Political Science

Economic and social shifts have led to rising income inequality in the world's affluent countries. This is worrisome for reasons of fairness and because inequality has adverse effects on other socioeconomic goods. Redistribution can help, but government revenues are threatened by globalization and population aging. A way out of this impasse is for countries to increase their employment rate. Increasing employment enlarges the tax base, allowing tax revenues to rise without an increase in tax rates; it also reduces welfare state costs by decreasing the amount of government benefits going to individuals and households. The question is: can egalitarian institutions and policies be coupled with employment growth? For two decades conventional wisdom has held that the answer is no. This book provides an assessment of the experiences of rich nations since the late 1970s. It examines the impact on employment of six key policies and institutions: wage levels at the low end of the labor market, employment protection regulations, government benefit generosity, taxes, skills, and women-friendly policies. The analysis includes twenty countries, with a focus on Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The book concludes that there is some indication of tradeoffs, but that they tend to be small in magnitude. There is no parsimonious set of policies and institutions that have been the key to good or bad employment performance. Instead, there are multiple paths to employment success. The comparative experience suggests reason for optimism about possibilities for a high-employment, high-equality society.

Society needs more from social sciences than they have delivered. One reason for falling short is that social science methods have depended excessively on regression and other statistical approaches, neglecting logical model building. Science is not only about the empirical “What is?” but also very much about the conceptual “How should it be on logical grounds?” Statistical approaches are essentially descriptive, while quantitatively formulated logical models are predictive in an explanatory way. This book contrasts the predominance of statistics in today's social sciences with predominance of quantitatively predictive logical models in physics. It shows how to construct predictive models and gives social science examples. Only secondary school mathematics is often needed, plus willingness to simplify reality outrageously. The book also shows how to use and report basic statistical analysis in more informative ways, including emphasis on symmetric regression.

The Maastricht Treaty and the Stability Growth Pact demand that EU member states comply with their famous deficit and debt requirements of three and sixty per cent of GDP. Yet, how can the EU's leaders be certain that these targets are met? Is a three percent deficit in Belgium equivalent to one in Italy or France? This book explores how the Maastricht Treaty's budgetary surveillance procedure monitors member state budgetary policies, harmonizes their budgetary data, and effectively determines which member states qualified for member status and are subject to the Pact's sanctions. This book provides an examination of how the EU entrusted the credibility of these critical budgetary figures to a relatively minor European Commission agency, and what effect the surveillance procedure has on the making of the EMU and the enforcement of Maastricht.

Ever since the 1970s, the problem of unemployment has defined politics in Western Europe, but governments have responded in different ways. In the 1970s and 1980s, some governments used macroeconomic policy to support domestic economic activity and maintain full employment. In the 1990s and 2000s, on the other hand, some governments made large labor market policy changes to ensure that the unemployed were looking for jobs, well-trained, and matched with employers willing to hire them. Comparing Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, this book shows that governments made different choices because of underlying political differences: the development of party systems, corporatism, and norms regarding the purpose of political authority. Low unemployment was the linchpin of political arrangements in Western Europe after the Second World War. When mass unemployment became a threat again in the 1970s, Austria and Sweden – where the post-war political order remained intact – used economic policies to preserve full employment. In the 1990s and 2000s, governments in Denmark and the Netherlands – who had lived with high unemployment for a long period of time and reformed their political models in the course of the 1980s – undertook far-reaching labor market policy changes.

This volume is devoted to the analysis of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) and its role in international and national policy making. On its 50th anniversary, the OECD enjoys widely acknowledged international standing. Despite this, it has so far remained a rarely researched and analyzed organization. This book is thus a pioneering work: it fills a long‐overdue gap in presenting a theoretically guided and empirically rich analysis of the OECD as a political actor. It explores its role in political processes through various case studies in a variety of policy fields. By conceptualizing the contributions to this volume around the concept of mechanisms of governance, it evaluates how and to what extent the OECD provides international incentives for national policy making. The volume collects a set of ten contributions on the OECD and its activities in core fields of its commitment as an ‘economic organization’, such as economic and labor market policy, tax issues, finance or financial crime, but also in complementary fields in which the organization is active today despite its original economic focus, such as education, biotechnology, health, family issues, and migration. The case studies presented in this volume are an interdisciplinary collection from different academic perspectives, including political science, international relations, law and organization studies. The book provides a current and wide‐ranging analysis of this organization including its constraints and opportunities in policy making.

In many Western democracies, ethnic and racial minorities have demanded, and sometimes achieved, greater recognition and accommodation of their identities. This is reflected in the adoption of multiculturalism policies for immigrant groups, the acceptance of territorial autonomy and language rights for national minorities, and the recognition of land claims and self-government rights for indigenous peoples. These claims for recognition have been controversial, in part because of fears that they make it more difficult to sustain a robust welfare state by eroding the interpersonal trust, social solidarity and political coalitions that sustain redistribution. Are these fears of a conflict between a ‘politics of recognition’ and a ‘politics of redistribution’ valid? This book aims to test this question empirically, using both cross-national statistical analyses of the relationships among diversity policies, public attitudes and the welfare state, and case studies of the recognition/redistribution linkage in the political coalitions in particular countries, including the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and in Latin America. These studies suggest that that there is no general or inherent tendency for recognition to undermine redistribution, and that the relationship between these two forms of politics can be supportive as well as competitive, depending on the context. These findings shed light, not only on the nature and effects of multiculturalism, but also on wider debates about the social and political foundations of the welfare state, and indeed about our most basic concepts of citizenship and national identity.

Till the recent financial crisis, globalization was regarded as the dominant driver of events in the world. As is now clear, the deep roots of the local cannot be overlooked. There is no social institution as deep-rooted as the nation-state. Social and political outcomes resulting from economic changes are therefore often a product of the interaction between the global and the local — between the forces of economic globalization and the nation-state. The timely book investigates the impact of globalization and liberalization on the state in India. It challenges the argument that an inevitable concomitant of globalization is the erosion, and possible dismantlement, of the economic and welfare roles of the state. Bringing to bear the weight of abundant empirical evidence on the question, the book documents the continued expansion of the state's economic and welfare roles. However, the author contends that the current state effort in the social sectors emerges as grossly inadequate when considered against the tremendous need in society. The fault for this situation lies, in good measure, in the state's delivery system. Setting it right requires the reform of governance and the rationalization of institutions. Lucidly and compellingly argued, this book will interest researchers and students of politics, economics, and international relations. It will also be useful to administrators, policymakers, and all those interested in the contents and discontents of globalization.

Modern welfare states developed primarily to meet the ‘old social risks’ that confront the mass of the population during a standard industrial life course – retirement pensions, health care services, sickness and disability provision. Most analysis of the current wave of reforms focusses on these areas, and tends to emphasise retrenchment, restructuring, and decommodification. This book deals with the ‘new social risks’ that have now emerged alongside old social risks from changes in family life and work patterns – needs for child and elder care, new rights for women in relation to paid work, measures to ease the transition into paid work, particularly for unskilled people, and the problems of social exclusion arising for some groups from policies like pension privatisation. It offers an original approach of the implications for national and EU level social policy‐making and contributes to theoretical work in this area. The detailed national case studies are written by national experts and are based on analysis of policy during the past 15 years and more than 250 interviews with key policy actors. The book is organised in a common framework that enables comparison of the significance of different national welfare state regimes and political institutions.

The book shows that (1) The recognition of new social risks and the structuring of policies to meet them are constrained by existing patterns of old social risk provision; (2) The politics of new social risks differs from that of old social risks. Most people are aware of needs in relation to the latter, leading to widespread pressure for more provision. The groups affected by new social risks are smaller, less politically cohesive, and less able to push for change; (3) New social risks policies offer the opportunity for governments to ‘transform vice into virtue’ by expanding the labour force and encouraging previously dependent groups (disabled and unemployed people) into productive work. For this reason, such policies are at the forefront of the EU level welfare reform agenda.

This book offers a description and explanation of the performance of western democracies. It addresses two main questions: Is the performance of western democracies in decline? Do institutions matter for political performance? It aims at a comprehensive stock-taking for twenty-one OECD countries by systematically examining all major domestic policy areas — domestic security policy, economic policy, social policy, and environmental policy — from 1974 to 1995. The quality of democracy is assessed at the level of the four policy areas, and at a general level encompassing all areas. The question of trade-offs between policy areas is studied in an unprecedented way. The empirical findings confront widely-held beliefs about the performance of democracies: Western democracies as a whole did not converge at a lower level of performance, and trade-offs between different policy areas did not increase. The question ‘do institutions matter?’ can only partially be answered in the affirmative. Political institutions do matter, but formal and informal institutions cause different effects; both matter only sometimes and only to a limited degree.

European governments have rediscovered labor migration, but are eager to be perceived as controlling unsolicited forms of migration, especially through asylum and family reunion. The emerging paradigm of managed migration combines the construction of more permissive channels for desirable and actively recruited labor migrants with ever more restrictive approaches towards asylum seekers. Nonstate actors, especially employer organizations, trade unions, and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations, attempt to shape regulatory measures, but their success varies depending on organizational characteristics. Labor market interest associations' lobbying strategies regarding quantities and skill profile of labor migrants will be influenced by the respective system of political economy they are embedded in. Trade unions are generally supportive of well-managed labor recruitment strategies. But migration policymaking also proceeds at the European Union (EU) level. While national actors seek to upload their national model as a blueprint for future EU policy to avoid costly adaptation, top-down Europeanization is recasting national regulation in important ways, notwithstanding highly divergent national regulatory philosophies. Based on field work in and analysis of primary documents from six European countries (France, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and Poland), this book makes an important contribution to the study of a rapidly Europeanized policy domain. Combining insights from the literature on comparative political economy, Europeanization, and migration studies, this book makes important contributions to all three, while demonstrating how migration policy can be fruitfully studied by employing tools from mainstream political science, rather than treating it as a distinct subfield.