2009 forthcoming. A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus, with Liesbet Hooghe. British Journal of Political Science. Rejoinders from Schmitter, Kriesi, and Boerzel & Risse.

This article is an attempt to draw on recent advances in the study of public opinion, political parties, and identity to frame hypotheses about preferences, strategies, and outcomes of regional integration.

"Preferences over jurisdictional architecture are the product of three irreducible logics: efficiency, distribution, and identity. We substantiate the following claims: a) European integration has become politicized in elections and referendums; b) as a result, the preferences of the general public and of national political parties have become decisive for jurisdictional outcomes; c) identity is critical in shaping contestation on Europe. Our theorizing is postfunctionalist in that we make no assumption that jurisdictional outcomes are efficient."

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2008. Double Issue. Regional and Federal Studies, Vol. 18 (2-3), 111-302 "Regional Authority in 42 Democracies, 1950–2006: A Measure and Five Hypotheses," with Liesbet Hooghe and Arjan Schakel.

Table of Contents
1. Measuring Regional Authority*
2. Operationalizing Regional Authority*
3. Validation of the Regional Authority Index*
4. Patterns of Regional Authority*
Appendices: [A] [B] [C]*

* Unofficial, pre-publication versions. For the published versions in Regional and Federal Studies , please consult the Taylor&Francis website.

"At no time in recorded history has a single set of units monopolized authority on earth. Large units—empires and states—have always been several jurisdictional layers deep and most medium and even small units have not been uni-level. The resulting pattern is far from uniform. There is massive variation—over historical time and cross-sectionally—in the scope and structure of government.

"How might one conceive variation in government structure? Individuals are encompassed in multiple jurisdictions operating at diverse territorial scales. If we limit our view to general-purpose jurisdictions, the number of government levels for most people living today is between three and six, of which between one and four exist within their national state. Governments are structured as a more or less hierarchical set of multiple, non-intersecting, jurisdictions. All have one or two levels of local government, and one, two, or three levels of intermediate or regional government below the national.

"Why this structure? Why have what appears to be a convoluted pattern of jurisdictions instead of a simpler set-up, the centralized national state? How does the territorial structure of government vary across time and place, and how might one generalize about it? These are fundamental and difficult questions that lie at the heart of a science of politics, and which have been taken up by political philosophers, including Aristotle, Rousseau, and Althusius, and political scientists, such as Karl Deutsch and Robert Dahl."

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In revision. Radicalism or Reformism. Socialist Parties before World War I, with Heather A. D.  Mbaye and Hyung-min Kim.

This paper began as a series of discussions with Marty Lipset in the early 1980s when he was writing his influential analysis of the sources of radicalism or reformism in socialist parties that became his presidential address to the American Political Science Association. At the time, I was finishing my dissertation which compares the American, British, and German union movements, and which covered ground that was an intellectual love of Lipset's life: American Exceptionalism. When Marty died, I wanted to finish the article I had started during our discussions, and with the help of Heather Mbaye and Hyung-min Kim, we eventually did so.

"This paper seeks to explain ideological variation among socialist, social democratic and labor parties across 18 countries in the early twentieth century. It builds on Seymour Martin Lipset’s classic analysis, but qualifies Lipset’s claim that political citizenship provides a key to socialist orientation. Basic civil liberties (freedom of association and freedom of the press) are prior to, and apparently more decisive than, citizenship. Finally, the explanation we propose goes beyond the widely-held view that socialist ideology is a response to the structure of political alternatives. We claim that the internal structure of the labor movement—in particular, relations between the party and labor unions—was a powerful impetus for socialist radicalism or reformism."

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2008. “European Union?” with Liesbet Hooghe. 30th Anniversary issue of West European Politics.”

"This paper provides an overview of the study of the European Union since the doldrums of the 1970s. We focus on three debates that have helped to shape the field. Has European integration centralized state control or is European integration part of a process of dispersion of authority? What is the role of identity in framing preferences over European integration? And, finally, is European integration part of a new political cleavage? We observe that the European Union is a moving target. It has a habit of throwing up new and unexpected facts which wrong-foot extant theories. We have no grounds for believing that this will not continue."

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In revision. Virtues and Vices of Scale Flexibility, with Liesbet Hooghe.

This paper is part of a larger project on jurisdictional architecture. We are currently revising the piece, so comments are particularly welcome.

"In the eyes of its detractors, dispersal of authority across multiple jurisdictions exacerbates corruption, leads to gridlock, engenders moral hazard, constrains redistribution, obfuscates accountability, and wastes money. Yet a vast literature shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the incidence of multi-level governance has increased over the past several decades. Systematic data on regional authority in 42 countries for the period 1950 to 2005 reveal that in no country have regions lost authority, and in a large minority they have gained authority. At no time in the past have supranational jurisdictions been more authoritative than at the present. For all its current problems, the scope and depth of authority exercised in the European Union has increased over the past half century. While the extent of authority exercised by other regional regimes is less than that of the EU, many such regimes exist, and most have gained, not lost, authority over the past two decades."

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2007. Does Occupation Shape Attitudes on Europe: Benchmarking Validity and Parsimony, with Liesbet Hooghe and JingJing Huo. Acta Politica

This article is an inconclusive attempt to measure the influence of occupation on political attitudes. However, in the process we present a frame for evaluating the trade-off between parsimony and validity.

"Occupation lies behind most models of individual economic interest, and individual economic interest lies behind most rational accounts of preferences. This article investigates the causal influence of occupation for Euroscepticism. Employing data from the 2003 International Social Science Survey Program survey, we find that a) identity and occupation exert independent effects, b) estimates of the total effect of these variables vary across countries in an explicable way, c) political framing by political parties influences whether Euroscepticism is related to occupation or identity, and d) reliability is a serious issue in measuring occupational location."

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2007. Triangulation and the Square Root Law. Electoral Studies 26: 1-10.

This piece thinks through the virtues of triangulation and sets out a simple formal argument using sampling theory. The article encompasses triangulation within the square-root law which specifies an outer limit for informational accuracy as a function of the volume of information.

Unbeknownst to my colleagues (and most of my friends) most of my recent work has been in the field of methodology and data-gathering. This is (I hope!) a temporary condition forced upon me by circumstances, in particular the desperate need for reasonably valid data on topics of substantive and theoretical importance. With Liesbet Hooghe and several current and former Ph.D. students I am gathering data on political parties, international organizations, and subnational governments. The life of a data-gatherer is, to reverse Hobbes, convivial, collegial, and anything but short.

The article below provides an example of triangulating information from four datasets that suffer from diverse method effects.

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2007. Cross-Validating Data on Party Positioning on European Integration, with Liesbet Hooghe, Marco Steenbergen, and Ryan Bakker. Electoral Studies 26: 23-38.

"Our purpose in this article is to cross-validate expert and manifesto measures of party positioning on European integration. We compare these data with each other and with measures from a European election survey and an elite survey of parliamentarians. We find that expert surveys provide the most accurate data for party positioning on European integration. In part, the errors of expert evaluations and electoral manifestos are shared. Both have some difficulty measuring the positioning of small, extreme, parties. But we also detect and explain errors that are unique to each measurement instrument."

For a formal approach to triangulation see the article above.

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2007. Do expert surveys produce consistent estimates of party stances on European integration? Comparing expert surveys in the difficult case of Central and Eastern Europe, with Liesbet Hooghe, Matthew Loveless, Robert Rohrschneider, Marco Steenbergen, Milada Vachudova, Stephen Whitefield. Electoral Studies 26: 23-38.

"Expert surveys have been subject to a number of criticisms concerning their ability to produce accurate estimates of party positions. Such criticisms have particular prima facie credibility in new post-Communist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe,
where party development is regarded as weak. This paper compares data from two expert surveys independently conducted between 2002 and 2004. We find, contrary to expectations, that there is a remarkable overlap in positions assigned to parties. This suggests the usefulness of expert surveys even in the ‘most difficult’ case of post-Communist party systems. It also suggests that parties in these countries have developed effective means of communicating their positions on major issues."

This is a short article with a long title and author list. I once wrote an article with a yet longer title, comparing European integration with the Carolingian empire. The advantage of that article was that the title conveyed the substance of the paper so well that few read the paper.

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2007. Evaluating Expert Judgments, with Marco Steenbergen. European Journal of Political Research.

"Although expert surveys have gained a prominent place in comparative studies of party positions on issues, their validity has been called into question. In this paper, we evaluate some of the validity concerns in the context of our own expert survey on national party positions vis-à-vis European integration. One goal of this paper is to demonstrate that this expert survey produces valid measures of party positions. An equally important goal, however, is to suggest some methods that can help in assessing the quality of expert survey data. These methods, which are rooted in psychometric theory, are applicable in a variety of contexts and are easily implemented."

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2006. Party Ideology and European Integration: An East/West: Different Structure, Same Causality, with Liesbet Hooghe, Moira Nelson and Erica Edwards. Comparative Political Studies 39 (2), 155-75.

"With the accession of eight former communist countries in May 2004 Europe has been stitched back together. What is the character of political conflict in an enlarged European Union, and how does the ideological profile of a party constrain its support on European integration? We seek to shed light on this question with a new expert data set on party positioning on European integration for 171 political parties in 23 countries. We find that the structure of domestic competition differs radically in East and West, but that, with respect to European integration, the same causality is at work: parties’ positions on European integration are systematically related to their positions on domestic conflict. But the substantive connection could not be more different. In the West, the two main sources of opposition to European integration—the hard left, and the hard right, are at opposite ends of the axis of domestic party competition. In the East, opposition is located at one end of the axis, among parties sympathetic to the communist legacy of economic egalitarianism and authoritarianism."

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2006. Europe’s Blues: Theoretical Soul-Searching After the Rejection of a European Constitution, with Liesbet Hooghe, PS: Politics and Political Science (April 2006), 247-250.

This article discusses how the rejection of the European Constitution challenges our understanding of European integration. It is, we hope, suited to undergraduate classes.

"The Spanish, French, Dutch, and Luxembourg referenda on the Constitutional Treaty
are the latest, but certainly not the last, flashpoints in a contentious European Union. The
era in which EU politics was determined by national and European elites ended about 15
years ago. With the Maastricht Accord of 1991, decision making on European integration entered the contentious world of party competition, elections, and referenda."

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