Craig Parsons
Biographic Data
| ID | 3744868 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Craig Parsons |
| GIVEN NAMES | Craig |
| FAMILY NAME | Parsons |
| SIGNATURE | PARSONS C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oregon |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3119-0893 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 412 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
New or old politics? Understanding public preferences for the EU single market
Despite its place at the core of EU integration, support for the EU’s single market is under-investigated by European public opinion scholars. This paper uses novel survey data from eight EU member states to compare how utilitarian concerns, postmaterialist values and national identities shape popular views of the EU’s single market. Focusing on the freedom of movement for goods, workers, and services, we find that postmaterialist attitudes more …
Introduction
After receding from the headlines for a long time, the Single Market has returned to the forefront of the European Union agenda. The project to pursue the “four freedoms” of goods, services, labor and capital remains over shadowed by calls to develop new EU capacities for strategic autonomy in security and economic affairs, but it is once again widely praised as a key tool—if still a contested one—to promote European competitiveness and power. Th…
American Services in European Perspective
The European Union identifies the sector of construction services as a priority for its agenda to remove barriers to cross-border activity. Taking the EU’s efforts as a starting point, this article explores the politics of interstate barriers in construction services in the United States. To what extent do US construction firms encounter internal-border barriers like those targeted by the EU? If they do, how much business mobilization and governm…
Introduction
The two great “single markets” of the Western world are the result of market-building projects at the heart of American federalism and European integration. This special issue compares the contemporary politics of internal-market openness within these two polities. Common wisdom characterizes Europe’s project as an “incomplete” effort to imitate a wide-open US arena. But if this image is partly correct—Europe remains behind the US in market integ…
Do Citizens Have Views about Single Market Governance
To what degree do citizens hold structured views about the governance of openness in multi-jurisdictional markets? This article presents the results of a preregistered experiment that assesses public attribution of governmental authority with respect to five issues central to market integration. We fielded the survey in the world’s two largest single markets, the United States and the European Union (EU). Across the nine sampled countries (N = 17…
Postfunctionalism across the Atlantic
The European Union’s internal market was modeled in part on the United States’ national market, yet public attitudes toward market governance in the two arenas have long been understood through different theoretical lenses. In this article, we apply the postfunctionalist theory of European integration—developed to explain EU citizens’ attitudes toward supranational authority—to American federalism, testing whether cultural identity divides (GAL/T…
Federal Spirits
This article compares the politics of internal market governance in the European Union and the United States by focusing on a shippable but highly regulated “sin” good: distilled spirits. A few generations ago, both arenas governed spirits in highly decentralized and varied ways. Over time, Europe has centralized regulation to increase market openness while the United States has seen little change. Today regulatory differences between American st…
Andy Smith
Taking Ideas Seriously in Political Science
Today it is rare to find a political scientist who rejects that “ideas matter”—at least in the abstract. But if ideationally inclined theorists have gained seats at the disciplinary table, their approaches still occupy disadvantaged positions. Ideational theories typically must confront nonideational alternatives to achieve salient publication, but nonideational theorists routinely design and publish research without considering ideational altern…
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Parties, Pluralism and the “Crisis” in American Representation
Ever tighter union? Brexit, Grexit, and frustrated differentiation in the single market and Eurozone
Ideas and power
The notion that ideas powerfully shape policies seems highly intuitive. How actors think about policy matters, and their thinking is not just a mechanistic function of uninterpreted conditions around them. Yet turning this intuition into clear claims about the influence of ideas is challenging. This contribution extracts guidelines from the growing literature on ideas to suggest how to best display four common kinds of intersections between ideas…
Dynamic party unity
Moises Ostrogorski once denounced political parties for burying diverse concerns of pluralistic societies under monolithic electoral options. E.E. Schattschneider celebrated them for the same reason: organizing choice and ‘responsible party government’ amid pluralistic complexity. Comparativists have found both dynamics in European legislatures: most European parties exhibit the high average levels of voting unity that Schattschneider’s theory im…
Constructing the International Economy
Before eclecticism
Should constructivist research engage empirical debates with other approaches, especially non-constructivists? Recent calls for ‘eclectic’ and ‘pluralistic’ scholarship seem to encourage engagement, including across epistemological divides many constructivists have long perceived with non-constructivists. Yet this literature downplays competition between approaches, instead emphasizing that they answer different parts of questions. In seeming to …
One Woman's Prejudice
Were the British fated to clash with the European Union? Powerful traditions in British political culture certainly inclined the UK to be an ‘awkward partner’ in Europe. Yet traditions are material from which politics is constructed, not fixed frameworks for destiny. This article argues that a careful historical reconstruction of the development and consolidation of today's British Euroscepticism – with its stronghold on the political right – pas…
Power, Patterns, and Process in European Union History
Sebastian Rosato's admirably provocative Europe United retells the origins of the European Union (EU) as a realist story of the balance of power. While he deserves praise for a bold attempt to extend offensive realism into history's greatest instance of international cooperation, the book ultimately reads as a cautionary methodological tale about how not to support a realist argument. Realist theory has been influential mainly because it offers s…
European Stories
Cross-Cutting Issues and Party Strategy in the European Union
Has European integration affected national electoral politics beyond the margins? Experts describe its main impact as empowerment of radical voices. Mainstream parties avoid European Union (EU) issues that divide their left-or right-based organizations; extreme parties attack the EU and the center’s silence. But EU issues also generate important dynamics inside mainstream parties. The authors theorize cross-cutting EU issues as an example of a ge…
Constructivism and Interpretive Theory
How – and how much – are sociological approaches to the EU distinctive
Revisiting the Single European Act (and the Common Wisdom on Globalization)
The European program of liberalization launched by the Single European Act (SEA) of 1987 is commonly seen as a powerful instance of “globalization” trends of economic integration, liberalization, and international institution building. This article revisits the origins of the SEA to argue that the extent and success of its liberalizing program depended on a causally distinct push for European institutional reform. A retracing of concrete politica…
Immigration and the Transformation of Europe
How to Map Arguments in Political Science
To venture into explanation of political action we need some map of our basic options: what kinds of explanations are out there? Even advanced students and scholars can find the landscape difficult to chart. We confront a bewildering maze of partial typologies, contrasting uses of terms, and debate over what counts as explanation. This book makes an argument about the most useful first cut into explanations of action. It illustrates the map with …
Showing Ideas as Causes
Why did Western Europe create uniquely strong international institutions in the 1950s, setting the foundations for today's quasi-federal European Union? This article contests explanations of the European Economic Community (EEC) as a straightforward response to structural interdependence, or as an institutionally “path-dependent” variation on such a response. Only leadership based on certain ideas explains why Europeans created the EEC rather tha…
Constructing the International Economy
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Ideas and power
The notion that ideas powerfully shape policies seems highly intuitive. How actors think about policy matters, and their thinking is not just a mechanistic function of uninterpreted conditions around them. Yet turning this intuition into clear claims about the influence of ideas is challenging. This contribution extracts guidelines from the growing literature on ideas to suggest how to best display four common kinds of intersections between ideas…
Dual Networks in European Regional Development Policy
This article seeks to extend the general analytical powers of the ‘multi‐level governance’ (MLG) model of politics in the European Union. Empirically, we investigate the political dynamics of networks linking supranational, national, and subnational actors in EU regional development policy. Theoretically, we argue that interaction in these networks can be illuminated by an approach based on the structuralist logic of sociological network theory. …
One Woman's Prejudice
Were the British fated to clash with the European Union? Powerful traditions in British political culture certainly inclined the UK to be an ‘awkward partner’ in Europe. Yet traditions are material from which politics is constructed, not fixed frameworks for destiny. This article argues that a careful historical reconstruction of the development and consolidation of today's British Euroscepticism – with its stronghold on the political right – pas…
Cross-Cutting Issues and Party Strategy in the European Union
Has European integration affected national electoral politics beyond the margins? Experts describe its main impact as empowerment of radical voices. Mainstream parties avoid European Union (EU) issues that divide their left-or right-based organizations; extreme parties attack the EU and the center’s silence. But EU issues also generate important dynamics inside mainstream parties. The authors theorize cross-cutting EU issues as an example of a ge…
Domestic Interests, Ideas and Integration
Both the major approaches to European integration, ‘intergovernmentalism’ and ‘neofunctionalism’, model integration as reflecting the demands of domestic interest groups. Where scholars qualify this basic model, they typically see integration diverging gradually and unintentionally from its expectations. This article tests the interest‐group model against research into French policy‐making across the history of integration, and argues that French…
After Empire
The `special relationships' formed by Spain, France and Britain with their former colonies demonstrate that even ties initially based on political and economic domination transform the identities of both parties. In this study, we show how European post-colonial behavior in Africa, Asia and Latin America has been inspired by historically rooted subjective conceptions of national identity and norms of interstate community. We employ a constructivi…
Ever tighter union? Brexit, Grexit, and frustrated differentiation in the single market and Eurozone
Puzzling out the EU role in national politics
This concluding paper sets the special issue in the broader context of literature on Europeanization. I consider what sort of empirical picture emerges from the issue and other literature, and highlight some puzzles in domestic politics to which that portrayal directs our attention. We see disjunctures between the EU's policy importance and low political mobilization around it, between general demobilization and bursts of activity around referend…
Before eclecticism
Should constructivist research engage empirical debates with other approaches, especially non-constructivists? Recent calls for ‘eclectic’ and ‘pluralistic’ scholarship seem to encourage engagement, including across epistemological divides many constructivists have long perceived with non-constructivists. Yet this literature downplays competition between approaches, instead emphasizing that they answer different parts of questions. In seeming to …
How – and how much – are sociological approaches to the EU distinctive
Dynamic party unity
Moises Ostrogorski once denounced political parties for burying diverse concerns of pluralistic societies under monolithic electoral options. E.E. Schattschneider celebrated them for the same reason: organizing choice and ‘responsible party government’ amid pluralistic complexity. Comparativists have found both dynamics in European legislatures: most European parties exhibit the high average levels of voting unity that Schattschneider’s theory im…
Power, Patterns, and Process in European Union History
Sebastian Rosato's admirably provocative Europe United retells the origins of the European Union (EU) as a realist story of the balance of power. While he deserves praise for a bold attempt to extend offensive realism into history's greatest instance of international cooperation, the book ultimately reads as a cautionary methodological tale about how not to support a realist argument. Realist theory has been influential mainly because it offers s…
Revisiting the Single European Act (and the Common Wisdom on Globalization)
The European program of liberalization launched by the Single European Act (SEA) of 1987 is commonly seen as a powerful instance of “globalization” trends of economic integration, liberalization, and international institution building. This article revisits the origins of the SEA to argue that the extent and success of its liberalizing program depended on a causally distinct push for European institutional reform. A retracing of concrete politica…
Introduction
The two great “single markets” of the Western world are the result of market-building projects at the heart of American federalism and European integration. This special issue compares the contemporary politics of internal-market openness within these two polities. Common wisdom characterizes Europe’s project as an “incomplete” effort to imitate a wide-open US arena. But if this image is partly correct—Europe remains behind the US in market integ…
Taking Ideas Seriously in Political Science
Today it is rare to find a political scientist who rejects that “ideas matter”—at least in the abstract. But if ideationally inclined theorists have gained seats at the disciplinary table, their approaches still occupy disadvantaged positions. Ideational theories typically must confront nonideational alternatives to achieve salient publication, but nonideational theorists routinely design and publish research without considering ideational altern…
Parties, Pluralism and the “Crisis” in American Representation
Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment
Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment. By Isabela Mares. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 288p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.Just three years after publishing The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development, a prize-winning book on the role of employers in the development of European welfare states, Isabela Mares offers an overarching explanation of labor market performance in postwar Europe. She builds on the in…
The State of the European Union. Vol. 7, with US or against US? European Trends in American Perspective
Since 1945, two major projects have dominated European worldviews: the transatlantic partnership and “integration” in the European Union. Neither is fundamentally at risk today, but both have entered uncharted territory. President Bush has asked bluntly if Europeans are “with us or against us,” and most lean toward the latter. The EU’s original road map for integration culminated in monetary union, and its future agenda is vague. This introductio…
Dual Networks in European Regional Development Policy
This article seeks to extend the general analytical powers of the ‘multi‐level governance’ (MLG) model of politics in the European Union. Empirically, we investigate the political dynamics of networks linking supranational, national, and subnational actors in EU regional development policy. Theoretically, we argue that interaction in these networks can be illuminated by an approach based on the structuralist logic of sociological network theory. …
Domestic Interests, Ideas and Integration
Both the major approaches to European integration, ‘intergovernmentalism’ and ‘neofunctionalism’, model integration as reflecting the demands of domestic interest groups. Where scholars qualify this basic model, they typically see integration diverging gradually and unintentionally from its expectations. This article tests the interest‐group model against research into French policy‐making across the history of integration, and argues that French…
Democracy, Federalism, and the European Union
Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum, eds., Democracy in the European Union (New York: Routledge, 2000) Dusan Sidjanski, The Federal Future of Europe: From the European Community to the European Union (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2000
Showing Ideas as Causes
Why did Western Europe create uniquely strong international institutions in the 1950s, setting the foundations for today's quasi-federal European Union? This article contests explanations of the European Economic Community (EEC) as a straightforward response to structural interdependence, or as an institutionally “path-dependent” variation on such a response. Only leadership based on certain ideas explains why Europeans created the EEC rather tha…
After Empire
The `special relationships' formed by Spain, France and Britain with their former colonies demonstrate that even ties initially based on political and economic domination transform the identities of both parties. In this study, we show how European post-colonial behavior in Africa, Asia and Latin America has been inspired by historically rooted subjective conceptions of national identity and norms of interstate community. We employ a constructivi…
Rational Idiosyncrasy and Monetary Integration
Erik Jones's The Politics of Economic and Monetary Union is a tightly written book that provides a dense analytical overview of the issues surrounding economic and monetary integration within the European Union (EU). The jacket describes Jones's book as a textbook, which seems apt given its basic structure and comprehensiveness. Indeed, the scope is impressive for such a short work. Jones begins at the basic theoretical technology of money and mo…
What's unique about immigration in Europe?
A new kind of historic transformation is underway in Europe at the outset of the twenty-first century. Twentieth-century Europeans were no strangers to social, economic, and political change, but their major challenges focused mainly on the intra-European construction of stable, prosperous, capitalist democracies. While the extra-European world obviously affected the continent in many ways, the biggest problems turned on compromises within or bet…
How Institutions Affect Europe's Voice in the World
In the past decade Sophie Meunier has become a well-known figure in the circle of experts on the European Union (EU), recognized especially for her work on the Union's external economic relations. Her many articles have carefully dissected the changing institutional shape of the EU's external representation, and her prize-winning first book offered the best overview yet of the challenges of globalization to her native France (Gordon and Meunier 2…
The State of the European Union. Vol. 7, with US or against US? European Trends in American Perspective
Since 1945, two major projects have dominated European worldviews: the transatlantic partnership and “integration” in the European Union. Neither is fundamentally at risk today, but both have entered uncharted territory. President Bush has asked bluntly if Europeans are “with us or against us,” and most lean toward the latter. The EU’s original road map for integration culminated in monetary union, and its future agenda is vague. This introductio…
How to Map Arguments in Political Science
To venture into explanation of political action we need some map of our basic options: what kinds of explanations are out there? Even advanced students and scholars can find the landscape difficult to chart. We confront a bewildering maze of partial typologies, contrasting uses of terms, and debate over what counts as explanation. This book makes an argument about the most useful first cut into explanations of action. It illustrates the map with …
Have US–Japan Trade Agreements Made a Difference
The few existing empirical studies of US–Japan trade agreements have relied primarily on descriptive statistics or univariate time series methods. We conduct a potentially more powerful test by evaluating agreements in the context of well-specified econometric models. Consistent with trade theory, import demand is modeled as a cointegrating relationship with income and relative price variables, where a trade agreement may cause a structural break…
Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment
Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment. By Isabela Mares. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 288p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.Just three years after publishing The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development, a prize-winning book on the role of employers in the development of European welfare states, Isabela Mares offers an overarching explanation of labor market performance in postwar Europe. She builds on the in…
Puzzling out the EU role in national politics
This concluding paper sets the special issue in the broader context of literature on Europeanization. I consider what sort of empirical picture emerges from the issue and other literature, and highlight some puzzles in domestic politics to which that portrayal directs our attention. We see disjunctures between the EU's policy importance and low political mobilization around it, between general demobilization and bursts of activity around referend…
Immigration and the Transformation of Europe
Constructivism and Interpretive Theory
How – and how much – are sociological approaches to the EU distinctive
Revisiting the Single European Act (and the Common Wisdom on Globalization)
The European program of liberalization launched by the Single European Act (SEA) of 1987 is commonly seen as a powerful instance of “globalization” trends of economic integration, liberalization, and international institution building. This article revisits the origins of the SEA to argue that the extent and success of its liberalizing program depended on a causally distinct push for European institutional reform. A retracing of concrete politica…
European Stories
Cross-Cutting Issues and Party Strategy in the European Union
Has European integration affected national electoral politics beyond the margins? Experts describe its main impact as empowerment of radical voices. Mainstream parties avoid European Union (EU) issues that divide their left-or right-based organizations; extreme parties attack the EU and the center’s silence. But EU issues also generate important dynamics inside mainstream parties. The authors theorize cross-cutting EU issues as an example of a ge…
Power, Patterns, and Process in European Union History
Sebastian Rosato's admirably provocative Europe United retells the origins of the European Union (EU) as a realist story of the balance of power. While he deserves praise for a bold attempt to extend offensive realism into history's greatest instance of international cooperation, the book ultimately reads as a cautionary methodological tale about how not to support a realist argument. Realist theory has been influential mainly because it offers s…
Constructing the International Economy
Before eclecticism
Should constructivist research engage empirical debates with other approaches, especially non-constructivists? Recent calls for ‘eclectic’ and ‘pluralistic’ scholarship seem to encourage engagement, including across epistemological divides many constructivists have long perceived with non-constructivists. Yet this literature downplays competition between approaches, instead emphasizing that they answer different parts of questions. In seeming to …
One Woman's Prejudice
Were the British fated to clash with the European Union? Powerful traditions in British political culture certainly inclined the UK to be an ‘awkward partner’ in Europe. Yet traditions are material from which politics is constructed, not fixed frameworks for destiny. This article argues that a careful historical reconstruction of the development and consolidation of today's British Euroscepticism – with its stronghold on the political right – pas…
Ideas and power
The notion that ideas powerfully shape policies seems highly intuitive. How actors think about policy matters, and their thinking is not just a mechanistic function of uninterpreted conditions around them. Yet turning this intuition into clear claims about the influence of ideas is challenging. This contribution extracts guidelines from the growing literature on ideas to suggest how to best display four common kinds of intersections between ideas…
Dynamic party unity
Moises Ostrogorski once denounced political parties for burying diverse concerns of pluralistic societies under monolithic electoral options. E.E. Schattschneider celebrated them for the same reason: organizing choice and ‘responsible party government’ amid pluralistic complexity. Comparativists have found both dynamics in European legislatures: most European parties exhibit the high average levels of voting unity that Schattschneider’s theory im…
Political science (29 works) · Politics (25 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Economics (19 works) · European union (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Political economy (18 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (14 works)