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441 produkter
441 produkter
The European Parliament and Supranational Party System
A Study in Institutional Development
Häftad, Engelska, 2001
334 kr
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This book examines the impact of increased legislative power and political authority on the internal development of the European Parliament and the supranational party group system. This is done through an analysis of changes in the hierarchical structures that regulate the internal organization of both the EP as a whole and the individual party groups. In addition, the changing pattern of coalition formation between party groups across time and legislative procedure is analyzed. The trends of internal development examined suggest that the increases in EP power that have occurred since the creation of the cooperation procedure by the Single European Act in 1987 have caused a fundamental shift in the character of the European Parliament as a legislative institution. Prior to 1987 the European Parliament, despite direct election and several small attempts to increase its powers, served primarily as a chamber of debate where much more was discussed than accomplished.
Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States
Häftad, Engelska, 2002
410 kr
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This book argues that the post-1970 rise in international capital mobility has not contributed to the retrenchment of developed welfare states. Nor has globalization reduced the revenue-raising capacities of governments and undercut the political institutions that support the welfare state. Rather, institutional features of the polity and the welfare state determine the extent to which the economic and political pressures associated with globalization produce welfare state retrenchment. In systems characterized by electoral institutions, social corporatist interest representation and policy-making, centralized political authority, and social insurance-based program structures, pro-welfare state interests are favored. In nations characterized by majoritarian electoral institutions, pluralist interest representation and policy-making, decentralization of policy-making authority, and liberal program structure, the economic and political pressures attendant on globalization are translated into rollbacks of social protection. Globalization has had least impact on large welfare states of Northern Europe and most effect on small welfare states of Anglo nations.
Redeeming the Communist Past
The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe
Häftad, Engelska, 2002
409 kr
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This major study examines one of the most surprising developments in East Central European politics after the democratic transitions of 1989: the completely unexpected regeneration of the former communist parties. After the collapse of the communist regimes in 1989, these ruling communist parties seemed consigned to oblivion. However, confounding scholarly and popular expectations, all of these parties survived. Some have even returned to power. This in-depth, comparative study systematically analyzes the trajectories of four cases: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary (with additional examination of other communist party successors). Relying on extensive, and unprecedented, primary research, this analysis employs a consistent analytical framework that combines the peculiarities of the post-socialist cases with broad theoretical concerns of institutional analysis, democratic transitions and consolidation, and party politics.
460 kr
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This 2002 study examines the process by which the seemingly impossible in 1987 - the disintegration of the Soviet state - became the seemingly inevitable by 1991, providing an original interpretation not only of the Soviet collapse, but also of the phenomenon of nationalism more generally. Probing the role of nationalist action as both cause and effect, Beissinger utilizes data and case studies from across the USSR during its final years to elicit the shifting relationship between pre-existing structural conditions, institutional constraints, and event-generated influences in the nationalist explosions that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Beissinger demonstrates, the 'tidal' context of nationalism - i.e., the transnational influence of one nationalism upon another - is critical to an explanation of the success and failure of particular nationalisms, why some nationalisms turn violent, and how a crescendo of events can overwhelm states, periodically evoking large-scale structural change in the character of the state system.
509 kr
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The movement for European integration has yielded a European Union of fifteen states with a unified monetary system that will eventually embrace over 370 million people. If current trends continue, an average of one in ten of these people will be unemployed. Not surprisingly, the European public ranks joblessness among its primary political concerns. This book focuses on both unemployment and economic unification. It examines the consequences of each and their interconnections. With chapters on the policy implications of European union, on current workings of domestic bargaining institutions and on how unemployment affects political behavior, this book yields a message with important policy implications: the organized managed economies of Europe should be reformed but not replaced, and a united Europe should be wary of modeling itself on the United States.
344 kr
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Why has the literature on Asian development not addressed the issue of money politics in Korea? How can we reconcile the view of an efficient developmental state in Korea before 1997 with reports of massive corruption and inefficiency in that same country in 1998 and 1999? Politics is central to the answer. In this book the author makes two arguments. First, both Korea and the Philippines experienced significant corruption throughout the post-independence era. Second, political - not economic - considerations dominated policy making in both countries. Focusing on the exchange of favors for bribes between state and business, the author argues that politics drove policy choices, that bureaucrats were not autonomous from political interference in setting policy, and that business and political elites wrestled with each other over who would reap the rents to be had. Even in Korea, corruption was far greater than the conventional wisdom allows.
409 kr
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This book synthesizes and extends modern political-economic theory to explain the postwar evolution of macroeconomic policy in developed democracies. Chapters 2-4 study transfers, debt, and monetary/wage policy-making and outcomes, stressing that participation enhances transfer-policy responsiveness to inequality and vice versa, that policy-making veto actors retard fiscal-policy adjustments, inducing greater long-run debt-responses to all other political-economic stimuli, and that monetary policy's nominal and real effects depend, respectively, on the broader political-economic interest-structure and on wage-price bargainers' sectorial composition and coordination. Broadly, the book argues that these developments have exacerbated the distributional conflicts inherent in the policies to which postwar governments had committed while undermining their more-universally desired efficiency-fostering roles. Battles that once raged primarily over policies conducted within postwar-commitment frameworks now rage over the putative 'reforms' of the frameworks that will set the institutional rules within which democratic struggle over macroeconomic policy and free-market competition will continue.
Understanding Ethnic Violence
Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe
Häftad, Engelska, 2002
347 kr
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This 2002 book seeks to identify the motivations of individual perpetrators of ethnic violence. The work develops four models, labeled Fear, Hatred, Resentment, and Rage, gleaned from existing social science literatures. The empirical chapters apply these four models to important events of ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe, from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Each historical chapter generates questions about the timing and target of ethnic violence. The four models are then applied to the case, to learn which does the best job in explaining the observed patterns of ethnic conflict. The findings challenge conventional wisdom, in that the Resentment narrative, centered on a sense of unjust group status, provides the best fit for a variety of cases. While Fear, Hatred, and Rage do motivate hostile actions, Resentment pervasively appears to inflame ethnic animosity and drive outcomes in the timing and pattern of action.
334 kr
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Why do women protest? Under what conditions do women protest on the basis of their gender identity? Professor Baldez answers in terms of tipping, timing and framing. She relies on the concept of tipping to identify the point at which diverse organizations converge to form a women's movement. She argues that two conditions trigger this mobilization among women: partisan realignment, understood as the emergence of a new set of issues around which political elites define themselves, and women's decision to frame realignment in terms of widely held norms about gender difference. To illustrate these claims, she compares two very different women's movements in Chile: the mobilization of women against President Salvador Allende (1970-3) and that against General Augusto Pinochet (1973-90). Despite differences between these two movements, both emerged amidst a context of partisan realignment and framed their concerns in terms of women's exclusion from the political arena.
370 kr
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Widespread support among rural people for the leftist insurgency during the civil war in El Salvador challenges conventional interpretations of collective action. Those who supplied tortillas, information, and other aid to guerillas took mortal risks and yet stood to gain no more than those who did not. Wood's rich tapestry of explanation is based on oral histories gathered from peasants who supported the insurgency and those who did not over a period of many years during and immediately following the war, and interviews with military commanders of both sides. Peasants supported the FMLN, Wood found, not for any material gain that was contingent on their participation, but rather for moral and emotional reasons. Wood's alternative model places emotions and morals, as well as conventional interests, at the heart of collective action.
398 kr
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This book systematically investigates the past accomplishments and future agendas of contemporary comparative-historical analysis. Its core essays explore three major issues: the accumulation of knowledge in the field over the past three decades, the analytic tools used to study temporal process and historical patterns, and the methodologies available for making inferences and for building theories. The introductory and concluding essays situate the field as a whole by comparing it to alternative approaches within the social sciences. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences will serve as an invaluable resource for scholars in the field, and it will represent a challenge to many other social scientists - especially those who have raised skeptical concerns about comparative-historical analysis in the past.
334 kr
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The ultimate goal of environmental policy is reducing pollution. Attention to environmental problems in the social sciences has brought some bold generalizations about causes of good results, but almost no systematic cross-national studies that flesh out major theoretical arguments and test those claims with data. This study makes a seminal contribution to that effort in two ways. First, by taking environmental outcomes over the last thirty years as the central dependent variable, it provides a basis for evaluating national performance in reducing environmental problems. Second, by developing a data set including performance in a number of countries and elaborating on major explanations of environmental performance found in the literature, this study provides the most rigorous available analysis of the determinants of environmental performance. In so doing, it challenges what is probably the conventional wisdom in the social sciences.
397 kr
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Nationally-specific definitions of citizenship proved decisive for the development of the Tax State in Brazil and South Africa in the twentieth century. Although both countries had been divided along racial and regional lines in the late nineteenth century, watershed constitutions addressed these political problems in very different ways. South Africa's institutionalized white supremacy created a level of political solidarity that contributed to the development of a highly progressive and efficient tax system. In Brazil, federalism and official non-racialism proved more divisive, making the enactment and collection of progressive taxes much more difficult. The legacy of these divergent state-building processes remains evident at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Lieberman extends this analysis to a wider group of country cases and finds similar patterns and causal relationships between the politics of race, region, and taxation. The findings are based on field research, large-scale national surveys, macroeconomic data, and various archival sources.
Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State
A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany
Häftad, Engelska, 2006
333 kr
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This book presents empirical research on the nature and structure of political violence. While most studies of social movements focus on single - nations, Donatella della Porta uses a comparative research design to analyse movements in two countries - Italy and Germany - from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through extensive usage of official documents and in-depth interviews, della Porta is able to explain the actors' construction of external political reality. The empirical data are used to build a middle-range theory of political violence that incorporates an analysis of the interactions between social movements and the state at the macro-level, an analysis of the development of radical organizations as entrepreneurs for political violence at the meso-level, and an analysis of the construction of 'militant' identities and countercultures at the micro-level.
441 kr
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In most post-colonial regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, state power has been used to structure economic production in ways that have tended to produce economic stagnation rather than growth. In this 1993 book, Catherine Boone examines the ways in which the exercise of state power has inhibited economic growth, focusing on the case of Senegal. She traces changes in the political economy of Senegal from the heyday of colonial merchant capital in the 1930s to the decay of the 1980s and reveals that old trading monopolies and commercial hierarchies were preserved at the cost of reforms that would have stimulated economic growth. Boone uses this case to develop an argument against analyses of political-economic development that identify state institutions and ideologies as independent forces driving the process of economic transformation. State power, she argues, is rooted in the material and social bases of ruling alliances.
Uncertain Boundaries
The Social and Political Construction of European Economies
Häftad, Engelska, 2007
428 kr
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During the post-World War II period, a pattern emerged in several European countries: the concentrated and centralized political regulation of the economy, based on the adoption of Keynesian policies, the development of the welfare state and moderately successful attempts at tripartite integration. This pattern entered a deep crisis in the 1980s however, and in the view of many observers, was replaced by a far-reaching deregulation of the economy. The author argues that social and political institutions have by no means lost their ability to structure economic activities. They have, in fact, shaped the different ways in which the European economies have adjusted to market conditions. A pattern of 'micro-social' regulation of European economies emerged as a potential candidate to take the place of the 'macropolitical' one. This volume discusses the conditions under which a change from a macro to a micro form takes place, as well as the features of the emerging pattern.
586 kr
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This book is an attempt to explain the temporal movement of postwar Italian strikes: why and when strikes go up or down and what the strategies of the main actors involved are. In many ways, the book is unique in the social sciences. First, it takes an inductive approach. Rather than start with theories and then use available empirical evidence to test the explanatory power of the theories, the book starts with date. Second, the book is based on a variety of empirical evidence: statistical, historical, ethnographic and survey material. Third, the book considers the strategies of all the actors involved: workers, employers, the state and the radical left. Finally, the book does not simply explain the movement of strikes; more broadly, it attempts to show how strikes, in their turn, deeply affect the economic, institutional and political spheres of society.
428 kr
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This 1996 book is about politics in Brazil during the military regime of 1964-85 and the transition to democracy. Unlike most books about contemporary Brazilian politics that focus on promising signs of change, this book seeks to explain remarkable political continuity in the Brazilian political system. It attributes the persistence of traditional politics and the dominance of regionally based, traditional political elites in particular to the manner in which the economic and political strategies of the military, together with the transition to democracy, reinforced the clientelistic, personalistic, and regional basis of state-society relations. The book focuses on the political competition and representation in the state of Minas Gerais.
441 kr
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Money, Markets, and the State, first published in 2000, provides in-depth explanations behind the various successes and failures of the economic policies of social democratic governments in five Western European countries: Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. Dr Notermans examines these economic systems from the inflation of the early twenties, through the Great Depression of the thirties and then continues his analysis up to present-day mass unemployment. Drawing on a wide range of historical and statistical sources, Dr Notermans argues that the fate of social democratic economic policy hinges critically on the political and institutional success of maintaining price stability and not on structural economic factors such as changing supply side conditions or increasing globalization of economic relations. Although social democracy has repeatedly been declared obsolete, the study concludes that even under present economic conditions, successful policies for full employment are possible by way of social democratic theory.
428 kr
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Most African countries have a population composed of a multitude of language groups and most African citizens have a varied repertoire allowing them to rely on different languages for use in the home, at school, in the market, at work and in communicating with political authorities. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa analyses the complex language scene in Africa today and asks whether this distinctive web of language use is symptomatic of the early stage of state construction. If so, one would expect that as each of these states develops there will be a rationalisation of language use and agreement on a common language within the country's borders. Alternately, Africa's language scene may be the result of a particular historical context of state construction, with the implication that political development will not lead to the one-state, one-language outcome typical of the idealised nation-state.
672 kr
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In an in-depth comparative analysis, Stefano Bartolini studies the history of socialism and working-class politics in Western Europe. While examining the social contexts, organizational structures and political developments of thirteen socialist experiences from the 1880s to the 1980s, he reconstructs the steps through which social conflict was translated and structured into an opposition, as well as how it developed its different organizational and ideological forms, and how it managed more or less successfully to mobilize its reference groups politically. Bartolini provides a comparative framework that structures the wealth of material available on the history of each unit and allows him to assess the relative weight of the complex explanatory factors.
Stuffing the Ballot Box
Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica
Häftad, Engelska, 2006
428 kr
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Stuffing the Ballot Box is a pioneering study of electoral fraud and reform. It focuses on Costa Rica, a country where parties gradually transformed a fraud-ridden political system into one renowned for its stability and fair elections by the mid-twentieth century. Lehoucq and Molina draw upon a unique database of more than 1,300 accusations of ballot-rigging to show that parties denounced fraud where electoral laws made the struggle for power more competitive. They explain how institutional arrangements generated opportunities for executives to assemble legislative coalitions to enact far-reaching reforms. This book also argues that nonpartisan commissions should run elections and explains why splitting responsibility over election affairs between the executive and the legislature is a recipe for partisan rancour and political conflict. Stuffing the Ballot Box will interest a broad array of political and social scientists, constitutional scholars, historians, election specialists and policy-makers interested in electoral fraud and institutional reform.
428 kr
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Why do some state-building efforts succeed when others fail? Using formerly unavailable archival sources, this book presents an explanation for the rise and subsequent collapse of the Soviet state. The study explains how personal networks and elite identity served as informal sources of power that influenced state strength. Reconstructing the State also offers alternative interpretations of how the weak Bolshevik state extended its reach to a vast rural and multi-ethnic periphery as well as the dynamics of the center-regional conflict in the 1930s that culminated in the Great Terror.
Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia
Power, Perceptions, and Pacts
Häftad, Engelska, 2008
441 kr
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The establishment of electoral systems in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan presents both a complex set of empirical puzzles and a theoretical challenge. Why did three states with similar cultural, historical, and structural legacies establish such different electoral systems? How did these distinct outcomes result from strikingly similar institutional design processes? Explaining these puzzles requires understanding not only the outcome of institutional design but also the intricacies of the process that led to this outcome. Moreover, the transitional context in which these three states designed new electoral rules necessitates an approach that explicitly links process and outcome in a dynamic setting. This book provides such an approach. Finally, it both builds on the key insights of the dominant approaches to explaining institutional origin and change and transcends these approaches by moving beyond the structure versus agency debate.
1 166 kr
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Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Based on a diverse array of indicators and surveys of party legislators and public opinion, the book argues that learning and adaptation through fundamental policy innovations are the main mechanisms by which politicians build programmatic parties. Marshalling extensive evidence, the book's analysis shows the limits of alternative explanations and substantiates a sanguine view of programmatic competition, nevertheless recognizing that this form of party system organization is far from ubiquitous and enduring in Latin America.
Colonialism and Postcolonial Development
Spanish America in Comparative Perspective
Inbunden, Engelska, 2010
1 200 kr
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In this comparative-historical analysis of Spanish America, Mahoney offers a new theory of colonialism and postcolonial development. He explores why certain kinds of societies are subject to certain kinds of colonialism and why these forms of colonialism give rise to countries with differing levels of economic prosperity and social well-being. Mahoney contends that differences in the extent of colonialism are best explained by the potentially evolving fit between the institutions of the colonizing nation and those of the colonized society. Moreover, he shows how institutions forged under colonialism bring countries to relative levels of development that may prove remarkably enduring in the postcolonial period. The argument is sure to stir discussion and debate, both among experts on Spanish America who believe that development is not tightly bound by the colonial past, and among scholars of colonialism who suggest that the institutional identity of the colonizing nation is of little consequence.
1 034 kr
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Does democracy control business, or does business control democracy? This study of how companies are bought and sold in four countries - France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands - explores this fundamental question. It does so by examining variation in the rules of corporate control - specifically, whether hostile takeovers are allowed. Takeovers have high political stakes: they result in corporate reorganizations, layoffs and the unraveling of compromises between workers and managers. But the public rarely pays attention to issues of corporate control. As a result, political parties and legislatures are largely absent from this domain. Instead, organized managers get to make the rules, quietly drawing on their superior lobbying capacity and the deference of legislators. These tools, not campaign donations, are the true founts of managerial political influence.
334 kr
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The democratization of a national government is only a first step in diffusing democracy throughout a country's territory. Even after a national government is democratized, subnational authoritarian 'enclaves' often continue to deny rights to citizens of local jurisdictions. Gibson offers new theoretical perspectives for the study of democratization in his exploration of this phenomenon. His theory of 'boundary control' captures the conflict pattern between incumbents and oppositions when a national democratic government exists alongside authoritarian provinces (or 'states'). He also reveals how federalism and the territorial organization of countries shape how subnational authoritarian regimes are built and how they unravel. Through a novel comparison of the late nineteenth-century American 'Solid South' with contemporary experiences in Argentina and Mexico, Gibson reveals that the mechanisms of boundary control are reproduced across countries and historical periods. As long as subnational authoritarian governments coexist with national democratic governments, boundary control will be at play.
397 kr
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Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Based on a diverse array of indicators and surveys of party legislators and public opinion, the book argues that learning and adaptation through fundamental policy innovations are the main mechanisms by which politicians build programmatic parties. Marshalling extensive evidence, the book's analysis shows the limits of alternative explanations and substantiates a sanguine view of programmatic competition, nevertheless recognizing that this form of party system organization is far from ubiquitous and enduring in Latin America.
Colonialism and Postcolonial Development
Spanish America in Comparative Perspective
Häftad, Engelska, 2010
357 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
In this comparative-historical analysis of Spanish America, Mahoney offers a new theory of colonialism and postcolonial development. He explores why certain kinds of societies are subject to certain kinds of colonialism and why these forms of colonialism give rise to countries with differing levels of economic prosperity and social well-being. Mahoney contends that differences in the extent of colonialism are best explained by the potentially evolving fit between the institutions of the colonizing nation and those of the colonized society. Moreover, he shows how institutions forged under colonialism bring countries to relative levels of development that may prove remarkably enduring in the postcolonial period. The argument is sure to stir discussion and debate, both among experts on Spanish America who believe that development is not tightly bound by the colonial past, and among scholars of colonialism who suggest that the institutional identity of the colonizing nation is of little consequence.