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As an advisory body the Committee of Regions' influence on policy making in the EU depends on its ability to structure internal decision making according to major lines of conflict. Given its heterogeneous composition, which cleavages do exist & what effects do collective actors & institutional rules have? Based on quantitative analysis of decisions & qualitative interpretation of interviews we find a low level of conflict. Where conflict exists this is overwhelmingly structured by a national cleavage with the partisan cleavage being a distant second factor. The relevance of cleavages varies depending on policy areas & the organizational capabilities of parties & national delegations as collective actors. 4 Tables, 4 Figures, 47 References. Adapted from the source document.

Research shows that electoral systems, gender quotas and a country's socio-economic development affect women's legislative representation (WLR). Less attention is paid to the effects of the rise of regional political arenas and multilevel politics on WLR. Due to less costly and competitive electoral campaigns, women can have easier access to regional legislatures. We argue that this relationship is mitigated by the distribution of competences between the different levels of the political system and that decentralization's effect on WLR at the regional level is dependent on the regions' political power. To test this, we use an original dataset on WLR in 383 regional parliaments in 19 European countries from 1970 to 2018. Results of the three-level models show that more political authority vested into regions leads to a lower level of WLR in the legislatures of the more politically powerful regions in comparison with not only the regions possessing less authority but also with the national parliament. Possible explanations for this effect, such as the attractiveness of these positions to the mostly male political elite and, consequently, increased costs and competitiveness of electoral campaigns, are suggested.

In this article, we analyse the impact of intra-party procedures of candidate selection for national elections on the representativeness of parties towards their voters. With regard to candidate selection we distinguish between two dimensions: inclusion and centralization. While the first identifies the type of selectorate for candidate nominations (members, delegates or committees), the second captures the territorial unit in which the nomination is decided (local, regional or national). Based on data for 53 parties in 9 Western European countries for the period 1970 to 1990, the analysis points to the relevance of the inclusion dimension. Parties in which party elites decide the nomination of candidates show slightly higher degrees of representation than parties with more inclusive selectorates. We conduct our analysis separately for two frequently used but theoretically different concepts of representation: cross-sectional representation (at one point in time) and dynamic representation (over time). Our analysis shows that candidate-selection procedures only matter for the first concept. The empirically inconsistent results between the two concepts are due to deficiencies in the way dynamic representation is currently operationalized. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Studies evaluating the effects of territorial state organization on the performance of democratic political systems produce ambiguous results. The authors argue that research so far has suffered from insufficiently conceptualizing federalism and decentralization as two distinct dimensions. This article makes use of the advantages of a nested design and detects micro-level causal mechanisms underlying statistically confirmed effects. The authors conduct in-depth case studies comparing policy processes in four countries (Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, and Denmark) in the area of regional development policy, an area that exhibits typical effects in a macro-quantitative analysis, to back their hypothesized and corroborated macro-level relationships by micro level causal evidence. The case studies show that federalism induces subnational actors to adopt divergent positions and push through individual interests in processes of decision making, thus increasing transaction costs and preventing substantial policy shifts. Decentralization and subnational discretion induces actors to vary service delivery in an efficiency-enhancing way. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Does federalism matter? We develop a theoretical model on the causal relationships between federalism, decentralization & system performance by merging the two literatures on political & fiscal federalism. The model is then tested in a quantitative analysis, including the OECD countries. We find that, consistent with our model, federalism & decentralization are different dimensions of the territorial organization of politics. Decentralization has positive effects; federalism tends to result in either no or a negative performance effect. Tables, References.

This article integrates ideology into a game-theoretical model of centre-periphery bargains. Ideological differences between national and sub-national elites constitute a major obstacle for the accommodation of autonomy claims. While reforms bringing about decentralization are often analysed systematically as well as through case studies, cases where, despite claims to autonomy, decentralization does not occur have been largely neglected by scholars of territorial politics. Turkey is such a 'negative case'. We argue that ideological distance prevents national parties from accommodating peripheral authority claims. We test our expectation with a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative analysis of party positions with in-depth qualitative analysis of party documents showing how the different ideological positions of national and Kurdish parties affect decentralization demand and national response in Turkey between 1987 and 2015. Our findings support the theoretical expectations, but also point to additional inferences. Whereas asymmetric authority demands have been widely ignored, symmetric local autonomy has become an important issue in territorial politics.