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The chapter argues that union strength, decline, and revitalization are best understood as multi-faceted processes and furthermore, that these processes are best understood in a comparative context. The chapter offers an overview of existing comparative scholarship on union revitalization and examines the claim that unions continue to have an important function in national economies, societies, and politics. Using empirical data, conventional indicators of union strength and decline are compared in the five cases examined in the book. This chapter then develops a four-dimensional approach to study union revitalization comprising membership density, political power, bargaining power, and institutional vitality. The chapter concludes by pointing to the importance of context in analysing comparative union revitalization since the importance of each of the dimensions is likely to vary across countries given different economic, institutional, and political configurations. Furthermore, the chapter argues that union leaders retain an element of choice in deciding on revitalizing strategies.

Examines the determinants of union influence over wages. After a brief review of the existing literature on union wage effects, it describes the major factors conditioning the extent to which unions will be able to exert an influence on bargained wage outcomes. The likely impact of trade, economic integration, and FDI on union bargaining power are analysed in the following section.

Chapter Nine explores the structural safeguards of bilateral balancing through the bargaining norms and media of exchange that accompany the trade in federalism entitlements. Federalism bargaining operates where each party wants something from the other, and negotiators trade on various aspects of the governing capacity available to them. These include legal authority, financing, resources and expertise to accomplish specific regulatory goals, release from inhibiting legal obligations that one side may hold over the other, and credit. Notably, the normative power of federalism itself forms important leverage at the bargaining table—often by clever statutory design—further constraining the results of negotiations in which participants are also motivated by other concerns. Chapter Nine includes compelling anecdotal testimony by primary source practitioners about participation, initiation, mechanics, leverage, relationships and consultation, underlying legal uncertainty, and available sources of trade in federalism bargaining. It carefully analyzes bargaining under the federal power of the purse, in spending power deals such as No Child Left Behind. Negotiated federalism is a project of bilateral balancing—incorporating wisdom from all levels of government about how to prioritize competing federalism values and exogenous considerations in each individual circumstance. Understanding the dynamics in federalism bargaining helps demonstrate the structural safeguards that bilateral balancing affords. Federalism bargaining ensures the active engagement of federalism goals through its very design—regardless of the competing policy concerns or the subjective considerations of participants—by balancing local and national interests in the substance of actual governance. Bilateral balancing thus affords protection for federalism on a structural level that surpasses the political safeguards available at a purely unilateral level. Like other federalism safeguards, however, the structural encouragement of federalism values is not infallible. Leverage dynamics, failed relationships, competitions for credit, and bargaining abuses can overcome them in some cases.

The WTO introduced a new set of rules for membership that attempted to promote and improve the discipline among members since this was needed to accomplish market access obligations. Also, WTO intended to attain universal membership. Working on these two goals brought about a lot of tension, thus this chapter aims to look into the political economy of the WTO accession process, especially on the first twenty-five new members to accede, and on their accession terms. The chapter compares the trends in membership of both the GATT and the WTO while also identifying the benefits attributed to members of these organizations. The chapter also looks into the GATT rules of accession and why these were modified in the WTO. The chapter also investigates on how long it takes to finish an accession agreement through a set of regression analyses while discussing the impact of WTO members' activity and bargaining power.

There has been an enormous increase in the formation of international strategic alliances and in the research efforts devoted to understanding alliances over the last few decades. The chapter begins with a brief overview of alliance forms and then moves on to consider alliance formation and governance structures, alliance performance, control issues, bargaining power, the role of trust, evolutionary processes, and alliance networks. Within each section, key research areas and questions are identified and the major supporting research and associated findings are discussed.

Looks at some of the labour market outcomes of recent economic reforms. The extent to which labour market institutions affect the relationship between reform policies and income inequality remains controversial. Some see labour market institutions as a hindrance to more efficient development and growth, while others argue that without proper labour market institutions an economy cannot progress. Labour market policies, regulations, and institutions have at least three goals: improving allocative efficiency (matching supply and demand); improving dynamic efficiency (increasing the quality of the labour force); and improving or maintaining a sense of equity and social justice among labour force participants. These different goals inform the discussion throughout the chapter, which is organized as follows: after an introduction, the second section touches briefly on some theoretical aspects of labour markets and reform policies; the third reviews trends in labour market changes in terms of informalization of employment, wage shares in national income, and wage inequality; the fourth reviews some general trends in labour market policies that have typically been implemented under the Washington Consensus, namely, a decline in minimum wages, shifts in the bargaining power of unions, and a reduction in employment protection; the final section offers conclusions on whether or not labour market policies reduce income inequality.

An important problem in the management of global public goods lies with the imbalance of bargaining power as between developed and developing countries in the multilateral negotiations involved. Looks at characteristics of the negotiation process; the composition and strength of developing country negotiation teams; and tactics and methods for improving their bargaining position. Current constraints on negotiating capacity often reflect a lack of national policy analysis, design, and management capacity. One of this chapter's main recommendations is to increase national policy‐making capacity.

The neoclassical, principal‐agent and transaction costs theories cannot by themselves explain firm boundaries. This chapter describes a theory—the incomplete contracting or property rights approach—based on the idea that power and control matter when contracts are incomplete. If the terms of a transaction can always be renegotiated, the incentives of a party to undertake relationship‐specific investments will depend crucially on the ability to control the use of productive assets when renegotiation takes place (the hold‐up problem). In this context, asset ownership becomes an essential source of power and different ownership structures will affect the severity of the hold‐up problem. The author presents a model that illustrates the benefits and costs of integration. In the absence of wealth constraints, firm boundaries are chosen to allocate power optimally among the parties to a transaction. An implication of the theory is that, ceteris paribus, a party is more likely to own an asset if he or she has an important investment decision. The theory also predicts that complementarities make integration more likely and, conversely, that independent assets should be owned separately. Finally, the author considers whether the theory's predictions actually match up with observed organizational arrangements.

In this chapter, the author conducts a “structured, focused comparison” of the US alliances with Japan, South Korea, and Spain with respect to domestic opposition to alliance cooperation, the leader’s attitude toward the alliance, the leader’s vulnerability, and intra-alliance bargaining. The case studies explain why a leader matters in intra-alliance bargaining and why it is important to analyze the leader’s attitude and vulnerability in combination. The chapter also shows that a state tends to receive less benefit from its alliance as its state resources increase, even though its influence in the alliance tends to grow with its capability. The final section discusses the implications of the findings as well as future research agendas.

In the theoretical chapter, different from the principal-agent literature which focuses on why principals delegate and how they seek to control the agent, this book analyzes delegation from the angle of power distribution among the involved actors, the Council, the Commission and the Parliament. The authors base their argument on institutionalist power-based bargaining theory and argue that all actors seek to establish a mode of decision-making that maximizes their institutional power. And if – dissatisfied with a formal distribution of competence distribution – they will seek to alter them through a re-bargaining of these during the application of the rules. The focus rests in particular on the rising power of the Parliament. The chapter shows how the Parliament has changed the parameters of the contest for power, thereby transforming the governance of comitology over the years.

This chapter explains the effects of three domestic variables on a state’s intra-alliance bargaining power. As the existing theories of international relations argue, the presence of effective domestic opposition to cooperation increases a state’s bargaining power in an alliance. The chapter advances our understanding of the domestic sources of bargaining power by further explaining disordinal interaction effects of a leader’s attitude toward an alliance and his or her vulnerability. The effects of a leader’s attitude and vulnerability vary, depending on the value of each variable; vulnerable pro-cooperation leaders and non-vulnerable anti-cooperation leaders have bargaining advantages in intra-alliance bargaining.

This chapter examines the grounds for legal protection of strikes. They may be socio-economic in nature, may draw upon a particular understanding of rights to political participation, and may be derived from the application of recognised civil liberties. The most common justification offered for legal protection of a right to strike is its role in the conclusion of collective agreements relating to terms and conditions of employment. In that context, it provides workers with the threat of an economic sanction to counter the often superior bargaining power of an employer.

Chapter 4 begins in present-day NEA, and unpacks its core strategic problem of uncertainty associated with an apparent power transition, relating it squarely to the enforced alienation between the two indigenous great powers, China and Japan. It argues that neither a purely power-political understanding nor one that overly emphasizes nationalism and domestic impediments has been especially helpful to advancing our understanding of how Sino-Japanese alienation serves to constrain the development of East Asia’s post-Cold War order. Instead, one should understand the contemporary problem as resulting from the disintegration of the region’s post-Second World War settlement that centred on the United States acting as a ring-holder between China and Japan. Introducing the great power bargain framework, it shows how we might usefully distinguish between the constitutive and regulative aspects of such bargains. It then employs this framework to analyse Sino-Japanese alienation after the long nineteenth century, examining how efforts to create a partial new bargain between 1945 and 1989 were eventually undermined by the two countries’ changing characters and politics after the Cold War.

‘Work-life balance’ is a contested notion, involving conflicting interpretations of ‘flexibility’ in relation to employment and family commitments. It may be justified on the basis of social care, a business case or the contemporary public policy compromise. In practice however, people's capacity as employee and family members to achieve the kind of flexibility they want rests on their bargaining power. This chapter draws on findings from a small-scale qualitative investigation of work-life balance in low income neighbourhoods in the UK. It discusses different perspectives on the relationship between the worlds of paid employment and family life; the social welfare perspective, the liberal/business perspective and the ‘Third Way’ public policy perspective. It also discusses bargaining power in relation to employer practices, income maintenance and childcare arrangements. The chapter ends by integrating the analysis of various perspectives on work-life balance with the experiences of households, most of whom were identified as having very limited bargaining power.

This chapter examines global governance mechanisms designed to protect citizens’ privacy rights, with special emphasis on the relationship between the United States and the European Union (EU) and their very different approaches to the issue. It argues that power relations are central to the transatlantic accommodation that has been reached, and to the EU’s efforts to push third-party countries toward higher levels of privacy protection. It also suggests that privacy regulation has always had a strong international component, but that the causal impact of international factors is likely to depend on two key intervening variables: existing national institutional traditions and state bargaining power. It then offers policy recommendations on how to protect privacy, such as extending privacy protections internationally, strengthening international mechanisms of privacy protection, and hybrid arrangements which involve increasing accountability requirements for public-private actor relationships.

This chapter empirically tests the argument presented in Chapter 3. In addition to intra-alliance bargaining power, it also examines the theory’s implications for the patterns of termination, duration, and formation of alliances in different systems. The chapter explains how much the structural shift from bipolarity to unipolarity has pushed American allies in favor of the superpower. The decline in the demand and supply of security in many parts of the world changed not only who forms alliances but also the goods exchanged within such alliances. The final section of this chapter discusses the theoretical implications of the systemic theory and offers some predictions about US alliances in the long and short terms.