Levels Of Political Integration Research Articles

Breaking the link? How European integration shapes social policy demand and supply

ABSTRACT How does European integration affect the welfare state? This paper argues that European integration has non-complementary consequences for the political economy of welfare spending: European economic integration increases popular demand for social spending, whereas European political integration decreases the supply of social spending. Thus, the conflicting implications of European integration essentially break the link between social policy preferences and social policy. Using statistical models that deal with the multilevel structure of the theoretical argument, we find a positive relationship between economic integration and support for social policy. In the second part of the empirical analysis, dynamic model specifications at the country level show that higher levels of political integration are associated with lower levels of social spending. Furthermore, we provide evidence that social policy responsiveness declines as political integration increases.

Reforming International Institutions: The Domestic Origins and Conditional Logic of Governmental Reform Preferences

Governmental preferences are crucial to our understanding of European and international treaty reforms. Nevertheless, current research fails to explain why and under what circumstances governments prefer certain proposals for institutional reform. The present article analyzes the conditional nature of governmental reform preferences over different dimensions of institutional design. In doing so, it integrates endogenous and exogenous explanations for governmental reform preferences into a single theoretical framework. The longitudinal research design enables an explicit empirical analysis of the observed short-term changes in the governments' positions on European treaty reforms. In terms of political integration, these changes not only represent short-term trends in public opinion but also reflect the partisan composition of governments and parliaments. Both causal effects are mediated by the institutional design of the domestic preference aggregation process. With respect to institutional reforms, the governments' changing positions can be explained as a reaction to previous treaty reforms. Given a particular level of political integration, governments optimize the trade-off between decision-making power and efficiency. Hence, I find that preferences on political integration and institutional reform are conditional upon each other, with the direction and strength of this conditionality varying systematically across member states and changing over time.

Oil and Unbalanced Globalization

Oil-exporting states occupy a paradoxical position in the international system. Economically, they are highly globalized, as large flows of goods, services, capital, people, and information travel across their borders. They are also the source of the world’s single most valuable commodity, and hence influential. Yet politically, they are strikingly unglobalized: they are exceptionally reluctant to participate in international institutions that require binding commitments. We demonstrate empirically that oil wealth is associated with both high levels of economic and social integration and low levels of political integration ‐ a condition we call “unbalanced globalization,” in contrast to more balanced globalization of other countries. We also develop an explanation for it, based on the unique advantages in trade and finance of the oilexporting states, and their tendency to export an unusually narrow range of goods.

An Analysis of the Deutsch Sociocausal Paradigm of Political Integration

Karl Deutsch has argued that since the mid-1950's the structural, or institutional, political integration of Western Europe has come to a halt. What Deutsch means by the halt of political integration in Western Europe is the ending of any trend toward the development or the expansion of the authority of supranational institutions to make major policy decisions. Political decisions will continue to be made by sovereign nationstates and not by any supranational European institutions. Although institutional political integration is the central variable in his analysis, Deutsch reports no attempts to directly measure the decisionmaking capability of any Western European supranational institution. By accepting the validity of his sociocausal paradigm of political integration, which holds that political integration cannot occur until after a process of social assimilation creates a homogeneous transnational population, Deutsch contends that in order to describe the levels of political integration in Western Europe he need only examine data relating to the levels of social homogeneity which characterize that region. To measure the extent of social assimilation in Western Europe Deutsch examines the transaction flow rates of trade, mail, travel, migration, and student exchange data and studies the responses of mass and elite population samples to a complex series of survey questions. Deutsch's analysis of these varied data leads him to conclude that the levels of social assimilation in Western Europe have 1) remained constant for the past decade and 2) are too low to permit institutional political integration to occur.