Governments and legislatures in Europe have created or greatly strengthened independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). Yet they also retain many formal controls over those agencies. The article analyses whether elected politicians have used their powers to create IRAs in their own image and kept IRAs under tight control or whether they have allowed IRAs to become a distinct set of actors, and henc...

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be in‡uenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’policies— i.e., policies to the left of the median voter— as a way of signaling that he is not from the right. Truly right-wing politicians r...

The PoliticalMashup Ngramviewer is an application that allows a user to visualise the use of terms and phrases in the “Tweede Kamer” (the Dutch parliament). Inspired by the Google Books Ngramviewer, the PoliticalMashup Ngramviewer additionally allows for faceting on politicians and parties, providing a more detailed insight in the use of certain terms and phrases by politicians and parties with...

Members of the Turkish Parliament (MPs) earn a base salary. In addition, they earn a bonus, if they are retired from the labor force. A law enacted in January 2012 pegged this bonus to 18% of the salary of the President of Turkey. As a result, salaries of the retirement eligible MPs increased substantially. Using a data set of MPs who served in the Parliament between 2007 and 2015, and exploiti...