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This chapter discusses how Governor Haley Barbour successfully penetrated the legislatively dominated budget making process. It shows how Barbour did not increase the formal powers of the executive branch of government, but how he did increase the informal executive powers significantly. Chapter 8 explains how Barbour gained budget power through political relationships on the state and federal levels, which ultimately resulted in the state of Mississippi withstanding one of the worst storms in the nation’s history, Hurricane Katrina. Unlike his predecessor discussed in the previous chapter, Governor Barbour did not get a single gubernatorial veto overridden because of the party loyalty that he championed among Republicans.

This chapter examines the factors that account for political parties’ willingness, or lack thereof, to comply with the European Semester. Using Germany, Austria, Ireland, and France as case studies, it investigates how parliamentary parties of these four Member States accommodate conflicting pressures from the European Commission and national constituencies and industries within the 2014 and 2015 cycles of the European Semester. It shows that the concept of ownership of the European Semester by national political parties is not particularly helpful in identifying the mechanisms that determine their willingness to comply with the European Semester. Compliance does not depend on their intrinsic commitment to EU economic coordination, but rather on a variety of external, formal, and institutional factors that limit their decisions. Namely, strong formal powers in European and budgetary matters constitute an incentive for non-compliance. This means that national parliamentary parties are less likely to comply with the European Semester when they enjoy strong formal powers. Compliance within the European Semester also becomes problematic when there is no coherence between country-specific recommendations and the economic preferences of a political party. Conflict over such compliance has therefore been structured along the ideological dimension (left–right conflict rather than that of political power (government–opposition conflict).

This chapter discusses the role of single woman in the family property distribution and formal–informal powers available to elite woman. Single women were absent from family genealogies that focus on marriage and the transmission of land from one generation to the next. However, as daughters, single women can be found in family settlements. The single woman's experience of property can also be traced through various deeds and property-related documents such as tax receipts, as well as personal correspondence and last wills and testaments. Such documents reveal a more complex life than images of lonely spinsterhood suggest, as single women are revealed as active, independent women who controlled their own property, generated extra income through loans and lived independent lives outside the family estate with connections to wide networks of friends and extended family.

This chapter discusses the role of widows in the family property distribution and formal–informal powers available to elite woman. Widows were discernably marginalised from family property in Ireland. Throughout the period, all women in the families in this study received jointure in place of dower, which in most cases was significantly less than the widow would have received as dower. Widows also had no rights to their husbands' personal property, which tended to be treated as an extension of estate property and bequeathed as such to the heir. Family practices, such as the use of trustees, further sidelined widows from family financial business. The stereotypical image of the greedy dowager bleeding dry an already encumbered estate was a common feature in the correspondence of this class.