If things can only get worse: Anticipation of enlargement in European Union legislative politics

Anticipation is a central feature of political behaviour. It has an impact on actors' choices and can change the timing of decisions. This article analyses anticipation in legislative politics. After delineating different objects as well as consequences of anticipation theoretically, a set of hypotheses about anticipatory behaviour in EU decision-making is derived. In particular, it is asked whether the EU Council anticipates the arrival of new Member States and how this affects legislative output. The theory is tested by estimating count models using a dataset that contains information on all binding EU legislation from 1976 to 2007. Covering five enlargement rounds, evidence is presented for anticipatory behaviour in EU legislative politics.     

The long and the short of it: Electoral institutions and the dynamics of party system size, 1950–2005

While institutional theories of party system size are usually examined cross‐nationally, there is ample reason to expect that changes in electoral institutions will affect party system size within countries as well. Although some of this effect may occur immediately, most of the effects are likely to be realised over time and across subsequent elections. A series of error‐correction models examine the short‐ and long‐term effects of changes in electoral institutions on party system size. The results indicate that changes in electoral institutions do produce the expected effects on party system size, and that these effects occur mostly over the long term.     

Representation as a median mandate: Taking cross‐national differences seriously

The extent and ways in which popular preferences influence government policy are absolutely central to our understanding of modern democracy. Paul Warwick's discussion of these in the European Journal of Political Research in 2010 puts itself at the heart of the debate with its critique of the median mandate theory of McDonald and Budge, proposing an alternative ‘bilateralist’ concept of representation. This article questions whether this concept has much to add to our theoretical understanding of representational processes. However, Warwick's further conceptual points deserve serious consideration. These concern the time horizons within which representative processes work, and the status of the median position given multi‐motivated voting. At the evidential level, Warwick argues that survey‐based measures of voter and party left–right positions fail to produce the correspondence between median and government policy positions that median mandate theory would have us expect. However, survey‐based measures of median voter and party placements obscure important cross‐national variation. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems ( CSES 2007 ), as Warwick does, this article shows that survey respondents norm their own and their country's party positions to their national context. The consequence is to make the political centre in all nations appear similar. Allowing for the relevant cross‐national differences brings the relationship between the median voter and government position back in line with expectations.     

POLICE OFFICERS' ATTITUDES,BEHAVIOR, AND SUPERVISORY INFLUENCES: AN ANALYSIS OF PROBLEM SOLVING*

This paper examines the influence of officers' and supervisors' attitudes and priorities toward community policing and problem solving over the time officers spend conducting problem‐solving activities. Analyzing data collected for the Project on Policing Neighborhoods, a multi‐method study of police patrol in two police departments, results show that officers' perceptions of their supervisors' priorities for problem solving affect the amount of time they spend conducting these activities, although their own attitudes toward community policing are unrelated to their behavior. We also find that officers' attitudes regarding problem solving are weakly correlated with their supervisors' attitudes and, further, that officers' perceptions of their supervisors' attitudes are often inaccurate.