Suchergebnisse

AbstractDirect democracy exhibits both promise and peril for the EU. The referendum has been deployed by Member States in a way that has shaped and will continue to shape the EU's geographical boundaries, its constitutional evolution, and salient EU policy matters. The referendum's promise is to accord a high degree of legitimacy to a political decision, but that promise varies across different types of EU referendum. Their peril for the EU has become increasingly apparent as they have proliferated in number and type and with a growing failure rate. In contrast, the European Citizens' Initiative is intended to harness the promise of direct democracy for the EU. But current practice raises the question of whether the failure to satisfy the ambitions placed on this novel instrument could, paradoxically, become a source of peril. Contrary to an increasingly pessimistic narrative, it is concluded that practice under the ECI exhibits promise and that the future of this instruments appears bright.

The recent proliferation of referendums on sovereignty matters has fuelled growing scholarly interest. However, comparative research is hindered by the weaknesses of current compilations, which tend to suffer from conceptual vagueness, varied coding decisions, incomplete coverage and ad hoc categorizations. Based on an improved conceptualization and theory-driven typology, this article presents a new dataset of 602 sovereignty referendums from 1776–2012, more than double the number in existing lists. In an exploratory analysis, it uncovers eight distinctive clusters of sovereignty referendums and identifies patterns of activity over time and space as well as outcomes produced.

This article draws on federal theory to analyze the dynamics of crafting a privacy regime in the European Union and the United States. Three dimensions of the policy domain are analyzed: how policy was framed, the policy dynamics activated, and the policy instruments used. The main finding is that despite obvious differences in the choice of specific policy instruments, a strikingly similar regulatory dynamic and framing of policy can be detected. Two conclusions are drawn: first, federal theory can reveal novel insights on the politics of regulating privacy, especially in relation to new technologies and counter terrorism measures. Second, applying a comparative research design to EU policy-making can help explain many of its apparent empirical puzzles. Adapted from the source document.

"Why have referendums on European integration proliferated since the 1970s? How are referendums accommodated within member states' constitutional orders and with what impact on the European integration process? What is the likely institutional impact of referendums on the future of the European integration process? Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, these are just some of the fundamental questions addressed in this book. The central thesis is that the EU is faced with a 'direct democratic dilemma', which is compounded by the EU's rigid constitutional structure and a growing politicisation of the referendum device on matters related to European integration. Referendums and the European Union discusses how this dilemma has emerged to impact on the course of integration and how it can be addressed"--

The authors present a dataset that contains the positions of 231 political parties across 28 countries on 30 policy issues that were considered salient for the 2014 elections to the European Parliament. The party position estimates were originally used in a voter information tool which compared the policy preferences of citizens to those of political parties. The paper discusses the estimation method in the context of the literature on estimating party positions, outlines the coding methodology, and introduces the value of the dataset for third-party users interested in studying political participation and representation.

We present a dataset which contains the positions of 231 political parties across 28 countries and on 30 policy issues that were considered salient for the 2014 elections to the European Parliament. The party position estimates were originally used in a voter information tool which compared the policy preferences of citizens to those of political parties. The paper discusses the estimation method in the context of the literature on estimating party positions, outlines the coding instructions of the method, and stresses the value of the dataset for third-party users interested in studying political participation and representation.

Filtering data generated by so-called Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) in order to remove entries that exhibit unrealistic behavior (i.e., cannot correspond to a real political view) is of primary importance. If such entries are significantly present in VAA generated datasets, they can render conclusions drawn from VAA data analysis invalid. In this work we investigate approaches that can be used for automating the process of identifying entries that appear to be suspicious in terms of a users' answer patterns. We utilize two unsupervised data mining techniques and compare their performance against a well established psychometric approach. Our results suggest that the performance of data mining approaches is comparable to those drawing on psychometric theory with a fraction of the complexity. More specifically, our simulations show that data mining techniques as well as psychometric approaches can be used to identify truly 'rogue' data (i.e., completely random data injected into the dataset under investigation). However, when analysing real datasets the performance of all approaches dropped considerably. This suggests that 'suspect' entries are neither random nor clustered. This finding poses some limitations on the use of unsupervised techniques, suggesting that the latter can only complement rather than substitute existing methods to identifying suspicious entries.