Liesbet Hooghe, Zachary Taylor Smith Professor at UNC Chapel Hill and Chair in Multilevel Governance at the VU Amsterdam
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Recent Papers/Books

2012. Europe and its Empires: From Rome to the European Union,

This paper claims that the territorial structure of government results from a tension between scale and community. The benefits of scale arise from the nature of public goods, and include economic exchange, political power, and protection against external shocks. Communities are double-edged in that they are characterized by parochial altruism. Altruism and social solidarity facilitate government within communities, but parochial attachments constrain government among communities. Scale and community provide a setting for strategic choice. Both are in flux as patterns of human interaction change, and government itself shapes those patterns. Evidence is drawn from the five largest polities in the history of western Europe: the Roman empire, the Frankish empire, Napoleonic France, the Third Reich, and the European Union. A first version was presented at as the JCMS Lecture at the European Union Studies Association, Boston, March 2011, and a second draft as the Humboldt Prize Lecture, FU Berlin, Oct 19, 2011.The final version, attached here, is forthcoming in the Journal of Common Market Studies (vol. 50, 1).

2011. Beyond Federalism: Estimating and Explaining the Territorial Structure of Government, with Liesbet Hooghe.

The basic distinction between federal and unitary government has limited as well as served our understanding of government. The notion that variation in the structure of government is a difference of kind rather than degree has straight-jacketed attempts to estimate the authority of intermediate government. One result has been the claim that a country’s footprint, not its population, is decisive for government. Analyzing data for 39 countries since 1950, and comparing our own findings with those of alternative measurements, we find evidence for the opposite conclusion. Government structure is a trade-off between responsiveness to soft information and per capita economies in public good provision.

2010. Symposium on Goldstein’s Political Repression, Labor History, Vol. 51, No. 2 (May 2010) 295-318.

All responses
My response:Crude Conceptualization, Biased Evidence, Weak Explanation

2010. Measurement Validity and Party positioning: Chapel Hill expert surveys of 2002 and 2006, with Ryan Bakker, Anna Brigevich, Catherine de Vries, Erica Edwards, Liesbet Hooghe, Jan Rovny, Marco Steenbergen, Milada Vachudova, European Journal of Political Research, 42 (4): 684-703.

This article reports on party expert data on European integration and 13 policy dimensions for 2002 and 2006. Data for the 2010 wave of expert surveys in 24 EU countries, Switzerland, Norway and Turkey (Balkans following) are being prepared for publication. Stay tuned.

2010— The Rise of Regional Authority: A comparative study of 42 democracies (1950-2006), with Liesbet Hooghe and Arjan H. Schakel. London: Routledge.

This is the first of three data gathering projects that provide estimates of authority exercised by subnational and international governments.

"Let diversity flourish! Empower regions! These two statements summarize the experience of regional governments in the 42 countries covered in this volume between 1950 and 2006.

Variation across regions shows no signs of declining over time. Some countries have no regional level (defined as a level of government between the local and the national with an average population greater than 150,000). Others have authoritative regional governments that play a decisive role not only in their respective regions, but also in the country as a whole.

There has been no convergence in regional government, but continuing, and wide, divergence. Yet this has been an era of regionalization. Not every country has become regionalized, but where reform has taken place, it has generally been in the direction of greater regional authority. Of 31 countries that saw regional reform in the years covered here, 29 became more regionalized.

These two characteristics, wide variation across countries and increasing regionalization, are puzzling. Do they result from distinct causal processes or can they be explained by a single theory? Our research suggests that multilevel governance can be explained by three logics: efficiency, distribution, identity."

2009— Radicalism or Reformism. Socialist Parties before World War I, with Heather A. D. Mbaye and Hyung-min Kim, American Sociological Review 74: 615-635.

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."

2009— Efficiency and the Territorial Structure of Government, with Liesbet Hooghe. Annual Review of Political Science 12 (May) 12: 225-241.

2009— A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus, with Liesbet Hooghe. British Journal of Political Science, 39 (1): 1-23.

Rejoinders from:

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."

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.

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

2008— "European Union?" with Liesbet Hooghe. 30th Anniversary issue of West European Politics, 31(1–2): 108- 129.

"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."

2007— Does Occupation Shape Attitudes on Europe: Benchmarking Validity and Parsimony, with Liesbet Hooghe and JingJing Huo. Acta Politica, 42(2): 329-351

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."

2007— Triangulation and the Square Root Law. Electoral Studies 26 (1): 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.

2007— Cross-Validating Data on Party Positioning on European Integration, with Liesbet Hooghe, Marco Steenbergen, and Ryan Bakker. Electoral Studies 26(1): 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.

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 (1): 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.

2007— Evaluating Expert Judgments, with Marco Steenbergen. European Journal of Political Research, 46: 347-366.

"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."