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The European Union (EU) is currently facing unprecedented challenges to its problem‐solving capacity, such as those represented by pressing transnational crises and by bottom‐up criticisms towards the European integration process. Moreover, the EU is said to compensate its weak input legitimacy with an enhanced problem‐solving capacity. However, the notion of problem‐solving itself has remained remarkably vague in the multilevel governance (MLG) literature. This symposium analyses problem‐solving in different MLG settings. In this introduction, we identify procedural and operational notions of problem‐solving in MLG, and present a structural framework to guide the comparative analyses of multilevel systems along the dimensions of political integration, functional differentiation and decentralization. The contributions to the symposium illustrate how structural elements of different multilevel systems shape both the policy‐making process and the politics of problem‐solving within these systems. In doing so, they pave the way for further comparative research.

Background
Media recommendations for suicide reporting are recommended to prevent imitative suicide but little is known about social media reactions to different revelations about celebrity suicide.

Methods
Using the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API), we recorded public tweets mentioning Avicii from the day when his death was reported (N = 2,865,292). We compared that data with a dataset of random tweets. Furthermore, we recorded tweets including suicide in 124 languages before Avicii‘s death (N = 5,939,107). We processed English tweets mentioning Avicii with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to quantify the frequency of affects and related linguistic signals. We also processed the text of tweets to detect tweets mentioning the suicide method, and we retrieved the list of followers of users who tweeted about the method. We constructed reply networks from the dataset, analysing three networks corresponding to the major news events about Avicii‘s death.

Results
Avicii's suicide sparked immediate strong interest with both positive (χ² = 781.06, p < 10⁻⁶) and negative emotional expressions (χ² = 1518.5, p < 10⁻⁶) in comparison to baseline levels. Subsequent revelations were associated with smaller peaks with mainly negative emotional content after Avicii's death was revealed as a suicide (χ² = 33.2, p < 10⁻⁶ and after news about the suicide method (χ² = 274.93, p < 10⁻⁶). Tweeting about the suicide method was infrequent, but twitter users who covered the method had more followers that users who did not (D = 0.1675, p < 10⁻⁶; t = 19.87, p < 10⁻⁶), and a noteworthy number of users had considerable exposure to the suicide method.

Limitations
This was a descriptive analysis.

Conclusions
Twitter users showed strong interest in news about Avicii's death and Avicii's suicide, but less so in the suicide method, and showed distinct tweeting behaviours based on the different revelations.

The study of the processes and effects of internationalization has become a major field of inquiry in the social sciences. This article takes stock of corresponding research efforts in the field of public administration (PA) to understand the internationalization phenomenon by analyzing studies that were systematically sampled from major PA journals over recent decades. After delineating, sampling, categorizing, and subsequently examining the scholarly production of PA regarding what can be understood as the internationalization of domestic PA, three major themes of PA-related debates are identified: diffusion, resistance, and the transformation of bureaucratic power. The article concludes that PA has developed neither genuine research questions nor a coherent theoretical framework able to come to grips with the internationalization challenge. It ends with an appeal for PA to become aware of this deficit and recommends PA scholars liaise more intensively with other social sciences to overcome the current state of affairs.

Automation, digitalization and smart software fundamentally reshape the employment structure of post-industrial societies. The share of routine jobs is constantly shrinking while non-routine jobs at both ends of the skill distribution tend to grow. We contend that the existing political science literature has not sufficiently connected the distributive implications of technological change with contemporary political disruptions. The fact that disadvantages are strongly concentrated among blue- and white-collar routine workers in the lower middle class is of crucial importance. Routine workers are a large and electorally relevant group with all the necessary means for political participation. Increasingly bleak prospects in the labor markets of tomorrow create a demand for social, cultural, and economic protectionism. Socially conservative parties in general and right-wing populist parties in particular have recognized the electoral potential of disaffected routine workers and skillfully address and acknowledge their anxieties. We conclude that a lower middle class no longer protected from the vagaries of economic modernization is a potential electoral game changer.

Under what conditions do civilians mobilize after power-sharing agreements? Research on post-conflict power-sharing has neglected the possible consequences of power-sharing agreements on micro level dynamics, i. e. civilian activism. We argue that (i) power-sharing practices increase the probability of civilian activism, (ii) political and territorial power-sharing practices are especially relevant in this regard, and (iii) ethnic identity groups affiliated to the former rebels are more likely to respond to power-sharing practices compared to other ethnic groups. Using data on power-sharing agreements and civilian activism in African post-conflict countries (1989–2006), we find support for our expectations. The results suggest that the effect of power-sharing practices on protests and riots is particularly high for ethnic groups with linkages to the former rebel organizations.

This research note presents EPAC 2017, a dataset resulting from the second round of an expert survey on ethnonationalism in party competition. EPAC provides cross-sectional data on the positions of (ethno-) national and mainstream parties on an ethnonational (also often referred to as ‘territorial’ or ‘centre-periphery’) dimension, as well as other important dimensions of political competition. The 2017 edition covers 222 political parties in 22 multinational European countries. The research note presents the main survey items and performs a series of validity and reliability tests on the data. Results show that EPAC 2017 provides valid and reliable measures of party positions on an ethnonational dimension. A short analysis of party system changes in Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates the opportunities of combining the 2011 and 2017 editions. The combined dataset allows studying the mobilization of the centre-periphery cleavage in party competition across Eastern and Western Europe and over time.

This article analyzes the sanction threats and impositions by the EU, the UN, and the US in the period between 1989 and 2015, demonstrating that the popular perception of economic coercion is largely mistaken. We show against the backdrop of high-profile failures that the sanction threats and impositions of the United States and the two International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) were often striving to achieve the dominant goal of protecting key liberal values such as the protection of free elections and human rights, but that the design of the coercive measures was frequently flawed.

How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic grievances and political participation remains empirically inconclusive. It is argued in this article that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which are effectively addressed by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EU‐SILC data from 2006–2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, a novel, more fine‐grained conceptualisation of objective economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of the direct link between economic grievances and protest behaviour. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e., the level of grievances) unambiguously de‐mobilises individuals, the deterioration of economic prospects (i.e., a change in grievances) instead increases political activity. Revealing these two countervailing effects provides an important clarification that helps reconcile many seemingly conflicting findings in the existing literature. Second, the article shows that the level of political mobilisation substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilised environment, even structural economic disadvantage is no longer an impediment to political participation. There is a strong political message in this interacting factor: if the presence of organised and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro‐level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself – that is, organised collective action – can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.

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Significant variation in the institutions and efficiency of public bureaucracies across countries and regions are observed. These differences could be partially responsible for divergence in the effectiveness of policy implementation, corruption levels, and economic development. Do imperial legacies contribute to the observed variation in the organization of public administrations? Historical foreign rule and colonization have been shown to have lasting effects on legal systems, political institutions, and trade in former controlled territories. Imperial legacies could also explain variations in the performance of public administrations. The author uses the case of Poland to investigate the long-term effects of foreign rule on bureaucratic systems. Historically, Poland was split between three imperial powers with very different public administrations: Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Statistical analyses of original data collected through a survey of more than 650 Polish public administrations suggest that some present-day differences in the organization and efficiency of bureaucracies are due to imperial legacies.

The study of multilevel governance (MLG) is fundamentally concerned with the capacity of MLG to effectively deal with policy problems. However, the notion of problem‐solving itself remains vague. Moreover, MLG research prioritizes questions of structure and agency, while neglecting the role and nature of policy problems themselves. This symposium defines problem‐solving in both procedural and operational terms. The introduction reviews relevant attributes of policy problems and existing assumptions about their influence on problem‐solving. By adding uncertainty, tractability, and three political attributes (power, conflict, salience), we propose an extended list of attributes of policy problems that matter for problem‐solving, and link them to different notions of procedural and operational problem‐solving in MLG. The contributions address the challenges facing problem‐solving in the European Union, adopting a particular focus on the characteristics of policy problems. Empirical cases include the European Semester, Brexit, the governance of the swine flu pandemic, and climate change.