Political Science

Recently there has been a convergence of party funding regimes across Western Europe. The driving force behind this process has been the introduction of state funding to political parties. Why is state funding to political parties being introduced in ever more countries and yet in some places it has only been introduced to a decidedly small degree? This book argues that a consensus of the relevant parties is a prerequisite for the introduction of state funding. The book therefore supposes a nexus between party competition and the outcome of party funding reforms. The introduction of state funding becomes more likely if parties have a high number of institutional veto points at their disposal, if vote-seeking plays a less significant role in parties' strategic preferences than does policy-seeking and office-seeking, and if the discourse on political corruption identifies state funding as a remedy against corrupt practices in party politics. This is confirmed for Germany, Sweden, Britain, and France. Two constellations facilitate the introduction or reform of state subsidies: In political systems which provide parties with a considerable number of veto points, vote-seeking generally plays no central role in decisions about party funding. However, parties can also reach a consensus independently from the institutional environment and their strategic preferences through the discourse on political corruption. There is evidence that causal mechanisms similar to those identified in the four cases studied in the proposed book are at work in Western Europe in general. Thus, the book represents a first step towards a theory which explains differences and similarities of party funding regimes.

This book confronts some of the most important questions related to liberalization, regulation, and the role of the nation state in an increasingly international economy. In the face of powerful transnational pressure for change, to what extent are states able to maintain stable institutional frameworks? Do different domestic structures generate dissimilar patterns of policy making and economic performance? How important are past institutional choices for subsequent reform? This book addresses these questions through a study of the transformations of a strategic economic sector, telecommunications, in Britain and France over the last three decades. The book analyses the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of ‘national institutionalist’ models of policy making. It employs the model to compare institutions in British and French telecommunications, analyses the process of organizational reform, and assesses the effects of national institutions on policy making and economic outcomes.

Since the early 1990s, European welfare states have undergone substantial changes. Traditional programmes, such as old age pensions have been curtailed. Cost-containment measures have been adopted also in other parts of the welfare state, ranging from health care services to invalidity benefits. At the same time, today's welfare states have taken up some new functions. They are expected to help and/or push non-working people back into employment, to complement work income for the working poor, to help parents reconcile work and family life, to promote gender equality, to support child development, and to provide social services for an ageing society. This book provides a thorough empirical account of these developments in western Europe. It also discusses a number of interpretations that have been put forward in relation to the transformation process, in particular whether change amounts to retrenchment, dualisation, or whether it is better captured by the notion of a reorientation towards an active, social investment-based welfare state. On the theoretical level the book focuses on the drivers of the transformation process. It does so on the basis of a multidimensional understanding of social policies, and highlights the importance of political competition and policy learning processes as explanatory factors for the emergence of a new welfare settlement.

This book focuses on the politics of privatization in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. It examines both the micro- and macroeconomics of achieving privatization, the policy measures introduced, and factors affecting the implementation of privatization. The political dimensions of privatization are analyzed to explain the variations in national success in formulating and implementing privatization programs. The book argues that evidence suggests that national governments planned, but rarely implemented, divestiture policies from a technical standpoint; rather, privatization is a learning process that evolves through trial and error. It also examines the apparently ‘unconventional’ methods used by the governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Peru to achieve privatization. Comparative in its approach, the book also seeks to shed light on the nature of privatization in countries throughout the developing world. More generally, it argues that poorly designed privatization policies may have serious future implications on issues such as the rule of law and the regulation of public utilities.

One of the principal goals of antipoverty efforts should be to improve the absolute living standards of the least well-off. This book aims to enhance our understanding of how to do that, drawing on the experiences of twenty affluent countries since the 1970s. The book addresses a set of questions at the heart of political economy and public policy: How much does economic growth help the poor? When and why does growth fail to trickle down? How can social policy help? Can a country have a sizeable low-wage sector yet few poor households? Are universal programs better than targeted ones? What role can public services play in antipoverty efforts? What is the best tax mix? Is more social spending better for the poor? If we commit to improvement in the absolute living standards of the least well-off, must we sacrifice other desirable outcomes?

The book investigates the processes of welfare state reform in the UK and Germany between the late 1970s and 2003. Adopting a programme-level perspective, it systematically compares processes of retrenchment, expansion and restructuring in three core social policy domains. The book suggests that unemployment support and public pension programmes have been subjected to retrenchment and restructuring, while family policies have been extended in both countries. However, patterns of retrenchment and restructuring differ across countries and programmes. Arguing in favour of multi-causal explanations of reform processes and outcomes, the book stresses the relevance of three sets of explanatory factors: shifts in party policy preferences and power relations, three institutional variables and contingent factors impinging on policy direction and profiles. Within pension policy, the relevance of different institutional characteristics and the respective balance between private and public forms of retirement suggest that the concept of ‘path dependence’ is particularly instructive. By contrast, differences in programme structures and their role within national political economies prove to be most relevant for the understanding of changes in unemployment support policy. Less institutionally embedded and expanding, the trajectories of family policies have to be seen in the context of dynamic party policy preferences.

Recent reforms in welfare states generate new challenges to social citizenship. Social citizenship depends on the readiness of voters to support reciprocity and social inclusion and their trust in welfare state institutions as services that will meet their needs. Reform programmes in most western countries combine New Public Management, linking market competition and regulation by targets to achieve greater efficiency and responsiveness to service-users, and welfare-to-work and make-work-pay activation policies to manage labour market change. Both developments rest on a rational actor approach to human motivation. The UK has pursued the reform programme with more vigour than any other major European country and provides a useful object less of its strengths and limitations. The book provides a detailed analytic account of social science approaches to agency. It shows that the rational actor approach has difficulties in explaining how social inclusion and social trust arise. Policies based on it provide weak support for these aspects of citizenship. It is attractive to policy-makers seeking solutions to the problem of improving the efficiency and responsiveness of welfare systems in a more globalised world, in which citizens are more critical and the authority of national governments is in decline. Recent reform programmes were undertaken to meet real pressures on existing patterns of provision. They have been largely successful in maintaining mass services but risk undermining social inclusion and eroding trust in public welfare institutions. In the longer term, they may destroy the social citizenship essential to sustain welfare states.

In recent decades, the share of service employment has increased greatly across Europe, fundamentally changing the structure of European labour markets and the nature of the economic risks that individual workers face. This book explores how far reforms to unemployment protection systems, which were introduced and consolidated in a very different labour market context, are responding to the particular challenges of post-industrial labour markets. It argues that adapting traditional systems of unemployment protection to the risk profiles of service-based economies requires a profound policy realignment, which can be summarized with reference to three overlapping processes of institutional change; the homogenization of unemployment benefit rights for different categories of the unemployed; the erosion of the institutional boundaries between benefit provisions for the unemployed and for other groups of working-age people reliant on state support; and the ever-closer operational integration of income maintenance policies and other forms of labour market support. Systematically comparing across twelve European welfare states over a period of twenty years, the book traces how these reform dynamics have played out in the context of political conflicts, institutional constraints, and changing macroeconomic conditions. While the book highlights that many differences continue to set the unemployment protection arrangements of different European countries apart, it also points to an emergent process of contingent convergence in conceptions of the risk of unemployment and of appropriate ways of regulating it.

Since opening to foreign investment in 1979, China has emerged as the leading investment site for multinational corporations. This book looks beyond the macroeconomic effects of China’s investment boom to analyze how foreign investors from the US, Japan, and other nations are shaping China’s legal, labor, and business reforms. The book draws on interviews with nearly 100 foreign and local managers, attorneys, workers, and members of the business community to explain why Chinese laborers and firms have gravitated toward foreign models, especially US businesses and their institutions. The book uses the term “state-guided globalization” to describe how China has used foreign engagement to advance its domestic reform objectives and to enhance its role in international society. Rather than undermining state power, globalization actually has allowed China’s state to push through difficult labor and legal reforms. The book concludes that Chinese policy makers drew lessons from foreign investors and foreign legal experts on how to introduce difficult labor market reforms in its state-owned enterprises and how to promote rule of law. The book examines globalization and foreign investment in a different light, showing how these developments have helped to chart China’s entry into international society. China’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession agreement and international norms have established parameters by which to judge Chinese legal and business reforms. Although China’s rise is a grave concern to the world, the book asserts that Chinese leaders now see compliance with international rules as a means to secure more investment and to enhance their international legitimacy. The book analyzes how foreign and domestic actors, from political leaders to average laborers, have contributed to remaking China’s institutions.

The result of a four-year long comparative research study centred at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and financed by the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme, this book presents the first full-length theoretical and comparative empirical study of new social pacts in Europe. Its aim is to bring the level of sophistication achieved in an earlier literature on neo-corporatism to the more contemporary phenomenon of ‘social pacting’. The book brings a wide range of complementary theories to bear on the emergence, evolution, and institutionalization of pacts, compares systematically a wide range of cases across Europe, and provides in-depth studies of Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. The book contributes to the scholarly debate on economic adjustment and institutional change in European capitalism by focusing on three inter-related questions: (a) what explains national variation in reliance on social pacts? (b) what determines the outcomes of individual pact negotiations? and (c) under what conditions are pacts repeated and become regular features of socio-economic governance? The book’s theoretical innovations include a novel application of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA) to help explain national differences in social pact adoption, the application of a game theoretic approach to explain social pact emergence, and a reinterpretation of traditional neo-corporatist and new institutionalist theory to help understand social pact consolidation and institutionalization.