Existing datasets provided by statistical agencies (e.g. Eurostat) show that the economic and financial crisis that unfolded in 2008 significantly impacted the lives and livelihoods of young people across Europe. Taking these official statistics as a starting point, the collaborative research project "Cultural Pathways to Perceived economic self-sufficiency: a country-and…

Does voting behaviour in the Council of Ministers reflect different national interests? In this article, we explore this question by studying requests for authorization of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The fact that GMOs constitute a highly contentious issue in the European Union enables us to look underneath the 'culture of consensus' which usually characterizes voting behaviour in the Council. We argue that the focus on one issue area can help us to discover more specific voting patterns than those that have previously been found in EU legislative studies. Indeed, based on a dataset comprising all authorization requests voted on in the Council between 2004 and 2014, we find that ministers' voting behaviour is significantly influenced by important national factors such as public opinion, party politics, and structural as well as sectoral interests.

Legislative politics scholars rely heavily on roll call vote (RCV) data. However, it has been claimed that strategic motives behind RCV requests lead to overestimating party group cohesion and, thus, biased findings on legislative behaviour. To explore this claim, we distinguish between two types of bias, a 'behavioural bias' and a 'selection bias'. A recent rule change in the European Parliament, making RCVs mandatory on all final legislative votes, presents the unique opportunity to evaluate the latter. We compare party group cohesion in requested and mandatory RCVs by examining final legislative votes before and after the rule adoption using amendment RCVs (which still need to be requested) as a benchmark. The analysis shows that group cohesion is higher whenever RCVs are not just requested on some but mandatory on all votes. Hence, there is indeed a 'selection bias' in RCV data. Yet, somewhat contrary to former claims, relying on requested RCVs leads to underestimation of the cohesion party groups would have had were all votes automatically roll called. We argue that this is mainly because requests occur on more contentious votes.

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Promoting entrepreneurship has become an important policy strategy in Europe in the hope to stimulate the crisis-shaken economy. In this paper, we caution against undue expectations. Using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for 17 European countries, we find that a considerable proportion of the new entrepreneurs have started a business despite a negative perception of business opportunities as well as lack of confidence in their own entrepreneurial skills. This proportion has increased during the economic crisis, especially in those countries which were particularly affected by economic downturn and rising unemployment. We extend existing entrepreneurship theories to account for this phenomenon, which we call Bnons-entrepreneurship^. Testing the hypotheses derived from our model, we find that the primary motivation for these people to turn to entrepreneurship is the lack of other options to enter the labour market during the economic crisis. Still, this sort of Bdesperate^entrepreneurship does not equal necessity based entrepreneurship, warranting further research.