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A pioneering attempt to place the role of women within history during the inter-war years when both women's and socialist movements became prominent, this comparative study includes 11 west European countries.
This book traces the reasons for the differences between Continental and Northern European welfare state developments by applying a selected case study approach. Three countries were looked at: Germany, Austria, and Sweden, because all have different political settings. In order to keep a sharp focus on the different causes for European welfare state development, the author traced it back to its roots (i.e. by focusing on the people, the movements and parties that implemented, developed, and changed the course in welfare states). To determine the importance of Christian democratic and social movements numerous historical phases were also studied.
Democracy is today a concept that is overwhelmingly positively evaluated almost everywhere. A lot has been written about socio-economic and cultural backgrounds of democratic regimes as well as their institutional settings. By contrast, not much is known about the political manoeuvres and speech acts by which 'democracy' has been tied to particular regions and cultures in concrete historical situations. This book discusses a series of efforts to rhetorically produce a particular Nordic version of democracy. It shows that the rhetorical figure 'Nordic democracy' was a product of the age of totalitarianism and the Cold War. It explores the ways in which 'Nordic democracy' was used, mainly by the social democrats, to provide the welfare politics with cultural and historical legitimacy and foundations. Thus, it also acknowledges the ideological and geopolitical context in which the 'Nordic welfare state' was conceptualised and canonised. The contributors of the book are specialists on Nordic politics and history, who share a particular interest in political rhetoric and conceptual history.
Organized crime is now a major threat to all industrial and non-industrial countries. Using an inter-disciplinary and comparative approach this book examines the nature of this threat. By analysing the existing, official institutional discourse on organized crime it examines whether or not it has an impact on perceptions of the threat and on the reality of organized crime. The book first part of the book explores both the paradigm and the rationale of policy output in the fight against organized crime, and also exposes the often ‘hidden’ internal assumptions embedded in policy making. The second part examines the perceptions of organized crime as expressed by various actors, for example, the general public in the Balkans and in Japan, the criminal justice system in USA and circles within the international scientific community. Finally, the third part provides an overall investigation into the realities of organized crime with chapters that survey its empirical manifestations in various parts of the world. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, criminology, security studies and practitioners.
This book explains why countries have adopted different policies for working parents through a comparative historical study of four nations: France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States.
This book studies such governments, covering the full life-cycle of coalitions from the formation of party alliances before elections to coalition formation after elections.
When parties undergo abrupt organisational changes between elections - such as when they fuse, split, join or abandon party lists - they alter profoundly the organisation and supply of electoral information to voters. The alternatives on the ballot are no longer fixed but need to be actively sought out instead. This book examines how voters cope with the complexity triggered by party instability. Breaking with previous literature, it suggests that voters are versatile and ingenious decision-makers. They adapt to informational complexity with a set of cognitively less costly heuristics uniquely suited to the challenges they face. A closer look at the impact of party instability on the vote advances and qualifies quintessential theories of vote choice, including proximity voting, direction-intensity appeals, economic voting and the use of cognitive heuristics. The rich and nuanced findings illustrate that political parties hold a key to understanding voter behaviour and representation in modern democracy.
This volume examines and assesses the contemporary relationships between old left-of-centre parties and trade unions in twelve countries that have been democracies since at least the mid- to late-1940s.
Winner, Best Book on European Politics, 2005, European Politics and Society Section, American Political Science Association How does a democracy deal with threats to its stability and continued existence when those threats come from political parties that play the democratic game? In Defending Democracy, political scientist Giovanni Capoccia studies key European nations between World Wars I and II which survived such democratic crises. A comprehensive and thoughtful historical analysis of the democracies of interwar Europe, Defending Democracy provides a unique perspective on the many lessons to be learned from their successes and failures. With this exclusively empirical investigative approach, Capoccia develops a methodology for analyzing contemporary democracies—such as Algeria, Turkey, Israel, and others—where similar political conditions are present. Given the rise of terrorism and the persistence of extremism in both established and new democracies today, continued research and dialogue on the defense of democracy are necessary for its preservation.
The nature of 'fascism' has been hotly contested by scholars since the term was first coined by Mussolini in 1919. However, for the first time since Italian fascism appeared there is now a significant degree of consensus amongst scholars about how to approach the generic term, namely as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism. Seen from this perspective, all forms of fascism have three common features: anticonservatism, a myth of ethnic or national renewal and a conception of a nation in crisis. This collection includes articles that show this new consensus, which is inevitably contested, as well as making available material which relates to aspects of fascism independently of any sort of consensus and also covering fascism of the inter and post-war periods.This is a comprehensive selection of texts, reflecting both the extreme multi-faceted nature of fascism as a phenomenon and the extraordinary divergence of interpretations of fascism.