Echoing the call for ‘no taxation without representation’, the development of modern taxation went hand‐in‐hand with Western democratisation. However, taxation appears to have lost its role in the third wave of democratisation. Unlike early democratisers, contemporary autocracies tend to introduce a ready‐made modern taxation system before democratisation. With advice from international organisations, the value added tax (VAT), which mature democracies innovated, has been adopted for economic adjustment and development in globalised markets. Despite these divergences, it is argued in this article that a fundamental relationship between taxation and representation remains. Taxation inherently involves a social contract between revenue‐seeking rulers and citizens, and thus involves their bargaining over representation. Therefore, the production of state revenue intervenes in contemporary democratisation as well. By factoring in the effect of the VAT in 143 developing countries between 1960 and 2007, an entropy‐balancing analysis has confirmed its important role in contemporary democratisation. The taxation‐democratisation linkage has travelled from early to contemporary democratisation.

In both public and scholarly debates, globalisation has recently been accredited with a massive impact on the political preferences and electoral behaviour of Western citizens. Some go as far as to declare a new cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation, driven, for example, by individuals’ exposure to international competition and their degree of national as opposed to cosmopolitan identification. Extant tests of this argument have, however, relied on class and education as proxies for these processes. In contrast, this study provides a direct test of the influence of the globalisation processes on attitudes to economic distribution, the European Union and immigration as well as on vote choice across nine West European countries. The results show that variables tapping the core aspects of globalisation have relatively little impact on attitudes and vote choice; are largely unable to account for the effects of class and education; and do not seem to lead to the establishment of new divisions between winners and losers within or across classes. Rather, the winners and losers of globalisation seem to be the traditional winners and losers with respect to material positions and political influence in modern Western societies – that is, those placed higher as opposed to lower in the class and education hierarchies. In this way, the proposed cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation may seem to be rather much like old wine in new bottles.

Ladies and Gentlemen, on my own behalf as a professor of international relations, and on behalf of my host institution here, IBEI, the Barcelona Institute for International Studies, I would like to thank you for the kind invitation to address your Graduate Conference here today, and to share some thoughts, born of the intersection of my field of specialisation, International Relations, with the experience of living, writing, research, working and listening in this city of Barcelona, and in the Catalan and Spanish contexts, these past 4 years.

The concept of internationalisation, when referring to the work of social scientists within academic institutions, takes on different meanings and involves different activities. This contribution aims to shed light on the international activities of political scientists across Europe and to investigate the various meanings and practices of internationalisation. The analysis relies on the PROSEPS survey, involving some 1,800 political scientists across 37 European countries. We identify three distinct profiles of international scholars: the networked researcher, the editorial manager, and the traveller. These profiles differ according to 1) the building of international research networks, 2) the involvement in the activities of the international publishing industry, 3) the research and teaching exchanges with foreign academic institutions. Determinants, such as gender, family status, career stage, availability of institutional and financial support, and geographical location, are considered as potential drivers or inhibitors of internationalisation. Our analysis shows that the internationalisation of academic practices follows contrasting paths according to the type of international profile.

Recent trends of mass‐level euroscepticism seriously challenge Deutsch's transactionalist theory that increased transnational interactions trigger support for further political integration. While transnational interactions have indeed proliferated, public support for European integration has diminished. This article aims to solve this puzzle by arguing that transnational interaction is highly stratified across society. Its impact on EU support therefore only applies to a small portion of the public. The rest of the population not only fails to be prompted to support the integration process, but may see it as a threat to their realm. This is even more the case as, parallel to European integration, global trends of integration create tensions in national societies. The following hypotheses are proposed: first, the more transnational an individual, the less she or he is prone to be eurosceptical; and second, this effect is more pronounced in countries that are more globalised. A multilevel ordinal logit analysis of survey data from the 2006 Eurobarometer wave 65.1 confirms these hypotheses.

Democracies are fragile constructions. The apparently overwhelming expansion of democratic regimes should not, however, hide their intrinsic weaknesses. The paper examines how five (hypo)theses proposed by the author 10 years ago are still valuable instruments of analysis in periods of troubled times. The discrepancy between aspirations, programmes and the harsh reality of today is examined in the background of the Europeanisation and globalisation processes.

This article considers the transformation of higher education in Europe and the challenges it has to face in particular in the field of research. The article argues that national systems have developed from very different traditions but that they are now confronted with similar issues and problems. There is an ongoing process of Europeanisation from the bottom (networks, benchmarking) and from the top (Bologna process, European Commission). But the challenge of the future is the need to play at a ‘global’ level and to compete worldwide with the best university systems.

While political opposition to economic globalisation has increased, several governments have adopted stricter unilateral interventions in global supply chains in the name of sustainability, despite their potentially significant economic costs. We argue that these policy choices are partly driven by politicians’ incentives to align with domestic public opinion. In particular, new information disclosure rules enable governments to implement market access restrictions compliant with binding trade liberalisation commitments while (a priori) obscuring their costs to voters. We assess the latter argument with original survey data and experiments with representative samples from the twelve major OECD importing economies (N = 24,000). Indeed, citizens expect substantive benefits while discounting costs from these new regulations, resulting in majority support for rather stringent standards. We further observe that these relationships are muted in countries with high trade exposure. These findings suggest that governments may strategically implement unilateral policies with high-cost obfuscation to garner domestic voter support, driving regulatory proliferation in international economic relations.

China innovated a policy hybrid of ‘social pooling plus individual accounts’ for health protection in the 1990s and exnovated the individual accounts in the 2010s. On the basis of expert interviews and document analysis, this paper explores the life course of individual accounts from the perspective of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘bricoleur’. The individual accounts were grafted onto the social health insurance to signify the ideational shift from ‘egalitarianism’ to ‘fairness with considerable efficiency’. Meanwhile, piloting reform strategies provided a practical foundation for implementation of the policy. As China’s modern social security expanded and the capability for scientific policy-making grew, the government embarked on revising or removing the individual accounts. The analysis casts insights into the increasingly popular policy hybrid practices resulting from globalisation, responds to the debate on East Asian welfare regimes, provides a dynamic view on policy decoupling from world culture and furthers our understanding of policy innovation management.

Since the 1950s, Catalonia has remained one of Europe’s most popular tourism destinations. Throughout this period, however, Catalonia’s presentation to the world has changed dramatically. In this article, I explore claims to authenticity in Catalan tourism attractions and promotion, which emerged as shrewd marketing language in the increasingly competitive tourism market of the 1980s and 1990s. The resulting Catalanisation of the region conditioned the international projection and reception of the region as historically, linguistically, culturally, and politically different from Spain and, indeed, the rest of the world. This new image of the region relied on and sustained an ontology of marketable and consumable national difference that resonates far beyond Catalonia’s borders. This research shows how ideas of consumable authenticity functioned as an important mediator between nationalism and globalisation, popularised nationalist thinking without the influence of committed nationalist actors, and helped scholars to understand the sustained importance of the nation-state as a unit of international politics despite its shifting meaning, function, and power from the 1970s to today.