Master thesis | European Politics and Society: Vaclav Havel Joint Master Programme
open access
In recent years, rising concerns about the spread of fake-news and misinformation across liberal democracies have gained academic prominence, particularly in light of the January 6th Insurrection...Show moreIn recent years, rising concerns about the spread of fake-news and misinformation across liberal democracies have gained academic prominence, particularly in light of the January 6th Insurrection and the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a seldom explored aspect is whether people’s lack of responsiveness to facts, or fact-insensitivity, has disparate effects across electoral systems. To fill this gap, I build on Stephanopoulos’s (2014) alignment approach of democracy to empirically test whether fact-insensitiveness exacerbates misalignment effects across majoritarian, proportional, or mixed electoral systems. Methodologically, I conduct a Large-N analysis to test the strength of the relationship between the degree of fact-insensitiveness and electoral alignment in lower house constituencies in 16 democracies (N=2722). Additionally, I bound the scope of inference by taking into account cultural and psychological proximity in the country selection process (Schulz, Bahrami-Rad, J. P. Beauchamp, et al. 2019; Muthukrishna et al. 2020). To evaluate this, I employ a dataset that combines original vaccination data with existing data on COVID-19 disorder events, and electoral outcomes. The results show that electoral systems have significantly different electoral outcomes in terms of alignment, however, there are no statistically significant differences among them with regards of fact-insensitivity. In turn, this denies any normative gains or losses when selecting an electoral system in contexts of varying degrees of fact-insensitiveness.Show less
This paper examines the recurrence of three main views on disability in policy-making to understand general discourses and perspectives affecting (disability) employment policies and societal...Show moreThis paper examines the recurrence of three main views on disability in policy-making to understand general discourses and perspectives affecting (disability) employment policies and societal mindset. The most similar case study of Flanders and the Netherlands, combining critical discourse and thematic (content) analysis on plenary debates, demonstrates that the view of disability as an individual’s issue rather than a society’s responsibility was commonplace. Particularly in the case of the Netherlands. Nonetheless, the social and human rights models also re-occurred. Therefore, it illustrates how employment policies affecting individuals with disabilities consist of a mixture of views and goals, which entangle in practice and policies.Show less
Master thesis | European Politics and Society: Vaclav Havel Joint Master Programme
open access
This thesis aims to understand the reasons behind the increase in the duration of government formation negotiations in Western Europe. It argues that there is a gap in the existing scholarship on...Show moreThis thesis aims to understand the reasons behind the increase in the duration of government formation negotiations in Western Europe. It argues that there is a gap in the existing scholarship on this issue. On the one hand, scholars have noted that party systems in the region have undergone profound changes over the last decades, and particularly since the 2008 financial crisis. On the other, the effect this has had on the duration of government formation has not been as thoroughly researched. In order to explain this phenomenon, this thesis expands upon the survival analysis literature, by means of applying recent innovations to the Cox proportional hazards model, such as the Cox with Expected Durations package (Kropko & Harden, 2017, 2020). All in all, the results show that longer government formation processes can be attributed to two main phenomena: the rise in parliamentary fragmentation, and the rise in less stable legislative types as per the typology outlined by Laver and Benoit (2015). The findings of this thesis thus contribute to a better understanding of this crucial development in the Western European political landscape, which has wider implications for the stability of Western European democracies as a whole.Show less
This thesis evaluates the reasons behind the failure of the EU - Mercosur negotiations through a comparative analysis of two periods in the process, via five variables: Political will, regional...Show moreThis thesis evaluates the reasons behind the failure of the EU - Mercosur negotiations through a comparative analysis of two periods in the process, via five variables: Political will, regional institutional capacity, special and sectoral interest, simultaneous trade negotiations and economic shocks. The study suggests the negotiations have not been successful due to a lack of political will from both the EU and Mercosur and the absence of sufficient institutional capacity in Mercosur on both negotiations terms.Show less
This thesis is concerned with the question why social democratic parties in Western Europe have shifted their socio-economic policies towards the right of the political spectrum in the 1990s. In...Show moreThis thesis is concerned with the question why social democratic parties in Western Europe have shifted their socio-economic policies towards the right of the political spectrum in the 1990s. In particular, labour market reforms that substantially conflict with social democratic ideology and conduce to the gradual erosion of the welfare state are under scrutiny. Building on the theoretical innovations of discursive institutionalism, it contributes to the academic effort of resolving the research gap on the motivation of social democratic parties legitimising this shift by focussing on the communicative discourse of social democratic parties governing in the Netherlands (PvdA) and Germany (SPD). Moreover, communicative discourse is posed as the independent variable explaining the strong difference in the degree of societal protest to the respective national reforms – within a timeframe of similar socio-economic challenges and with (ideologically) similar reforms. The thesis concludes, firstly, that the motivation of the PvdA and the SPD are generally alike in terms of their emphasis on the necessity to reform/modernise the labour market given internal and external challenges to the welfare state. Secondly, subtle but significant differences in the consistency, cognitive soundness and considerateness of the conveyance of the respective discourses explains why public protest in Germany was stronger than in the Netherlands.Show less
