SUPRANATIONAL GOVERNANCE OR NATIONAL BUSINESS‐AS‐USUAL? THE NATIONAL ADMINISTRATION OF EU STRUCTURAL FUNDS IN THE NETHERLANDS AND DENMARK

The partnership principle in EU cohesion policy was introduced in order to involve subnational authorities and interest organizations in policy formulation and implementation. In this article we examine how the member states have reacted to this call for a new way of making public policy. We argue that the multi‐level governance literature and the critics of the multi‐level governance framework have not examined implementation structures properly, but have focused on regional influence. We conduct a comparative analysis of the Dutch and Danish implementations of the European Social Fund and the European Regional Development Fund. Our findings show that when examining implementation structures it becomes clear that member states are in full control of the re‐allocation of EU funds. They show that Denmark and The Netherlands have been able to absorb EU cohesion policy within already existing national implementation structures of labour market policies and regional development. One central theoretical implication of our study is that the focus of studies of any fundamental re‐allocation of power resources in cohesion studies should comprise the entire network of implementation rather than the strategies of its individual component actors.     

Is Narco‐Violence in Mexico Terrorism?

Mexico's drug ‘war’ produced 100,000 deaths between 2006 and 2012. The extreme violence has raised the notion that Mexico has become a failed state wracked by terrorism. We categorise the forms of narco‐violence in Mexico in light of the literature on terrorism and contemporary Mexican politics. Our study suggests three overlapping dimensions of narco‐violence that should be considered terrorism: (a) narco‐terror as a struggle for regional political control; (b) narco‐terror as a practice ordered by cartel leaders rather than spontaneous violence of foot soldiers; and (c) narco‐terror as an expansion strategy from solely drug trafficking to other kinds of organised crime.     

Appraising Commitments and Guarantees with Option Prices1

Budgetary decision‐making is prone to myopia and to tunnel vision. Pension commitments suffer from both of these pathologies. In this case, we look closely at the State of Oregon's Public Employee Retirement System to show how the disclosure standards adopted by the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) help correct the fiscal vision of state and local governments and further conclude that postemployment commitments ought to be comprehensively examined in GASB's review of its accounting and reporting standards scheduled for 2008, ideally from the standpoint of present‐value budgeting.     

European parties' performance in electoral competition

Abstract: This article focuses on competition for votes between parties, as it existed in Western Europe in the period of the direct election to the European Parliament in 1989. Following earlier research by Van der Eijk and Niemöller, an instrument is introduced to measure the probability of party choice of EC citizens which establishes the likelihood of respondents to vote for any of the nationally relevant options/parties. A number of substantive conclusions about political parties'competitive performance result from this research. First, a single mechanism seems to structure electoral competition in all EC member-countries. Second, the competitive performance of political parties is not affected by their governmental status, their ideological position, and the degree of politicisation of the electoral environment. And third, parties'competitive performance is strongly affected by the degree of uniqueness of their electoral potential, their mobilising capacities, their ideological extremity and their sheer size.     

Losers lose more than winners win: Asymmetrical effects of winning and losing in elections

Being on the winning or the losing side in elections has important consequences for voters’ perceptions of democracy. This article contributes to the existing literature by showing that being on the losing side has persistent effects over a surprisingly long time. Based on a dataset that measures voters’ satisfaction with democracy three years after elections were held, it first shows that losers are significantly more dissatisfied with democracy than winners on both input and output side measures of perceptions of democracy. Furthermore, the article shows that turning from winning to losing has significant negative effects on voters’ satisfaction, and that this finding is robust across a number of different specifications. These results are remarkable given that the data used is from Denmark – a country that constitutes a least-likely case for finding effects of being on the winning or the losing side.