Ove K. Pedersen - Böcker

This book investigates what happens to an organized political unit when it becomes part of a larger entity and, in particular, how increased European integration and the tentative moves towards a transnational state will affect the European Union's nation state. Europeanization and TransnationalStates provides an extensive comparative survey of the central governments in four Scandinavian countries and analyses the ways in which the European Union has influenced the day-to-day work of their state administrations. It includes coverage of Denmark, a long-standing member of the European Union; Finland and Sweden, countries that became members in 1995 and Norway, a non-member.The book utilises various theoretical perspectives - such as adaptation to external pressure, strategic choice and path-dependencies - to explain the changes related to increased European integration in central government agencies. It concludes that the consequences of Europeanization can be described as the growth of a transnational administration where identities as well as loyalties are created in processes that transcends the borders of states.

The last quarter century has been marked by the ascension of neoliberalism--market deregulation, state decentralization, and reduced political intervention in national economies. Not coincidentally, this period of dramatic institutional change has also seen the emergence of several schools of institutional analysis. Though these schools cut across disciplines, they have remained isolated from and critical of each other. This volume brings together four--rational choice, organizational, historical, and discursive institutionalism--to examine the rise of neoliberalism. In doing so, it makes tremendous methodological strides while substantively enlarging our knowledge about neoliberalism. The book comprises original empirical studies by top scholars from each school of analysis. They examine neoliberalism's rise on three continents and explore changes in macroeconomic policy, labor markets, taxation, banking, and health care. Neoliberalism appears as much more complex, diverse, and contested than is often appreciated.The authors find that there is no convergence toward a common set of neoliberal institutions; that neoliberalism does not incapacitate states; and that neoliberal reform does not necessarily yield greater efficiency than other institutional arrangements. Beyond these important empirical contributions, this book is a methodological milestone in that it compares different schools of institutionalist analysis by seeing how they tackle a common problem. It reveals a second movement within institutionalism--one toward rapprochement and cross-fertilization among paradigms--and explains how this might be furthered with benefits throughout the social sciences. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sarah L. Babb, Ellen M. Bradburn, Bruce G. Carruthers, Terence C. Halliday, Colin Hay, Edgar Kiser, Peter Kjaer, Jack Knight, Aaron Matthew Laing, David Strang, and Bruce Western.

In politics, ideas matter. They provide the foundation for economic policymaking, which in turn shapes what is possible in domestic and international politics. Yet until now, little attention has been paid to how these ideas are produced and disseminated, and how this process varies between countries. The National Origins of Policy Ideas provides the first comparative analysis of how "knowledge regimes"--communities of policy research organizations like think tanks, political party foundations, ad hoc commissions, and state research offices, and the institutions that govern them--generate ideas and communicate them to policymakers. John Campbell and Ove Pedersen examine how knowledge regimes are organized, operate, and have changed over the last thirty years in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark. They show how there are persistent national differences in how policy ideas are produced. Some countries do so in contentious, politically partisan ways, while others are cooperative and consensus oriented.They find that while knowledge regimes have adopted some common practices since the 1970s, tendencies toward convergence have been limited and outcomes have been heavily shaped by national contexts. Drawing on extensive interviews with top officials at leading policy research organizations, this book demonstrates why knowledge regimes are as important to capitalism as the state and the firm, and sheds new light on debates about the effects of globalization, the rise of neoliberalism, and the orientation of comparative political economy in political science and sociology.