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While the first part of the volume explores how transitional justice mechanisms and pressure for corporate accountability from below can address past atrocities, this chapter introduces the second half of the volume that focuses on the post-transition era. This chapter explores how a country’s past—accountability efforts for former state actors for human rights abuses—shapes its future and the ability to hold corporations accountable. Using the Corporations and Human Rights Database (CHRD), this chapter uses large-N data from Latin America to explore the following questions: Do accountability efforts for state-sponsored human rights abuses in the past affect access to remedy for corporate human rights abuses in the post-transition era? Does accountability from below in one historical moment shape accountability in another? Or, is access to remedy limited, as it is a function of entrenched economic interests and veto players? 

This chapter begins with a discussion of the classic theories of fiscal federalism from economics, and it compares the European Union with fiscal federalism in the United States. The US federal government has fiscal capacity but it does not regulate fiscal conduct at the state level. The EU, by contrast, has little fiscal capacity but it does regulate the fiscal conduct of the member states. After the financial crisis that began in 2008, multiple veto players in the EU left it in a reactive mode. There was still some regulatory change because the two most important states in the Union, France and Germany, can become the crucial agenda setters for reform. The US federal government, in contrast, did not try to regulate the states during the crisis, but it did successfully increase further its fiscal capacity

The chapter examines the role of the private sector in the human rights violations that occurred during the 2019 Chilean social protests. It discusses corporate involvement, the role of courts in accountability efforts, the most effective legal framework, and the legal obstacles. The chapter contributes to understanding the legal opportunities and challenges that civil society mobilisation and legal innovators face to overcome the force of veto players in current corporate accountability affairs. The chapter first lays out the human rights standards applicable to private actors in Chile in particular. It uses international human rights standards, comparative law, and Chilean legislation to establish private actors’ specific human rights obligations. The second part uses studies on transitional justice and corporate complicity in order to map the patterns of business involvement in current human rights violations. This empirical section draws on qualitative research to investigate how economic actors from different sectors have participated in the human rights crisis. The third part applies the legal standards examined in the first section of the chapter to the patterns of behaviour observed in the second section. It concludes by discussing innovative legal strategies to make economic actors accountable for their involvement in the human rights crisis. 

This chapter aims to add to the literature on welfare retrenchment by consolidating prospect theoretical, party competition and veto player explanations into one framework of analysis. It tests this framework against comparative historical evidence of four Western European democracies, namely Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands. It suggests answers to the questions ‘why’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ policymakers engage in welfare retrenchment are indeed best considered jointly: looking at the ‘why’ question through ‘losses domains’ enables us to identify governments that are more likely to engage in “treacherous” welfare retrenchment, but falls short of telling us much about possible stumbling blocks to reform in political systems with multiple constitutional constraints. Considering party competition and particularly the strength of Left parties helps us to understand ‘when’ policymakers are likely to engage in unpopular welfare retrenchment, but fails to illuminate ‘how’ – or the mechanisms through which – welfare retrenchments are achieved, namely consensus seeking.

This chapter analyses the change (or continuity) of MENA regimes in a post-Arab Spring context, focusing on governments and power relationships. This chapter firstly analyses the place governments occupy in their respective political systems; how they are perceived by their populations; and the extent to which are they capable of managing violence and imposing their authority across the whole of their national territory. Governments are responsible for the policies carried out in their countries. Thus, many of the social protests - predominantly focused on the high levels of corruption - were directed against governments. However, while governments are perceived to be the institutions responsible for meeting citizens’ welfare needs, there are other non-elected institutions (formal or informal) with significant decision-making powers that are non-accountable, such as the presidents of the republic, the monarchs, and other national (the armed forces in the case of Egypt; armed groups in the cases of Libya, Syria and Yemen) or international actors (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran). On the other hand, this chapter studies changes in the power structure. The author finds evidence of greater power concentration, with the exception of the new democratic regime of Tunisia.