Search Results

This chapter analyzes the institutional setting of the United Nations. The underlying assumption is that the Security Council can best be described as a Janus-faced structure of both an open system and a closed shop. This notion reflects the Council’s sensitivity towards external change, while the restrictive provisions of the Charter constrain the possibilities of formal adaptation. The chapter examines: (1) the role of great powers in international organizations, (2) the role and function of the Security Council according to the Charter of the United Nations, and (3) the ‘constitutional practice’ of the Council, elaborating on certain variants of the collective security scheme as envisioned in the Charter.

This chapter examines the historical factors that explain Germany's resistance to multiculturalism, which are partly rooted in the nature of the German welfare state and German labour relations. It considers the more recent cautious opening towards ideas of multiculturalism. In the past decade, the German left (particularly the Social Democratic Party) has had an intense internal debate about whether to embrace MCPs, and how such a shift towards multiculturalism would affect its electoral chances and its traditional social policy goals. The chapter examines the different positions adopted in this debate, the basis for fears that MCPs might jeopardize welfare state goals, and the factors shaping the resulting political strategies. It is shown that while there is no evidence that MCPs have weakened the welfare state, the German case suggests that fears of such an impact can weaken the political alliances necessary to introduce or sustain MCPs.

The epilogue briefly summarizes the book's argument and examines William Claiborne's 1677 petition for the return of Kent Island. It argues that the seventeenth-century colonial American world had changed dramatically and irrevocably by the 1670s, by which time the extraordinary influence of intercultural alliances along the Atlantic seaboard had largely passed. By then the Susquehannocks no longer played such a pivotal role in alliances linking peoples from Iroquoia to the Chesapeake Bay.

Between the Robbinsian expansion of the 1960s and the restrictions of the 1980s there was, among other social dramas, a period of student rebellion, imported largely from California and France. Sociology was not a prime cause but bore a main part of the consequences. Over the centuries, British students have been relatively peaceable. Low student/staff ratios, the absence of a separate administration, and shared domesticity had distinguished British universities from their counterparts in France. Germany, and USA. The LSE, a recent addition, approximated least to the ‘English idea of the university’ and it was here that the troubles began. In consequence, the popular image of the undergraduate was transformed, and sociologists were widely held to have been responsible, but the most serious consequence was the rise of anti‐positivism and the intellectual disarray of sociology itself.

The conclusion gives an overview of how the changes in citizenship, participation and policymaking that have been part of transitions to democracy are gendered and lays out the circumstances under which gender outcomes can be positive. After summarizing the outcomes in the electoral, bureaucratic, and constitutional/legal arenas, the conclusion outlines the key factors involved in any explanation. Although women's movements are often central in articulating gender issues, more is needed to ensure that those issues are placed on the agenda of the transition and subsequently remain on the policy agenda in the post transition period. Any analysis therefore has to include the political opportunity structure and the roles of key actors and strategic alliances. The conclusion then outlines how the book's arguments fit into wider debates within the study of gender and politics and comparative politics.

This chapter shows how the firm can use marketing-finance fusion to choose bundling strategies to increase its performance. Topics covered include: how to price interdependent products, how and when to use cross-couponing strategies, how to allow for production capacity constraints, and how to reward managers of multidivisional firms when cross-couponing strategies are used. It analyzes why many bundling strategies fail in the marketplace; in addition, it proposes new metrics for measuring consumers' willingness to pay for products and bundles.

Chile’s binomial open-list PR system was selected by the Pinochet regime as the most likely to optimise the parliamentary strength of the authoritarian right given its level of electoral support. The system was intended to lead to the fundamental reshaping of the party system, but instead, two broad alliances have arisen, incorporating many elements of the pre-Pinochet party system. The small district magnitude puts a premium on the need for parties to form alliances, and leads to extensive intra-alliance negotiations regarding candidate selection. The electoral system is unpopular with parties of the centre and left, but institutional barriers to electoral reform are high.

This chapter analyses the changes in the relationship between the Christian churches in Ireland in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It concludes that from the relatively good ecumenical relations at the beginning of this period, the churches came into more and more conflict with one another, and that contemporary political developments helped inflame religious sectarianism. The Evangelical movement in Ireland had a generally negative impact on ecumenical relations, and helped establish a long-term gulf between Roman Catholics and Protestants.

This chapter analyzes persistent exclusionary electoral practices, using quantitative indicators of access to the secret ballot in Mexico's 1994 presidential election in rural areas. While the opposition expected a re-run of the repertoire of fraud and manipulation that characterized the 1988 race, instead the state effectively deployed a range of levers of intervention in rural economic and social life that, in combination with the systematic lack of access to the secret ballot, reduced the ruling party's need to resort to fraud by inducing a widespread ‘fear vote’. This study draws on two previously unstudied data sets to estimate the degree of rural voter access to the secret ballot in the 1994 presidential elections, including a focus on opposition party oversight in indigenous municipalities in the states of Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas.

This chapter turns to an explanation of welfare state development in Sweden, where ironically, the major strides had to wait until the 1940s and 1950s, although Sweden's progressive political forces seemed stronger than America's in the 1930s. First it looks at why. Because of their solidaristic system of labor market governance, capitalists in Sweden would benefit from progressive reforms in times of acute labor scarcity (associated with postwar macroeconomic conditions) rather than the reverse as in the U.S. Then it analyzes how the Social Democratic government's very modest unemployment insurance and pension reforms of the 1930s served solidarism's need for low levels of militancy and heightened labor mobility, and thus helped forge the kind of cross‐class alliance that was to secure a long reign of peaceful relations between labor and capital under a leftist government.

This chapter turns to the social democratic reforms of the 1940s and 1950s, rooted in cross‐class alliances that were ultimately to distinguish Sweden as the world's paragon social democratic welfare state. Looking first at its People's Pension and universal health insurance reforms, it shows how the Social Democratic government assisted organized employers in their efforts against welfare capitalism by relieving pressure on individual firms to use private social benefits to attract and retain labor under the labor scarcity associated with solidarism and strong expansionary macroeconomic pressures. It then looks at Sweden's renowned “active labor market policy” and its controversial pension legislation of 1959 to show how additional social democratic reforms directly served employers’ solidaristic interests in wage restraint, labor mobility, and the rationing of labor made scarce by collectively administered underpricing – all the while preserving capitalist domination of the investment process.

This chapter develops an alternative theory about welfare state development, which posits that reformers try to root their legislation in cross‐class alliances intersecting the internally diverse interests of capital and labor. Reformers appeal to interests in progressive reform deriving from capitalists’ desire for regulation of markets. The theory about the politics of the welfare state draws on labor economics, arguing that macroeconomic shocks to systems of labor market governance (various forms of collective bargaining and managerial relations) create an opportunity for politicians to enlist capitalist support for regulatory assistance through social insurance and labor reform.

This chapter turns to the dramatically different turn of events in early 20^th century. Sweden, where highly centralized collective bargaining took hold, largely at the behest of employers, accomplished with their effective use of sweeping multifirm and multiindustry lockouts. Securing absolute management rights despite union input in collective bargaining, employers achieved a solidaristic system of labor market regulation in which wages were held below market equilibrium for most firms and wages were standardized or compressed within many industries. The employer confederation was not successful, however, in achieving a desired compression of wages across industries, a goal that was to require labor union help and political intervention, discussed in the following chapter.

This chapter picks up where the last left off, in the 1930s, when the Swedish Social Democratic Party took power, and instead of undermining solidarism, actually helped employers achieve their long sought‐after solidaristic goal of compressing wage levels across industries. During the Great Depression, Social Democratic intervention against militant unions in the building and construction trades brought their wages down to levels long sought by employers, and inaugurated a decade‐long period of labor‐management harmony and consensual politics despite Social Democratic domination. This harmony was based on a cross‐class alliance of interest between major export‐oriented sectors of Swedish industry and the social democratic labor movement, reflected in the details of achievements of other political and industrial relations of the decade: the Social Democratic government's crisis program against unemployment and the famous 1938 Basic (Saltsjöbaden) Agreement between the labor and employer confederations.

This chapter returns to the analysis of twentieth century U.S. to explain the dual nature of its system of labor market governance in which cartelism, a centralized system of multiemployer collective bargaining, thrived alongside segmentalism in important sectors like bituminous coal mining, clothing, and building and construction. In these sectors, employers and unions joined in cross‐class alliance to prop up wages to stem destabilizing low‐standard competition. The regulatory alliance, distinct from Sweden's solidarism, which imposed ceilings instead of floors on wages, helped give rise to economic and political phenomena of an equally distinct nature, e.g., early ties between the Republican Party and the powerful miners’ union; corruption in building and construction (which was absent in Sweden); and ultimately, employer interests in the New Deal's labor and social legislation of the 1930s.

Constructs an explanation of welfare state development in the U.S. from analysis of segmentalism and cartelism, analyzed in earlier chapters, which characterized key components of its labor market system. Segmentalists (implicitly) and cartelists (explicitly) contracted with workers to hold wages and benefits higher than what market mechanisms alone would have set them; thus, these employers were vulnerable to the deflationary macroeconomic shock and unemployment of the Great Depression, which allowed competitors to threaten their profits by more freely lowering wages and therefore charging lower prices. New Dealers, having learned from the Progressive era as well as more recent reform about the potential for capitalist support ignored vocal opposition from business organizations and proceeded with regulatory social security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, and labor law reform that would level the competitive playing field upward, stabilizing ruinous competition for cartelists and segmentalists, and thereby securing a cross‐class alliance for the New Deal.

This chapter argues that the prognosis for repairing the Atlantic relationship ought to be good. There may well be a large split between the policies of the Bush administration and the attitudes of the European public, but “the changes in US foreign policy that the Europeans have found objectionable have also made the American public uncomfortable.” Although American opinion may have acquiesced to these changes, particularly in the wake of September 11, public resistance soon increased and the Bush administration is now on its way out. In broad terms, therefore, despite recent policy tensions, American and European public opinion reveal “substantial common ground on numerous policy issues and the preferred character of the relationship between the United States and Europe.” The rumors of the death of the Atlantic alliance may indeed be highly exaggerated.

This chapter talks about the complex patterns of racial alliances that emerged during the Jim Crow era. It shows that, shaped by the interactions of a wide range of groups, the patterns and practices of white supremacy during the Jim Crow years varied from state to state, town to town, even neighborhood to neighborhood, and shifted over time in differing ways in all these locales. Within this new era of American racial politics, diminished but determined racially egalitarian actors, groups, and institutions remained important players in American politics, and over time new ones emerged. From their own efforts, aided by changes in a range of domestic and international circumstances, they would gradually grow more powerful through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, especially during and after World War II.