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This book challenges existing theories of welfare state change by analyzing pension reforms in France, Germany, and Switzerland between 1970 and 2004. It explains why all three countries were able to adopt far-reaching reforms, adapting their pension regimes to both financial austerity and new social risks. In a radical departure from the neo-institutionalist emphasis on policy stability, the book argues that socio-structural change has led to a multidimensional pension reform agenda. A variety of cross-cutting lines of political conflict, emerging from the transition to a post-industrial economy, allowed governments to engage in strategies of political exchange and coalition-building, fostering broad cross-class coalitions in support of major reform packages. Methodologically, the book proposes a novel strategy to analyze lines of conflict, configurations of political actors, and coalitional dynamics over time. This strategy combines quantitative analyses of actor configurations based on coded policy positions with in-depth case studies.
Firms are central to trade policy-making. Some analysts even suggest that they dictate policy on the basis of their material interests. Cornelia Woll counters these assumptions, arguing that firms do not always know what they want. To be sure, firms lobby hard to attain a desired policy once they have defined their goals. Yet material factors are insufficient to account for these preferences. The ways in which firms are embedded in political settings are much more decisive. Woll demonstrates her case by analyzing the surprising evolution of support from large firms for liberalization in telecommunications and international air transport in the United States and Europe. Within less than a dec...
The Political Construction of Business Interests recounts employers' struggles to define their collective social identities at turning points in capitalist development.
Throughout the last decades, advanced industrial democracies have been confronted by the long term pressures of globalisation, rising and persistent unemployment, ageing populations, rising health care costs, and the severe, but shorter-term shocks of recession, currency runs, and other troubles. The international political economy literature is rife with observations that states are under increasing pressure to reduce taxes and to trim their budgets, and recent austerity efforts in Europe and the United States support the view that governments are responding to these intensifying economic and political incentives by constraining their spending. Simultaneously, governments encounter politica...
This is the first in-depth study of the feminist movement that swept Italy during the "long 1970s" (1968-1983), and one of the first to use a combination of oral history interviews and newly-released archive sources to analyze the origins, themes, practices and impacts of "second-wave" feminism. While detailing the local and national contexts in which the movement operated, it sees this movement as transnationally connected. Emerging in a society that was both characterized by traditional gender roles, and a microcosm of radical political projects in the wake of 1968, the feminist movement was able to transform the lives of thousands of women, shape gender identities and roles, and provoke p...
This revised edition of Comparative Politics offers an assessment of the past decade of scholarship in comparative politics.
Prying Open Fortress: The Turn to Sectoral Labor Migration is unique in the field of migration studies since it traces the microeconomic motivations of the relevant economic actors who influence labor migration policy. The book updates the study of the political economy of immigration through a focus on the central and pro-active role of employers, exploring how they interact with trade unions and government to reconfigure the labor migration paradigm in Western Europe. By doing so, it is attentive to the logic behind their strategies, being sensitive to macroeconomic changes that produce sectorally variant policy outcomes. Beyond offering a micro-economically informed explanation for immigr...
This book argues that interests are actively forged through processes of politics. It develops an analytic framework for understanding how representation takes place - based on processes of identification, mobilization, and adjudication - and explores how these processes have evolved over time.
The US trade union movement finds itself on a global battlefield filled with landmines and littered with the bodies of various social movements and struggles. Candid, incisive, and accessible, this text is a critical examination of labour's crisis and a plan for a bold way forward into the 21st century.
Acting Alone: A Scientific Study of American Hegemony and Unilateral Use-of-Force Decision Making is a straight-forward analysis of unilateral U.S. military actions, which are dependent upon the power disparity between the U.S. and the rest of the world. In solving the puzzle as to why individual presidents have made the "wrong" decision to act alone, the author lays out a president's behavior, during a crisis, as a two-step decision process. Acting Alone reviews the well-studied first decision, deciding to use force, based on international conflict literature and organized along traditional lines. The author then details the second decision, deciding to use unilateral force, with an explana...