Ballots & Bullets

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Until the start of the Eurozone crisis, sociological research on integration in the European Union depended very much on the idea of “permissive consensus” by the people, meaning a tacit acceptance of EU policy. In this context and in Germany in particular, the political and economic elites who pushed for the deepening and enlargement of the EU, …

It increasingly seems as if the prolonged economic crisis is slowly but surely generating an identity crisis in Europe. Unsurprisingly, increasing invocations of what is necessary are once again followed by a decrease in solidarity, a tendency which is even stronger in a transnational context, such as Europe. Of course, crises do not only have negative consequences. As they are …

How we imagine politics is sometimes as important as how it really is – if the latter can ever be determined, that is. Indeed according to Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities, one of the most basic political concepts, the nation state, had to be first imagined before it …

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European integration has long been a divisive issue in British politics, leading to differences within and between parties. Voters’ views on this tend to vary by party support but, in recent years at least, this subject has been some way down the list of issues that voters view as most salient. How do voters view the …

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Euroscepticism has become an integral part of the political landscape in Europe, both at the national and supranational levels. It has attracted significant attention as European elections have provided Eurosceptic parties with an opportunity to get parliamentary representation. But if there is a rich literature on the Eurosceptic stances of these parties, there remains relatively little …

An important consequence of the eurozone crisis has been a rise in Euroscepticism across Europe, weakening the legitimacy of the integration process and undermining the political representation of the citizens in the member states. Just how extensive has the increase in euroscepticism been and what are its implications for the future of European integration? In investigating these questions, Greece offers …

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Eurosceptiscm is gaining attention and support in the UK, and perhaps throughout Europe. Although this appears to be a European problem, any wavering in the stability of the European Union will have widespread effects on the global political economy. In the following post I examine eurosceptiscm from an American standpoint, and assesses how and why the United …

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Throughout 2012, the growth of Euroscepticism was a persistent theme. Indeed in the latest Eurobarometer poll, only 31 to 33 per cent of respondents indicated that they tend to trust the European Union. Among those responses, it is possible to compare public support among the five Nordic States: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. …

Endless speculation about the rise of UKIP, the threat they pose to the chances of the Tories or Labour forming a majority government after 2015, and the desperate need of both parties to woo the British ‘eurosceptic vote’, have become an almost daily feature of British political commentary in the last year. But is the British electorate really as unified …

This is the twenty-first in a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than …