Month: January 2020

Over the past few years, EU candidate countries in the Western Balkans have gradually improved their formal compliance with the EU’s membership criteria. At the same time, democratisation in the region has stagnated at best. How can we explain patterns of decoupling between formal compliance and democratic transformation in the Western Balkans? In their article “Money, power, glory: the linkages between EU conditionality and state capture in the Western Balkans” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Solveig Richter and Natasha Wunsch identify informal, clientelist networks’ capture of political institutions as a formidable obstacle to the consolidation of democracy in the region. Solveig and Natasha argue that rather than countering state capture, EU conditionality involuntarily strengthened informal networks’ role instead. The weakening of political competition in the face of top-down conditionality and a liberalisation of markets have favoured a small ruling elite, whose interactions with EU officials have legitimized their influence in Western Balkans’ societies. Solveig and Natasha caution that “the current approach towards enlargement risks enabling and reinforcing informal networks by providing them with the resources to capture state institutions, undermine domestic mechanisms of accountability, and maintain their countries in a state of permanent hybridity.”

Several recent studies have suggested that an increasing polarization of political views within a society is detrimental to voters’ satisfaction with democracy. Polarization may sour the political discourse and impede meaningful discussions among voters. However, voters may not only hold fundamentally diverging views on a number of political issues, but also disagree on which issues are important to them. In their article “Unity in diversity? Polarization, issue diversity and satisfaction with democracy” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Julian Hoerner and Sara Hobolt argue that the negative effects of polarization on voters’ satisfaction with democracy are moderated by the number of political issues they consider as important. Drawing on Eurobarometer survey data and estimates of the polarization of party systems in 31 European countries between 2003 and 2018, Julian and Sara show that negative associations between polarization and satisfaction with democracy are diminished when the political discourse is not dominated by a single or small number of issues. Julian and Sara argue that these “findings suggest that we can be less concerned with an increase in ideological polarization if it manifests itself across a number of cross-cutting issues.”

In June 2016 more than 70 percent of eligible voters turned out to cast their ballot in the United Kingdom’s referendum on membership in the EU, far above turnout rates usually seen for the UK’s general and European elections. Did voters who would not usually make their way to the ballot box sway the outcome of the Brexit referendum? In his article “Turning out to turn down the EU: the mobilisation of occasional voters and Brexit” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Lukas Rudolph makes use of the fact that on the day of the referendum heavy rainfall in some of the UK’s regions induced occasional voters to stay at home. Comparing referendum results for regions with higher and lower turnout rates, Lukas shows that voters who would not usually turn out were more likely to vote in favour of Brexit. Drawing on survey data, he shows that occasional voters were not generally favouring Brexit. Instead, empirical evidence suggests that Leave-campaigners were more effective in mobilising occasional voters supportive of Brexit to turn up at the ballot box on referendum day. Drawing on these findings, Lukas concludes “that turnout is critical to understand electoral outcomes and policy choice in democracies, and even more so in single-issue referendums when partisan attachments are weak.”