Comparative Politics

Deliberative democracy now dominates the theory, reform, and study of democracy. Working at its cutting edges, this book reaches from conceptual underpinnings to the key challenges faced in applications to ever-increasing ranges of problems and issues. Following a survey of the life and times of deliberative democracy, the turns it has taken, and the logic of deliberative systems, contentious foundational issues receive attention. How can deliberative legitimacy be achieved in large-scale societies where face-to-face deliberation is implausible? What can and should representation mean in such systems? What kinds of communication should be valued, and why? How can competing appeals of pluralism and consensus in democratic politics be reconciled? New concepts are developed along the way: discursive legitimacy, discursive representation, systemic tests for rhetoric in democratic communication, and several forms of meta-consensus. Particular forums (be they legislative assemblies or designed mini-publics) have an important place in deliberative democracy, but more important are macro-level deliberative systems that encompass the engagement of discourses in the public sphere, as well as formal and informal institutions of governance. Deliberative democracy can be applied fruitfully in areas previously off-limits to democratic theory: networked governance, the democratization of authoritarian states, and global democracy, as well as in new ways to invigorate citizen participation. In these areas and more, deliberative democracy outperforms its competitors.

We love freedom. We hate racism. But what do we do when these two values collide? This book explores the policies that the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and other liberal democracies have implemented when faced with this challenge. The book's comparative historical approach reveals four central findings: first, most countries have restricted freedom for racist speech, associations, and motives since the end of World War II; second, this trend has more closely resembled a slow creep than a slippery slope; third, the United States has contradicted the overarching pattern by expanding freedom of racist expression and association; but, fourth, the United States has also been at the forefront of contracting freedom of racist opinion when used as a motive to actions. Each country has struggled to balance these core values, and although the outcomes differ significantly, none has violated the fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Drawing on these historical observations, this book asks just how much freedom we should grant to racists. It argues that we must pay close attention to the specific context and to the likely effects of the policies that we implement, and that any response should be proportionate to the level of harm inflicted by the racist speech, group, or act. This bopok concludes that the best way for societies to balance preserving freedom and combating racism is through processes of public deliberation that involve citizens and their representatives.

European countries’ political‐economic policies, practices, and discourses have changed profoundly in response to Europeanization, even more so than in response to globalization, but they have not converged. National policies may now be more similar, especially where they follow from common European policies, but they are not the same. National practices, although moving in the same general direction toward greater market orientation continue to be distinguishable into not just one or even two but three varieties of capitalism. And national discourses that generate and legitimize changes in policies and practices not only remain distinct, they matter. The book spans fields and combines theoretical insights with innovative methods to show that European countries have followed very different pathways of economic adjustment, and will continue to do so into the future. Of the three cases used in illustration, France is shown to have undergone the greatest amount of adjustment, having largely abandoned its interventionist policies and transformed its state‐led capitalism in response to both globalization and Europeanization, but without the benefits of a fully legitimizing discourse. Britain, by contrast, adjusted mainly in response to globalization while anticipating many of the pressures of Europeanization, and came up with a transformative discourse that largely legitimized its neo‐liberal policies and its move toward greater market capitalism. Germany, finally, felt global and European pressures latest, not until the 1990s, at which point it slowly began to alter its social market policies and to make its managed capitalism more competitive, also without the benefits of a fully legitimizing discourse.

Gender and Welfare State Regimes focuses on how social provision, taxation, and labour market policies structure and transform gender relations in several advanced industrial democracies. A central question is whether gender policy regimes coincide or cut across welfare state regimes. The first chapters examine the construction of gender in policies of countries representing the same welfare state regime—the conservative, liberal and social democratic regimes—while the subsequent chapters compare policies across welfare state regimes. The book argues that policy variations across the countries are shaped by differing strategies and demands of women's movements, the organizational strength of labour and industrial relations frameworks, and the constellations of parties supporting equality measures, policy legacies, and state structures.

In most countries around the world, women continue to lag behind men in an array of political orientations and activities. Understanding why this is the case and why some countries have been more successful than others at moderating gender gaps in political involvement is imperative for producing stronger and more representative democracies. Cultural, socioeconomic, and political factors explain some of the gender gaps in political involvement, but not all of them. In this book, the authors argue that electoral institutions attenuate gender gaps in mass political engagement and participation by drawing women, an “undertapped” constituency, into the democratic process. Using cross-national and country-specific analyses, the authors show that electoral institutions play a complementary and significant role in reducing gender gaps in political involvement. The cross-national analyses draw on comparative survey data from a wide range and large number of countries. The cases draw out the processes underlying changes in political attitudes and behaviors with evidence from four country studies: New Zealand, Russia, France, and Uruguay. All four countries have altered their electoral institutions, either through large-scale reform of the electoral system itself or adopting gender quotas, allowing the authors to examine patterns of political involvement pre- and post-reform. The book finds that inclusive electoral systems that produce more proportional electoral outcomes have larger effects on women’s political engagement and participation than on men’s. Gender quotas also mediate women’s engagement and participation, but to a lesser degree. On the whole, the book concludes that electoral rules designed to promote social inclusion in parliament are critical for promoting social group inclusion among the electorate.

This book is about political organization and organizing. It is about the role of formally organized political institutions in contemporary democracies and the democratic‐instrumental vision that citizens and their representatives might and ought to decide how they shall be organized and governed. The main argument is that to the extent that the future of democracies depends on the quality of their political institutions and deliberate institution-building capabilities, there is a need for an improved theoretical understanding of political institutions. There is a need for a better comprehension of the nature, architecture, dynamics of change, performance, and effects of institutions, and the possibilities and limitations of achieving intended, anticipated, and desired effects through institutional design and reform. The aspiration is to contribute to such an understanding. The book addresses the organization of government and public administration, the mechanisms through which these institutions change and the mechanisms through which they make a difference—in particular how institutions contribute to organized rule, orderly change, civilized coexistence, and the ability to accommodate and continuously balance rather than eliminate what John Stuart Mill called ‘standing antagonisms’. The book offers an organization theory‐based institutional approach and assumes that a fruitful route to improved understanding is to observe large-scale institutional reforms. The primary source of insight is the grand experiment in political integration through institution building and polity formation in Europe—the European Union. Yet the book relates to century‐long controversies concerning what is good government and how best to organize common affairs.

Advances the thesis that legislative processes are increasingly influenced by constitutional judges and the discursive practices of constitutional adjudication. Parallel to this process, the ordinary judiciary has been carving out wide‐ranging powers of judicial review for itself, seeking to alter statutes deemed unconstitutional. As Stone Sweet argues forcefully, these phenomena have combined to undermine parliamentary sovereignty and to transform the very nature of European government and society. These arguments are illustrated by the detailed comparative examination of five pivotal cases: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the EU.

The discussion of the immediate subject matter takes place, embedded into a wider set of concerns: what are the sources and consequences of judicial power? Why is judicial rule making often basic to institutionalization and political change? Already a classic in the ongoing debate about constitutional politics, this book offers important contributions to the literature on new institutionalism, rational choice theory, and the new constitutionalism in Continental legal theory.

Why does the regulation of risks to human health and safety vary so dramatically from one policy domain to another? Why are some risks regulated aggressively and others responded to only modestly? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? This book addresses these important questions by systematically examining variety amongst risk regulation regimes across policy domains, analysing the significant driving forces shaping those regimes, and identifying the causes of regulatory failure and success. In order to do so, the book develops a systems‐based concept of a ‘risk regulation regime’, which enables comparative description and analysis of the rules, institutional arrangements, and cultures that are bound up with the handling of risk within and between regimes. Using that framework, the book analyses how regimes and their constituent components are differentially shaped by three major driving forces—namely, the pressures exerted by market failure, by public opinion, and by organized interests inside and outside the state apparatus—and blame‐avoidance responses of regimes in the face of pressures for greater openness. The book applies the method to analyse a range of risk regulation regimes that cross the divide between ‘natural’ and ‘socially created’, state‐created and market‐created, ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’, high‐tech and low‐tech, individually, and corporately produced risks. Those regimes include the release of paedophiles into the community, air pollution, local road safety, radon, pesticides, and dangerous dogs. The analysis reveals both variations and paradoxes that can neither be identified by single case studies, nor be easily explained by macro‐oriented approaches to understanding risk regulation. The Government of Risk shows how such an approach is of high policy relevance as well as of considerable theoretical importance.

As inequality grows rapidly both in post-industrial societies and in the high-growth economies of the developing world, its centrality and ubiquity among problems of interest to social scientists is becoming only more apparent. And among all of inequality's causes and manifestations, access to education is key to understanding and combating it, both for improving a person's individual life chances and for increasing countries' national wealth. This book examines closely the relationship between inequality and education. Indeed as many countries grow economically, it is unclear whether this growth leads directly to increased opportunity or more ferocious competition and thus more severe inequality. In many growing economies there has been a staggering growth of private higher education as demand for opportunity has outpaced supply, and families who must fund this human capital accumulation are only burdened with more and more debt. Outlining the world-wide race for educational advantage, this book takes a comparative approach, describing not only various nations' systems of education, but weaving them together in a larger network of stratification. Covering almost every continent, this book provides an overarching examination of who is actually able to benefit from economic growth and who, because of the educational demands it brings about, it shuts out.

This book considers who should undertake humanitarian intervention in response to an ongoing or impending humanitarian crisis, such as found in Rwanda in early 1994, Kosovo in 1999, and Darfur more recently. The doctrine of the responsibility to protect asserts that when a state is failing to uphold its citizens' human rights, the international community has a responsibility to protect these citizens, including by undertaking humanitarian intervention. It is unclear, however, which particular agent should be tasked with this responsibility. Should we prefer intervention by the UN, NATO, a regional or subregional organization (such as the African Union), a state, a group of states, or someone else? This book answers this question by, first, determining which qualities of interveners are morally significant and, second, assessing the relative importance of these qualities. For instance, is it important that an intervener have a humanitarian motive? Should an intervener be welcomed by those it is trying to save? How important is it that an intervener will be effective and what does this mean in practice? The book then considers the more empirical question of whether (and to what extent) the current interveners actually possess these qualities, and therefore should intervene. For instance, how effective can we expect UN action to be in the future? Is NATO likely to use humanitarian means? Overall, it develops a particular normative conception of legitimacy for humanitarian intervention. It uses this conception of legitimacy to assess not only current interveners, but also the desirability of potential reforms to the mechanisms and agents of humanitarian intervention.