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Regionalization, in the form of a dispersion of political power away from national political centers to regional governments, has been a defining feature of European politics since the 1970s. The article focuses on how institutional regionalization changed citizens’ attitudes about the division of competences between the central and regional level. It argues that regional institutions and policies exert a socializing effect on citizens’ preference in favor of these institutions through a mechanism of adaptive preferences. First, attitudes are studied across cohorts in a single population to test whether cohorts that came of age in a context of more institutional regionalization are more favorable towards regional decision-making than cohorts that came of age in a centralized state. The analyses indeed show evidence for a socializing effect of institutional regionalization. Second, the article shows how regional elites’ discourses may moderate the relationship between institutional regionalization and citizens’ attitudes about regionalization. We study Belgium as a crucial case. We use five cross-sectional datasets of the Flemish and Walloon populations during the course of increased regionalization in Belgium (1991–2007).

Qualitative secondary analysis has generated heated debate regarding the epistemology of qualitative research. We argue that shifting to an abductive approach provides a fruitful avenue for qualitative secondary analysts who are oriented towards theory-building. However, the concrete implementation of abduction remains underdeveloped—especially for coding. We address this key gap by outlining a set of tactics for abductive analysis that can be applied for qualitative analysis. Our approach applies Timmermans and Tavory's ( Timmermans and Tavory 2012 ; Tavory and Timmermans 2014 ) three stages of abduction in three steps for qualitative (secondary) analysis: Generating an Abductive Codebook, Abductive Data Reduction through Code Equations, and In-Depth Abductive Qualitative Analysis. A key contribution of our article is the development of “code equations”—defined as the combination of codes to operationalize phenomena that span individual codes. Code equations are an important resource for abduction and other qualitative approaches that leverage qualitative data to build theory.

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Politicisation, in a broad and basic understanding, means to turn something -an issue, an institution, a policy -that previously was not a subject to political action into something that now is subject to political action. So far, most definitions of the concept would agree. But besides this basic approach, there is much discussion: Politicisation is a concept that is currently much used in the social sciences, and also a concept that is contested in its definitions and understandings. Several paths and subdisciplines contribute to the debate, but they are not necessarily connected to one another. Political theory or political economy discusses politicisation and also what can be termed the counter-concept, depoliticisation, theoretically and often with a normative background, whereas comparative politics and EU studies have increasingly taken to deliver empirical studies on the politicisation of the European Union. These latter studies most often rely on the indicators of salience, actor involvement and polarisation in and of political debates and processes. International Relations, last not least, increasingly discusses the politicisation of international politics and international organisations. This is why the contributions in this Critical Exchange bring together differing strands of the debate and aim to rethink politicisation in both theoretical and empirical understandings and usages. Kari Palonen starts the exchange with an overview on historical usages of the concept. Claudia Wiesner follows with an approach to challenges and possible pathways of concept specification. Veith Selk discusses politicisation and its linkages to populism. Niilo Kauppi and Hans-Jo ¨rg Trenz, as well as Claire Dupuy and Virginie van Ingelgom, critically regard the state of the art in studying EU politicisation and depoliticisation. Philip Liste closes with a discussion of the linkages between the concepts of juridification, depoliticisation, and politicisation in transnational politics. Taken together, the contributions raise a number of crucial issues in the academic debate on politicisation: the conception of politics and the political that politicisation relates to, its linkage to depoliticisation and juridification, and the relation of politicisation and populism.

This article asks how the most prominent recent changes in European welfare states are relevant for citizens’ political participation and attitudes toward politics, specifically citizens’ political efficacy, political interest, political trust and attribution of responsibility. We consider changes in benefits, in the form of generosity levels and conditionality, and changes in modes of delivery, including both marketization and rescaling. Reviewing the policy feedback on mass publics literature, a mainly US-centric scholarship, the article suggests that the mostly negative impacts that are theoretically expected are to be qualified in the European contexts. The article thereby reflects on the contributions and limits to what can be learned from this body of research to illuminate European cases; and it derives a research agenda to study policy feedbacks on mass publics in western Europe.

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