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Over the past three decades, advanced industrial countries have witnessed a decline of citizens' confidence in the core public (Miller 1974; Niemi et al. 1989; Dalton 1999; Nye 1997; Norris 1999; Newton 1999; Newton 2006) and a wide range of private institutions (Lipset and Schneider 1983; Dogan 1994; Listhaug and Wiberg 1995; Dalton 1996). This erosion of confidence in the major institutions of society has been explained as a result of both contextual government ineffectiveness and poor macroeconomic outcomes (Lewis-Beck 1988; Norpoth 1996; Newton 2006; Polavieja 2013; Magalhães 2014, 2016; Quaranta and Martini 2017; Teixeira et al. 2014) and as a consequence of deterioration in the quality of government performance (Aarts and Thomassen 2008; Holmberg and Rothstein 2012; Rothstein 2009, 2011; Rothstein and Teorell 2008; Wagner et al. 2009). ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

European integration has had a dual impact on border regions. On the one hand, borders were physically dismantled across most of the EU's internal territory. On the other hand, they have become a fertile ground for territorial co-operation and institutional innovation. The degree of cross-border co-operation and organization achieved varies considerably from one region to another depending on a combination of various facilitating factors for effective cross-border co-operation, more specifically, economic, political leadership, cultural/identity and state formation, and geographical factors. This article offers a conceptual framework to understand the growth and diversity of cross-border regionalism within the EU context by focusing on the levels of and drives for co-operation.

Paper prepared for the international conference Corruption Control in Political Life and the Quality of Democracy: A Comparative Perspective Europe – Latin America, ISCTE, Lisbon, 19-20 May 2005 ; In recent years, governments and legislatures have made an unprecedented effort to improve regulatory systems of political financing which had been perceived by many as fraught with corruption. Some countries have been more sensitive to the problem than others given the nature and extent of occurrences, but the successive waves of reform show how difficult it has been for the political class to arrive at an adequate control response. The reform panorama of the 1990s has been characterised by incremental, short-lived and non-comprehensive articulation of control instruments and monitoring/enforcement shortcomings. The general regulatory context was one of reforming to address scandal and an increasingly discontented public opinion towards parties and their representatives. Despite different national responses and understandings of the major issues of concern, there has equally been a convergence of the type of measures adopted and an increasing cross-country transfer of knowledge about the panoply of instruments available. What this paper will argue, however, is that "similarities" concern more the form rather than the substance of control. The transfer of regulatory instruments has taken place faster than the expected convergence of standards of conduct. Drawing from different regulatory experiences, the article deals with a series of interrelated issues of political financing regulation: liberal versus regulatory approaches to political financing; public versus private modes of political financing; balancing revenue and expenditure; rules of publicity and publication of accounts; making parties accountable internally and externally to monitoring bodies; matching penalties to offences. The aim is to provide a general reflection of the general features of the law and practice of political finance as a preliminary step towards more general conclusions about the challenges facing political financing regulation today. In short, the article attempts to address two overarching questions: Do laws on political financing suffice to constrain party related illegality? Why certain countries do better than others in face of the degree of cross-country transfer of knowledge and regulatory innovation achieved in recent years?

The anti-corruption activity of the 1990s is characterized by the rise of new players, such as specialized anti-corruption bodies. Anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) are public bodies of a durable nature, with a specific mission to fight corruption and reducing the opportunity structures propitious for its occurrence in society through preventive and/or repressive measures. Independently of their format and powers, ACAs encounter various constraints to their mandate, which explains the meagre results obtained by some of them. This introductory paper tries to understand the rise, future, and implications of this new kind of "integrity warrior" and to locate them in the evolving doctrine of corruption control. The objective of this edited volume is to re-launch the debate on ACAs as the most innovative feature of the anti-corruption movement of the last two decades.

In this article, we compared and tried to explain deputies' and voters' perceptions about various dimensions of European integration. The general assertion that the political elite's perceptions tend to be more pro-integration finds some support in our analysis, but the results indicate this difference ? in the Portuguese case ? is smaller than has been suggested in the mainstream literature. The data also showed citizens are more in favour of enlargement than their representatives are. We also observe these assertions hold true only for the deputies of the three parties with experience of government. Finally, we try to explain the divide between a voter and their deputy's position on European integration, and we observed that the main explanatory variable for a narrow divide is political interest and information (which also explains the voters' probability of having an opinion).

Nenhum processo de integração regional está isento de críticas sobre o seu alegado déficit democrático e/ou institucional. A razão destes déficits é, freqüentemente, apontada como uma conseqüência da escassa accountability e da falta de transparência dos sistemas de decisão em nível regional. Os diferentes blocos regionais têm tentado responder a um ou ambos dos déficits em causa, mediante uma variedade de métodos e opções institucionais. A mais visível das fórmulas aplicadas é a criação e fortalecimento de um Parlamento regional - ou seja, supranacional. Este artigo pretende analisar, comparativamente, cinco Parlamentos regionais na Europa e na América Latina - o Parlamento Europeu, o Parlamento Latino-Americano, o Parlamento Centro-Americano, o Parlamento Andino e a Comissão Parlamentar Conjunta do Mercosul - com o objetivo de compreender o impacto que estas instituições têm tido no âmbito da representação regional, dos processos de decisão e do fortalecimento da accountability. As conclusões sugerem cinco fatores que os autores consideram pertinentes para a explicação das diferenças verificadas entre as duas regiões transatlânticas.

Local democratic governance is a mixture of rivalry and cooperation between majority and minority political forces. With the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, local governments had to rethink its action mode and carry out a swift digital transition of their modus operandi. This digital transition affected both the administrative and political dimensions of local government, in particular the nature of ExecutiveOpposition relations. Although local democracy was not suspended, the context of exceptionality raised a series of institutional challenges. Using new survey data on the perceptions of local elected representatives (directly elected and ex-officio members of Municipal Assemblies) about the performance of their local democracy, we will seek to characterize Executive-Opposition relations in the Portuguese local government context. We will then run a probit regression model to assess three theory-driven factors influencing the nature of such institutional relationship in normal and exceptional contexts: the way minority rights are protected in practice in normal governance contexts; and the extent to which democratic performance and communication have been negatively affected by the pandemic context. The results show that Executive-Opposition relations are tendentiously conflictual. Our findings also show that the Executive's capacity to explain to its constituents the scope and impact of the exceptional measures adopted to cope with the pandemic crisis and its formal duty to communicate these decisions to the Municipal Assembly may hinder Executive-Opposition cooperative relations. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This article introduces a discussion on defining, measuring, and assessing the quality of democracy. Providing a short overview of the papers of the Symposium, it places them within a broader context of current academic debate on various methodological, theoretical, and policy outreach dimensions of the topic.