisation experiences

The article explores whether European Union membership has a socialisation effect on citizens’ attitudes towards their country’s membership of the EU. Using a sample of 15 Western European countries, it is shown that this is the case. First, evidence is provided of a positive lifelong socialisation effect: citizen support for their country’s membership of the EU increases with years spent living in an EU member state. Second, it is shown that those who joined the EU during their formative years are less supportive of the EU, whilst those who spent their formative years in a non-democracy are more positive about EU membership. The size of these effects is very small in comparison to that found for the lifelong socialisation effect, suggesting that the lifelong socialisation process of continued EU membership is much more important for EU attitudes. This study offers new insights into the formation of EU attitudes.     

Good governance and differentiated integration: Graded membership in the European Union

The study of European integration has traditionally focused on organisational growth: the deepening and widening of the European Union (EU). By contrast, this article analyses organisational differentiation, a process in which states refuse, or are being refused, full integration but find value in establishing in‐between grades of membership. It describes how the EU's system of graded membership has developed, and it explains the positioning of states in this system. The core countries of the EU set a standard of ‘good governance’. The closer European countries are to this standard, the closer their membership grade is to the core. Some countries fall short of this standard and are refused further integration by the core: their membership grade increases with better governance. Other countries refuse further integration because they outperform the standards of the core countries: their membership grade decreases as governance improves. These conjectures are corroborated in a panel analysis of European countries.     

Determinants of public support for EU membership: Data from the Baltic countries

Focusing on individual–level determinants of public support for EU membership, this paper brings the literature on Western European integration to bear on the Eastern and Central European accession. Existing theories have focused on utilitarian expectations, political values, and domestic politics as determinants of public attitudes toward European integration. The paper discusses the applicability of the proposed theories and measures in the Eastern European context and develops a model that identifies micro–level economic expectations, support for democratic norms, trust in the national government, and perceptions of ethnic tension as possible determinants of public support for EU membership. These propositions are tested with survey data from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, using logistic regression. The results lend strong support to the expected gains and domestic politics hypotheses but suggest that individual competitiveness, a frequently used proxy for economic expectations, may be a poor predictor of attitudes toward the EU in the CEE context. Perceptions of increased ethnic tensions were found to decrease minority support for EU membership in Latvia, the Baltic country that has pursued particularly stringent citizenship and minority policies. Identification with democratic norms did not influence opinions in Latvia and Estonia, while having an unexpected negative effect on the attitudes of the Lithuanian public.