Everyone agrees that legislators in democracies should have due regard for the future. However, we do not know what factors affect politicians' temporal focus. This is particularly true of personal characteristics of legislators, which may be advantaged by different (s)electorates. We study the temporal focus of politicians in the post-war United Kingdom, as inferred from their use of language. Specifically, we investigate whether new parents focused more on the future. We set out three mechanisms why parenthood might affect future focus. We find gendered effects: fatherhood promotes a general (across-topic) increase in future orientation amongst men, whilst motherhood promotes a decrease in future orientation amongst women which is consistent with a shift away from 'caring' topics towards general questions of government conduct. Our findings challenge some common tropes about parents having a greater stake in the future.
This article compares two contemporary crises of the European Union: Brexit and Rule of Law concerns in Hungary and Poland. It makes two related contributions. First, it conceptualises and defines 'membership crisis', a category capturing the two cases. State-building theories - Rokkan's developmental concepts of territorial bounding and binding authority; and Stepan's federalist logics of holding and coming together - are combined in a sequential framework describing how membership crisis destabilises and reshapes EU membership models. These are events originating in member states seeking a new, precedent-setting membership model that challenges EU authority and polity development. European leaders' responses are determined by the politics of coming or holding together around the EU's executive institutions. This is where the cases diverge. A structured comparison explores the divergent natures of the two cases. The shock of Brexit and overt membership change triggered a 'coming together' effect in the EU27, and a reaffirmation of club rules. The Rule of Law crisis reconfigures EU authority, presenting only creeping, covert changes to membership with no existential moment r & eacute;v & eacute;lateur. The crises demonstrate how the European polity is counterintuitively sustained by a reaction to profound shocks and undermined by an incapacity to innovate without them.
While most studies of unequal political representation focus on divisions by income and education, this paper centers the urban-rural divide as a key axis of variation in opinion-policy congruence. Drawing on a unique dataset that links individual-level survey responses on specific policy items to actual national policy outcomes in Sweden between 1986-2024, the study provides a direct measure of whose preferences are reflected in enacted legislation. The results reveal a small but persistent and robust urban advantage in representation: individuals living in urban municipalities are significantly more likely to experience policy congruence than rural residents, even when controlling for education, income, and other individual characteristics. Homeownership further strengthens congruence in urban areas, suggesting that spatial and material factors interact to shape levels of political representation. The analysis also confirms a status quo bias: citizens who favor existing policies are more likely to be represented, while inequalities are most pronounced when policy change is at stake. Though variation in survey items limits year-to-year comparability, there are signs of decreasing gaps in congruence over time. These findings call for a reevaluation of how geography and housing structure political inequality in national policymaking.
The recent debate on European integration has highlighted the need to increase the provision of European Public Goods (EPGs) in the economic and other fields. While there is broad consensus on the diagnosis, the delivery is encountering significant political constraints. In this paper, we analyse two typologies of economic EPGs: Innovative EPGs (EPG-I) and Solidarity EPGs (EPG-S). We argue that the heterogeneity of national benefits over the two types of EPGs, the differentiated costs associated with the transfer of national sovereignty in the financing and production of these EPGs, and the relative bargaining power of each member state play a key role. Such a conceptual framework is applied to a subset of EU countries (France, Germany, Italy and Sweden) to identify the bottlenecks in the provision of EPGs. We conclude that overcoming the undersupply of EPGs requires a balanced combination of EPG-I and EPG-S.
Modern democracies face a growing mismatch between the policies governments adopt and the administrative resources available to implement them. Yet while research has documented the consequences of this mismatch for policy outputs, what sustained resource shortfalls do to the implementing organizations themselves has largely been overlooked. This paper addresses that gap by introducing the concept of organizational corrosion. Organizational corrosion is defined as the incremental, self-reinforcing degradation of public agencies along three observable dimensions: performance, internal capabilities, and external standing. To illustrate the concept's explanatory power, contrasting trajectories are traced in two environmental regulators: England's Environment Agency, which exhibits advanced corrosion following sustained austerity and Brexit-induced task expansion, and Ireland's Environmental Protection Agency, which largely avoided corrosion through timely resource alignment and capacity-preserving internal practices.
This article compares domestic ratifications of two major EU crisis-response measures: the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), adopted during the euro-area sovereign debt crisis, and the Own Resources Decision (ORD), adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. It asks whether parliamentary party support varies across asymmetric and symmetric crises, as commonly assumed in the literature. The analysis reveals a strong pattern of continuity: levels of party support and opposition, as well as their underlying justifications, are remarkably similar across both cases. Based on a novel dataset covering all EU member states concerned and combining statistical analysis with qualitative and quantitative content analysis, the article shows that party preferences exhibit pronounced continuity and adapt only slowly, even in the face of major shocks. These findings challenge expectations of crisis-induced change in EU politics and instead highlight the persistence of established domestic conflict structures in shaping support for sharing fiscal liabilities.
The polycrisis has reshuffled the European Union (EU)'s institutional balance of power, raising new questions about the normalisation of European Council-European Commission relations. Drawing on migration policy, this article challenges the core thesis of new intergovernmentalism, namely that member states pursue deeper cooperation while keeping supranational institutions at bay, resulting in 'integration without supranationalism'. We argue that politicisation within the European Council produced legislative deadlock, constraining the Commission under the community method while opening a window of opportunity to develop a new role as technocratic leader in non-legislative areas. Through administrative rule-making and budgetary management, the Commission repositioned itself as a trustee capable of coordinating and centralising power across intergovernmental and supranational institutions. Based on official documents, interviews and participant observation, the article demonstrates that EU migration governance is better characterised as 'supranationalism without integration', a process that empowers the Commission but leaves functional problems unresolved.
How does immigration affect support for redistribution? While most research focuses on overall tax and spending levels, we investigate how immigration influences preferences conditional on tax structures. Using two original survey experiments in the UK, we find that low- and middle-income respondents are more likely to support redistribution to immigrants under progressive systems shielding them from fiscal costs, but oppose redistribution when immigrants are identified as beneficiaries and the tax structure increases their fiscal burden. In contrast, high-income respondents' preferences are largely unaffected by either tax structure or immigrant inclusion. These findings suggest that progressive taxation (1) is a viable revenue-generating strategy without provoking major political backlash; (2) reduces native resistance to immigrant welfare inclusion; (3) helps explain puzzling variation in immigration's effects on welfare attitudes; and (4) clarifies why low- and middle-income groups sometimes reject generous welfare programs despite standing to benefit. Our results highlight the importance of institutional design in shaping how economic self-interest and immigration concerns interact.
How did women's political inclusion shape the early development of the welfare state? We examine Sweden - one of the most egalitarian countries today - to explore the relationship between women's political representation and welfare state formation. Our focus is on the first local election after universal suffrage, analysing over 700 rural municipalities at a time when the welfare state was in its infancy, and women were newcomers in the political arena. Using data on welfare spending and original data on women's representation in municipal councils, we examine how the gender and party affiliation of local representatives relate to subsequent changes in social spending. Despite their small numbers, we find that Social Democratic women - unlike women from other parties or Social Democratic men - played a crucial role in expanding social spending, particularly in municipalities where the Social Democrats were strong. These findings enhance our understanding of women's early political representation in young democracies and political systems with limited women representation.
The green transition is producing new lines of political conflict across Europe, with rural areas emerging as focal points of resistance. Yet existing accounts, focused on individual economic costs, struggle to explain the form and territorial concentration of discontent. This paper argues that place is the missing variable in accounts of climate opposition, with rural discontent reflecting both the structural conditions that concentrate decarbonisation costs in rural territories and cultural narratives that shape how policies are understood and resisted. Using a mixed-methods design in France, it draws on geo-coded survey data to identify territorial patterns of policy support associated with structural vulnerabilities, such as employment structure or material constraints. It then turns to 53 in-depth interviews conducted in three distinct rural regions to examine how residents understand and contest policies. The analysis reveals two interrelated forms of place-based grievance: perceptions of unfair material burdens, and misalignments between climate policies and rural identities and forms of belonging. The study contributes to research on climate politics and political behaviour by demonstrating how structural inequalities and cultural meaning-making processes jointly shape discontent, hereby shedding light on the territorial roots of emerging political conflicts in contemporary Europe.
The EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is among its most contested policies, criticised for incremental changes despite fundamental challenges. Recent scholarship suggests a partial shift in the sector's governance from agricultural exceptionalism towards post-exceptionalism - marked by the emergence of actors seeking more fundamental policy change. Yet, post-exceptionalism scholarship remains unclear regarding who these contesting actors are, and how, and with what effects they challenge exceptionalist arrangements. We conceptualise these actors as potential environmental policy entrepreneurs (EPEs) to examine their role and perceived effectiveness in the post-2013 and post-2020 CAP reforms. Based on interviews with 25 key stakeholders, we identify a growing network of EPEs, within and outside of closed policy networks. Public information and mobilisation strategies were perceived as most effective in challenging exceptionalist arrangements, while other strategies, like institutional barrier manipulation, increased over time but had limited impact. Political context played a crucial role: the global financial crisis and the war in Ukraine favoured economic and productionist ideas over environmental concerns. We reflect that while EPEs challenged the CAP's exceptionalist governance, these arrangements remain resilient, raising critical questions about the ability to align EU agriculture with pressing sustainability challenges.
