Christian B. Jensen

Institutional hokey-pokey: the politics of multispeed integration in the European Union

EU member states desiring deeper integration often call for a multispeed approach to pursue ambitious projects without the hinderance of laggards. At other times, laggards have desired a multispeed approach to avoid policies they find objectionable. Under what circumstances do laggards (integrationists) propose (object) to a multispeed Europe? We investigate the institutions and member state preferences that lead these camps to accept or resist multispeed proposals, paying particular attention to how a multispeed approach affects member state bargaining power. We present a series of case studies to demonstrate that the preference configurations we examine do, in fact, lead states to pursue the policies with regard to a multispeed Europe that we expect.

Making Rules about Rulemaking: A Comparison of Presidential and Parliamentary Systems

The authors examine the administrative procedures acts (APAs) of separation of powers and parliamentary systems. They examine sixteen national APAs (thirteen parliamentary and three presidential) and forty-eight APAs from the U.S. states that have institutional structures analogous to the presidential systems. They identify a very stark difference between the parliamentary and presidential APAs. While all of the presidential system APAs place constraints on both adjudicative and rulemaking activities, only two of the parliamentary APAs make any reference to rulemaking at all. The authors present an institutional explanation for this observation based on recent work on veto players and delegated discretion to administrative agents. They argue that the presence of partisan veto players discourages focus on rulemaking in APAs.

Manifestos, salience and junior ministerial appointments

We build on previous theories of junior minister allocation and coalition oversight by incorporating a novel theory of strategic changes in the issues covered in party manifestos. We argue that parties use junior ministerial appointments to oversee their coalition partners on portfolios that correspond to issues emphasized by the parties’ activists when the coalition partner’s preferences deviate from the party’s. The findings, based on a data set of more than 2800 party-portfolio dyads in 10 countries, show significant support for these expectations. We find that party leaders who successfully negotiate for junior ministers to particular portfolios are most concerned about checking ideologically contentious coalition partners in areas of concern to activists. The results also illustrate the usefulness of our dyadic approach for the study of junior minister allocation.

Predicting Ambiguity: Costs, Benefits, and Party Competition

We present a formal model of party competition to explain differences in party ideological ambiguity. Existing works generally argue that parties are more or less ambiguous depending on whether their supporters are risk-acceptant or risk-averse. Our model explores more fully strategic choice of ambiguity by considering nonelectoral benefits to ambiguity—that is, party elite recruitment and retention. In terms of costs, we assume that all voters are risk-averse, who therefore prefer less ideological ambiguity. Explicitly considering both costs and benefits derives our hypotheses and highlights the importance of party competition—ambiguity is influenced by the proximity to a party’s closest ideological competitor. An empirical analysis of twenty-eight European countries supports our hypotheses.