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JEPP’s Best Paper Prize goes to Michael Baggesen Klitgaard, Gijs Schumacher and Menno Soentken

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Michael Baggesen Klitgaard (University of Southern Denmark) & Gijs Schumacher (University of Amsterdam)

“The partisan politics of institutional welfare state reform” was selected by two of JEPP’s editorial board members (Christoph Knill and Frank Schimmelfennig) as the best article published in a normal issue of JEPP in 2015. In their award statement, the jury praises the paper for making “a highly important contribution to the welfare state and party politics literature”. The paper makes a novel argument with the objective to demonstrate that the government partisan effect is significantly stronger on institutional welfare state reforms than on ordinary social policy reforms. To probe this claim, the authors employ an innovative dataset and a mixed-methods research design. The jury, furthermore, highlights the paper’s exceptional findings, which fit well with existing research but also contradict a number of major points made by the literature on welfare state reform, including the role of party ideology and class politics. JEPP congratulates the prize winners for their exceptional work!

A new arena for democratic politics in the EU?

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Ian Cooper (European University Institute)

National parliaments have been widely perceived as the losers of European integration, rubber-stamping legislation originating in Brussels. Ian Cooper’s article “A yellow card for the striker: national parliaments and the defeat of EU legislation on the right to strike” published in the Journal of European Public Policy disputes these assessments and demonstrates the potential of the Early Warning Mechanism, adopted by the Lisbon Treaty, to help national parliaments become “a collective force in European politics”. The article won the “PADEMIA Award for Outstanding Research on Parliamentary Democracy in Europe” at PADEMIA’s second annual conference.