VII Workshop (UB 2022)

To what extent do the Southern Euro countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece) benefit from frequently having similar goals in the EU’s Council of Ministers? And how does this compare to other well-established EU partnerships? With this paper, we aim to contribute to the literature by examining a group of countries that has had little attention devoted to it in EU studies, considering its size and importance. We attempt to answer the afore-mentioned questions by leveraging data from the DEU (Decision-Making in the European Union) dataset. We find evidence that having cohesive preferences does appear to benefit the Southern European MSs, as they are more likely to attain their objectives when they are aligned. This effect is particularly evident within the Council configurations dealing with economics and finance (ECOFIN) and Transport, Telecommunications and Energy (TTE). That being said, being aligned with Germany (though not with France) is even more beneficial to the Southern countries than working with each other, a result with interesting theoretical implications.

A growing number of FOI laws have been passed around the world, but their full enactment remains a challenge. Most of the previous research on determinants of active transparency focuses on sociodemographic, financial, elected officials, and mayor’s characteristics as proxies to explain divergences in active transparency publication between municipalities. The results, however, are mostly ambiguous and small. In this working paper, we aim to gauge the institutionalization of Spanish Transparency Laws (STLs) with an approach centered on organizational factors and based on institutional literature. Our contributions are twofold. First, we develop an analytical matrix to assess the institutionalization of STLs in Spanish municipalities in accordance with their organizational change and active transparency laws compliance. Second, we present a proposal, yet theoretical, for assessing which organizational factors affect transparency compliance the most.

What are the consequences of meddling in participatory processes? When rulers feel threatened, they opt for applying institutional or co-optive arrangements to repress the opposition and minimize the risks of losing power. I argue that, as collateral damage of applying this kind of fraudulent strategy, society gets more divided, and sentiments of animosity against the contrary get higher. In this paper, I study the impact of one of these arrangements: the indefinite suspension of the 2016 recall referendum (10/21/2016) on Nicolás Maduro by the National Electoral Council (CNE). I will use data from the AmericasBarometer 2016 (Zechmeister et. al, 2016), whose fieldwork occurred just when the suspension of the recall referendum was officially announced and, therefore, will allow me to estimate its causal effect on two distinct types of political polarization: Affective, and perceived societal polarization

There seems to be an intensification of the rural-urban divide going on and an issue that increasingly appears in rural-urban conflicts is the ecological transition. Literature shows ecological transition policies are finding opposition in rural areas and support for environmental policies is stronger in urban centres, but the causes of this gap are still not clear. The goal of the paper is to analyse some causal mechanisms of the rural-urban gap in the support for environmental policies. Using original data from a Spanish survey, we tested if environmental attitudes and the perception of being a loser of ecological transition policies mediated the relationship between the place of residence and support for environmental policies. Our results show that environmental attitudes do not explain the differences in support for environmental policies between urban and rural dwellers. Instead, the perception of being a loser of environmental policies partly explains them. This suggests the environmental justice paradigm is more adequate to comprehend rural opposition to environmental policies than Inglehart’s post-material values theory, at least in the case of Spain.