Explores ways to make democracy work better, with particular focus on the integral role of local institutions.

Focusing on the EU, this volume, with a combination of theoretical perspectives and empirical research, examines the problems multilevel governance causes for democratic legitimacy by placing it in a comparative and theoretical context, and explore how challenges faced by the EU compare with those faced by traditional federal systems worldwide.

All federal systems face an internal tension between divisive and integrative political forces, striking a balance between providing local autonomy and sub-national representation on one hand, and maintaining an integrated political community and sufficient integration to maintain stability on the other hand. This book argues that parties and voters strategically respond to the incentives of federal institutional design to shape the development of arenas of political competition that are either predominantly independent or integrated across levels of the federation. Drawing on a rich collection of original data, including a dataset of aggregate level electoral data from over 2200 federal and state-level elections in seven federations, as well as the author's original dataset on party organizational linkage from a survey of sub-national party elites, this book demonstrates how two aspects of institutional design — the degree of decentralization and the method of power allocation, affect the development of integrated or independent politics as observed through voter behaviour, party systems and party organization. Using a mixed method research design, it demonstrates how voters and parties react to federal institutional design. It also provides nuance in the causal processes at play, demonstrating how party organization, party system structure and voter behaviour interact, to produce a federalism that is predominantly integrating and stability-enhancing or one that is predominantly autonomy- and accountability-enhancing. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston, and Jonathan Slapin, Professor of Political Institutions and European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.

Citizen Participation in Multi-level Democracies offers an overview of new forms of participatory democracy in federally and regionally organised multi-level states. Its four sections focus on the conceptual foundations of participation, the implementation and instruments of democracy, examples from federal and regional States, and the emergence of participation on the European level. There is today a growing disaffection amongst the citizens of many states towards the traditional models of representative democracy. This book highlights the various functional and structural problems with which contemporary democracies are confronted and which lie at the root of their peoples’ discontent. Within multi-level systems in particular, the fragmentation of state authority generates feelings of powerlessness among citizens. In this context, citizens’ participation can in many cases be a useful complement to the representative and direct forms of democracy.

This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of the diverse and multi-faceted research on governance in multilevel systems. The book features a collection of cutting-edge trans-Atlantic contributions, covering topics such as federalism, decentralization as well as various forms and processes of regionalization and Europeanization. While the field of multilevel governance is comparatively young, research in the subject has also come of age as considerable theoretical, conceptual and empirical advances have been achieved since the first influential works were published in the early noughties. The present volume aims to gauge the state-of-the-art in the different research areas as it brings together a selection of original contributions that are united by a variety of configurations, dynamics and mechanisms related to governing in multilevel systems.

Multilevel governance divides powers, includes many veto players and requires extensive policy coordination among different jurisdictions. Under these conditions, innovative policies or institutional reforms seem difficult to achieve. However, while multilevel systems establish obstructive barriers to change, they also provide spaces for creative and experimental policies, incentives for learning, and ways to circumvent resistance against change. As the book explains, appropriate patterns of multilevel governance linking diverse policy arenas to a loosely coupled structure are conducive to policy innovation.

This comprehensive volume studies the vices and virtues of regionalisation in comparative perspective, including countries such as Belgium, Germany, Spain, and the UK, and discusses conditions that might facilitate or hamper responsiveness in regional democracies. It follows the entire chain of democratic responsiveness, starting from the translation of citizen preferences into voting behaviour, up to patterns of decision-making and policy implementation. Many European democracies have experienced considerable decentralisation over the past few decades. This book explores the key virtues which may accompany this trend, such as regional-level political authorities performing better in understanding and implementing citizens’ preferences. It also examines how, on the other hand, decentralisation can come at a price, especially since the resulting multi-level structures may create several new obstacles to democratic representation, including information, responsibility and accountability problems. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal West European Politics.

In this insightful book, Arthur Benz introduces a novel analytical approach to comparative research on multilevel governance. Confronting the intricate problems of coordinating local, regional, national and international policies in the face of political polarisation, he makes the case for pragmatic, sustainable and resilient multilevel governance.

This is the first legal monograph analysing multilevel governance of global 'aggregate public goods' (PGs) from the perspective of democractic, republican and cosmopolitan constitutionalism by using historical, legal, political and economic methods. It explains the need for a 'new philosophy of international law' in order to protect human rights and PGs more effectively and more legitimately. 'Constitutional approaches' are justified by the universal recognition of human rights and by the need to protect 'human rights', 'rule of law', 'democracy' and other 'principles of justice' that are used in national, regional and UN legal systems as indeterminate legal concepts. The study describes and criticizes the legal methodology problems of 'disconnected' governance in UN, GATT and WTO institutions as well as in certain areas of the external relations of the EU (like transatlantic free trade agreements). Based on 40 years of practical experiences of the author in German, European, UN, GATT and WTO governance institutions and of simultaneous academic teaching, this study develops five propositions for constituting, limiting, regulating and justifying multilevel governance for the benefit of citizens and their constitutional rights as 'constituent powers', 'democratic principals' and main 'republican actors', who must hold multilevel governance institutions and their limited 'constituted powers' legally, democratically and judicially more accountable.

This book presents a systematic overview and assessment of the impacts of politics on the media, and of the media on politics, in authoritarian, transitional and democratic regimes in Russia, Spain, Hungary, Chile, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Its analysis of the interactions between macro- and micro-level factors incorporates the disciplinary perspectives of political science, mass communications, sociology and social psychology. These essays show that media's effects on politics are the product of often complex and contingent interactions among various causal factors, including media technologies, the structure of the media market, the legal and regulatory framework, the nature of basic political institutions, and the characteristics of individual citizens. The authors' conclusions challenge a number of conventional wisdoms concerning the political roles and effects of the mass media on regime support and change, on the political behavior of citizens, and on the quality of democracy.