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AbstractAs the first country to introduce proportional representation (PR), Belgium has attracted considerable attention. Yet, we find the existing explanations for the 1899 breakthrough lacking. At the time of reform, the Catholic Party was politically dominant, advantaged by the electoral system, and facing reformist Socialists. Nevertheless, they single-handedly changed the electoral system and lost 26 seats in the first election under PR. We argue that the Catholics had good reasons to adopt PR. Majoritarian rules tend to create high levels of uncertainty because they provide incentives for non-dominant parties to cooperate. Such electoral coalitions are facilitated by multidimensional policy spaces that make electoral coalitions other than between nonsocialist parties possible. PR reduces the effectiveness of cooperation between non-dominant parties, but such certainty comes at a price. In addition, in the presence of dominant parties, divisions over electoral system reform often result in intra-party conflicts that may be more decisive than inter-party conflicts.

Based on the 1951 Refugee Convention, traditional conceptions of refugees typically referred to the politically active male persecuted for his obstructive acts against a communist regime. Yet, today's asylum seekers are increasingly female with very different experiences of persecution and different reasons to flee their countries of origin. Not all states have updated their asylum policies to reflect the specific situation of women—an issue the refugee crisis in 2015 brought to glaring light. We develop a Women-Friendliness in Asylum Index (WFA), which reveals clusters of states within the European Union (EU) with a solid implementation of women's rights in their asylum recognition and reception framework and others whom have yet to adapt their asylum policies to consider women's needs. In addition, we show that women's political representation is a key factor in explaining women-friendly asylum policies, whereas critical attitudes toward immigrants from non-EU countries retard the gendered revision of European asylum policies.

AbstractHistorical institutionalist research has long struggled to come to terms with agency. Yet injecting agency into historical-institutionalist accounts is no easy task. If institutions are structuring agents' actions, while they are simultaneously being structured by these very agents' behavior, the ontological status of institutions remains unclear. Hence, most historical-institutional accounts, at the conceptual level, tend to downplay the role of agency. However, in this way, they also remain incomplete. Following the "coalitional turn" in historical institutionalism, we develop a new account of institutional change and stability that awards a central role to agency. At the heart of our approach is the notion that both stability and change in institutions presuppose constant coalition building by organized entrepreneurial actors. However, for several reasons, such coalition building is complicated, which ultimately leads to institutional stability. In addition, we argue that relevant state agencies actively shape whether the incumbent coalition or the challenger coalition prevails. We illustrate the potential of our actor-centered approach to institutional change by analyzing the reform of commercial training in Switzerland, tracing developments from the beginning of the 1980s until today.

AbstractScholars increasingly use Swiss cantons to examine the effect of democratic processes and institutions on political, economic and social outcomes. However, the availability of political indicators at the cantonal level is limited, in particular for longer periods of time. We introduce a novel data set on the ideological and partisan composition of cantonal governments, covering the period 1848‐2017 for most cantons. In this research note, we describe our data collection efforts and present some descriptives on the political development of cantonal governments in order to illustrate the data's potential. In particular, we look at the political strength of different parties and factions, the number of parties in government, government volatility and the nationalization of the party system. Our data thus provide new opportunities to examine political, economic and social outcomes as well as the formation of party systems in the Swiss cantons.

AbstractAfter doggedly opposing any increase in exchange of information on tax matters for several decades, both Liechtenstein and Switzerland have made significant concessions over recent years. However, the two countries have reacted rather differently to international pressure: while Liechtenstein has adopted a more proactive approach, offering far‐reaching bilateral deals to several major economies, Switzerland has been slow to react to international pressure, despite calls for a more proactive strategy by its financial services industry. We suggest that these differences have a range of causes; in Liechtenstein, in particular, the pressure was more evenly distributed, thus allowing the financial services industry to close ranks and use its privileged access to the government to shape the government's response decisively. By contrast, there was internal division in the Swiss financial services industry and it was soon on the back foot in public debate, eventually losing control over the issue.

For many years women tended to vote more conservative than men, but since the 1980s this gap has shifted direction: women in many countries are more likely than men to support left parties. The literature largely agrees on a set of political-economic factors explaining the change in women's political orientation. In this article we demonstrate that these conventional factors fall short in explaining the gender vote gap. We highlight the importance of a religious cleavage in the party system across Western European countries, restricting the free flow of religious voters between left and right parties. Given that surveys show us a constantly higher degree of religiosity among women and a persistent impact of religion on vote choice, religion explains a substantial part of the temporal as well as cross-country variation in the transition from the more conservative to the more progressive voting behavior of women.