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| Issue Date | View | Title | Author(s) | Type of Publication | Series/Report no. | Abstract |
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2012
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Working Paper
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EUI SPS; 2012/03
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View Abstract
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.
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2012
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Working Paper
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EUI SPS; 2012/02
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View Abstract
This article argues against two firmly-established ideas about the 1944 communist insurgency that led to the outbreak of civil war in postliberation Greece: (a) blame attribution to predominantly one actor, who, depending on each author’s ideological perspective, is either the Greek Communists or the British, and (b) outcome inevitability. Instead, the present analysis brings to the fore a set of no less than five distinct actors including, besides the original two, Prime Minister George Papandreou; Greece’s traditional political class; and the Greek monarch. Based primarily on the close reading of original documents, such as the personal accounts left behind by the protagonists of the civil war drama, and using causal inferences derived from counterfactual logic, this analysis shows that the Greek civil war would have been an inevitable outcome only if there were on the scene just two actors, the British and the Communists, directly confronting each other. Since however that was not the case, it is shown that Papandreou could have prevented civil war had he succeeded in both forging strategic alliances with the traditional political elites and embracing republicanism. His failure to implement either goal offers a novel interpretation of the Greek civil war, which also emphasizes the need for bringing leadership back into the study of civil war and other contentious politics phenomena. This is expected to foster our thinking about the dynamics leading to civil war outbreaks at the crucial meso-level, while also alerting us to the fact that civil wars are rarely inevitable and that they can be prevented by strategic leadership action.
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2012
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Working Paper
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EUI RSCAS; 2012/01; EUDO - European Union Democracy Observatory
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View Abstract
This paper, based on cross-regional empirical research, provides an integrated analytical framework for understanding the emergence of populism in seemingly different political contexts in both Europe (including Greece, France and the Netherlands) and Latin America (including Peru and Venezuela). It is found that, given an appropriate context, political leadership is the most important factor for setting in motion a number of interdependent causal mechanisms that may produce populism. Those mechanisms include the politicization of social resentment, the formation of new cleavage lines, and intense polarization. When successfully emergent, populism’s first and foremost outcome is the creation of new parties, or movements, of a distinctly personalist appeal. The causal explanation proposed in this paper is both parsimonious and credible. It also points to specific research themes related to successfully emergent populism.
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2012
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Working Paper
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EUI SPS; 2012/01
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View Abstract
This paper addresses the global governance of human security and particularly its provision across borders. It argues that the responsibility to protect (R2P) framework is part of global governance. Of special interest to this paper is the role the international community plays within the global governance of human security. The international community is assigned a collective responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity that becomes activated when an individual state fails in its primary, individual responsibility to protect. Moreover, the international community is assigned an on-going preventative responsibility. In a sense the international community is a “governor” of sorts. Yet, the R2P framework is unclear in its conceptualization of the international community. Evidently within the R2P framework the international community is not a world government, a formal international organization, or necessarily synonymous with the society of states. Yet, existing alternative conceptualizations of “international community” are unhelpful. Hence the paper offers a novel suggestion: the international community as “potentiality.” The concept refers to the possibility of forming a configuration of actors and networks for the purposes of solving global governance issues. My proposal captures both how the international community is in flux and ad hoc, and how one can see some permanence in the international community “governing” without being a government.
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2011
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Working Paper
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Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance Working Paper; 2011/09
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View Abstract
The legal nature of EU citizenship remains a hotly debated issue, in particular its relationship with Member State citizenship/nationality. In this paper, we do not explore EU citizenship as such but rather focus on the withdrawal of EU citizenship. To this end, we comparatively analyze the ECJ’s Rottmann ruling and the US Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision. The paper begins with a critical analysis of the relevant EU case law and literature. In Rottmann, the ECJ, for the first time, had to deal with an inherent tension between the ‘autonomous’ EU legal order and EU citizenship’s ‘dependency’ on Member State nationality. We show that the ECJ took a rather cautious approach, leaving it mainly to the Member States and their courts to determine the ‘appropriateness’ of EU citizenship withdrawal. While the ECJ’s Rottmann approach has been criticized for being too reluctant, we argue that the ECJ – wittingly or unwittingly – was well advised to take such cautious steps with regard to European citizenship. On the basis of an in-depth analysis of Dred Scott v. Sandford we are able to demonstrate some of the challenges of shaping the boundaries of Union Citizenship. The separate opinions delivered in that decision provide an interesting insight into the possible effects of overemphasizing either the dependency or autonomy element of citizenship in multi-level systems. Seen in that light, the ECJ may have been well advised using a cautious, ‘middle-of the-road’ approach. Based on the comparative evidence from Dred Scott, we, however, find that the procedural implementation of the ECJ’s ‘Rottmann test’ lacks bite. As a result, Member States that seek to neglect the autonomous feature of European law can easily use it as a carte blanche. We conclude our paper by proposing a refined ‘Rottmann test’ that avoids Dred Scott-style ‘all or nothing’ excesses and yet can help to strengthen EU citizenship. Under such a refined test, withdrawal of Member State citizenship has to be justified by arguments from European law also, which means that Member States may only withdraw European citizenship when their reasoning is soundly justified also by this standard. Given the lack of primary and secondary law in this respect de lege lata, these minimum legal requirements need to be defined by the ECJ. Unfortunately, in Rottmann, the ECJ missed the opportunity to do so in a coherent way.
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