Ballots & Bullets

Image by Jan Kameníček

The blog will be taking a short break over Easter, so to keep you going here’s 5 popular blog posts from the year so far.

1. The invasion of Iraq did many things, putting young people off politics wasn’t one of them.

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War …

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 …

Image by Giorgio Tomassetti

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 …

Image by Dread Pirate Jeff

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. …

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Conservatives clearly care an awful lot – some would say too much – about Europe. But most of them care even more about winning elections. Naturally the Tory EUphoria occasioned by David Cameron’s referendum pledge owes something to his appearing to promise better-off-outters a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put their case directly to the British people. …

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 …

Image by David Sedlecký

Euroscepticism has been a growing issue in the media with David Cameron’s recent and long-awaited speech announcing his commitment to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership should the Conservatives win the next election. Next week, we launch a collaboration between LSE’s British Politics and Policy and EUROPP blogs and the University of Nottingham’s Ballots & …