This research applies the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scales/Revised and the Extension four Curricular Subscales (ECERS/R/E) in a systematic way to measure standards of pre-school provision in Ireland. This ...

The literature which explores public opinion formation processes in the newly democratised EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe is divided into competing schools of thought; one, which presumes that the inexperienced ...

Many commentators have sounded the death knell for party identification. For example, Dalton claims that we are witnessing a general process of partisan dealignment and that this trend ‘reflects long term and enduring ...

Little firm knowledge exists about the allocation of the Council's political attention across policy areas and over time. This article presents a new dataset of the date, duration, and policy coding of ...

This thesis proposes an electoral system-based explanation for the observable variations in the rate of family following in the parliaments of mature, developed, democratic states. Electoral systems that foster intra-party ...

This study presents an innovative approach to hand-coding parties’ policy preferences in the relatively new, crosssectoral field of climate change mitigation policy. It applies this approach to party manifestos in six ...

Research on the intra-institutional consequences of differences in the EU's inter-institutional rule configurations is rare. This study investigates the effect of the empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) on the ...

The Presidency plays a crucial role in the management and organisation of the Council’s work and the institution’s interactions with third parties. Formally, the Presidency just chairs the meetings of Council bodies; but ...

Specialization and delegation of policy leadership within committees is the norm rather than the exception in legislatures around the world. Yet, little research has studied the sub-groups of lawmakers who serve as ...

This article examines the regulation of linguistic diversity in Spain from a combined empirical and normative perspective. Spain is a particularly interesting case due to the intersection of linguistic and national ...