The literature on ministerial careers has recently been reinvigorated by individual contributions and collaborative projects. However, few studies of ministerial careers have been able to take into account the varying importance of ministerial positions. Fewer still have taken ministerial careers as their unit of analysis. As a result, they have been unable to account for crucial aspects of these careers. This paper seeks to fill these gaps, linking a crossnational data set on ministerial appointments and terminations with country-specific expert survey data that estimate the importance of ministerial portfolios. Among the new possibilities opened up by this data set of 977 ministerial careers is the systematic description of the structure of ministerial careers incorporating measures of ministerial importance. The paper contributes to the study of ministerial careers by introducing several innovations: a simple analytical framework for the analysis of ministerial careers; a new, crossnational data set on ministerial appointments and terminations incorporting data on ministerial importance; an approach to dealing with the problem of unconfirmed right-censoring that is posed by studying ministerial careers; new approaches to describing and measuring ministerial career structures that the ministerial careers framework and the new data set open up; and an agenda for the future development and use of this new data set on ministerial careers.

This essay reviews recent developments in liberal international relations theory, both empirical and normative. Furthermore, we seek to highlight parallels between contemporary liberal scholarship on international relations and the thought of classical figures such as John Locke, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Giuseppe Mazzini, and John Stuart Mill. In the first part of the essay we introduce key liberal principles and ideas and identify three different traditions of liberal thought on international relations. Thereafter we discuss the relationship between liberal democracy and international peace, followed by an overview of related scholarship on cooperation among democracies. In the final part of the essay, we briefly discuss two alternative liberal approaches to the ethics of military intervention: we show that although liberal theorists all share a fundamental attachment to representative governance and human rights, they can fundamentally differ in their support for coercive regime change.

This article investigates a widespread yet understudied trend in EU politics: the shift of legislative decision making from public inclusive to informal secluded arenas and the subsequent adoption of legislation as “early agreements.” Since its introduction in 1999, “fast-track legislation” has increased dramatically, accounting for 72% of codecision files in the Sixth European Parliament. Drawing from functionalist institutionalism, distributive bargaining theory, and sociological institutionalism, this article explains under what conditions informal decision making is likely to occur. The authors test their hypotheses on an original data set of all 797 codecision files negotiated between mid-1999 and mid-2009. Their analysis suggests that fast-track legislation is systematically related to the number of participants, legislative workload, and complexity. These findings back a functionalist argument, emphasizing the transaction costs of intraorganizational coordination and information gathering. However, redistributive and salient acts are regularly decided informally, and the Council presidency’s priorities have no significant effect on fast-track legislation. Hence, the authors cannot confirm explanations based on issue properties or actors’ privileged institutional positions. Finally, they find a strong effect for the time fast-track legislation has been used, suggesting socialization into interorganizational norms of cooperation.