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This chapter uses four legislative battles (the Freedom of Choice Act, Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances bill, Medicaid funding of abortion, and abortion provisions in the Federal Employees’ Health Benefit Act) as case studies for understanding the contested issues and complexity belying gender difference and women’s impact. While women members were seen as united around reproductive rights, institutional dynamics in this partisan environment and extra-institutional pressures encouraged the increasingly diverse group of women to give voice to diversity, defined (and re-defined) women’s priorities and their understandings of their roles and responsibilities as representatives of women, and influenced their prospects for political success within an institution whose agenda they did not control. While the case studies suggest the need to bring more women into office, they remind us that the potential of presence is limited without positional power, and that mobilized women voters who pose a gender gap threat can provide legitimacy for difference within institutions steeped in masculine values.

When the 1994 elections gave control of Congress to a conservative, Christian Coalition-dominated, Republican majority, what some had over-optimistically touted as a critical mass of women became a token group, notwithstanding a slight increase in numbers. Nowhere was that more evident than in the ability of that new Republican majority to re-define the agenda, raising new issues (Partial Birth Abortion Ban) and challenging seemingly non-controversial, bipartisan, well-established programs (funding for the Title X Family Planning program and international family planning programs). The continued evidence of the gender gap in prochoice support, along with the critical role played by the shrinking cohort of prochoice Republican women in challenging their leadership’s anti-reproductive rights agenda, reinforce the importance of increasing descriptive representation. Nevertheless, the gendered roles assumed by a growing vocal cohort of female Republican reproductive rights opponents, reluctance by some ostensibly prochoice Republican women to challenge their leadership, a shrinking gender gap in prochoice support within Congress, and the frustrations of those who attempted to fight these often futile battles, all highlight the critical role that institutional environments, increased ideological diversity among women, and extra-institutional forces play in shaping the probabilistic relationship between descriptive and substantive representation, in strengthening or weakening perceptions of legitimacy surrounding gender difference, and in defining and redefining the meaning of substantive representation of women and realizing the potential for difference. These case studies explore gender differences in perspectives of reproductive rights opponents, provide insight into the value of bipartisan support for reproductive rights policy agendas (despite Republicans being less prochoice than Democrats), and point to the important role of women voters in maintaining bipartisan support and political resolve.

This chapter deconstructs gender differences to explore the contested issues surrounding gender difference, when the politics of presence converged with partisan politics in the struggle over health care reform during the Democratic-controlled 103rd Congress. The impact of the institutional environment on women’s agenda and actions, along with differences in environmental pressures across parties and committees, are explored. The analysis attempts to move beyond the simple question of whether women make a difference to an understanding of how political environments, structured by partisanship and steeped in masculinist values, affect and can be affected by the feminale. The case study suggests that one cannot truly understand gender differences in an institutional vacuum, even as it forces us to confront the relationship between gender difference and substantive representation of women, and to consider the value of the concept of feminist protest in understanding partisan differences in gender difference and women’s impact.

Whatever the convergent pressures of globalization and Europeanization, countries have manifested divergent policy responses, depending upon a number of significant variables. This chapter identifies five mediating factors that shed light on the dynamics of policy adjustment—economic vulnerability, political institutional capacity, policy legacies, policy preferences, and discourse—to elucidate the different sequencing of responses of Britain, Germany, and France in monetary, industrial, labour, and social policy. It then adds the EU‐specific institutional constraints—the decisions that may provide more or less specified rules, suggested rules, or no rules at all—to help explain the mechanics of policy adjustment in such sectors as European monetary integration, financial services, telecommunications, electricity, and transport.

This chapter provides a more explicit comparison of the institutional differences in feedback mechanisms, highlighting the features inherent in each institutional arrangement that predisposed decision makers in each country toward or away from a particular policy, while also enhancing the understanding of how different institutional arrangements respond to crises by accelerating the policy debate, and thereby altering the political discourse to impact the course of policy development. In drawing together such diverse insights, the chapter also poses an explanation for the international alcohol control/prohibition policy “wave” of the early 20th century. In brief, the wave can be explained only with reference to a combination of transnationally diffused temperance ideas, varyingly translated into policy through institutionalized channels of decision making, with a common external stimulus of a world war. War explains the timing of the policy wave, transnational temperance information networks explain the direction of the policy change, and domestic institutional constraints explain the ultimate form of that change.

This chapter discusses the political professionalization of the Norwegian Storting, its main focus being on the various institutional constraints of Norwegian MPs and on the importance of the recruitment structures for providing access to the political class. Here, the role of the constituency party branch is crucial: Because local councils are the training ground for future parliamentarians, because of the decentralized character of the nomination process, and because of the political legitimacy of pursuing local interests, you rarely get to be a member of the political class without going through the local network provided by the constituency party. Norwegian parliamentarians are therefore actors on two different yet interrelated arenas, the local arena and the parliamentary arena: As party politicians they play the parliamentary role game, and as district representatives they are constrained by constituency demands.

The members of any nation would prefer to be sovereign rather than to be ruled by non‐nationals because this maximizes the chance that the government will provide them with an optimal mix of public goods. This general preference is affected by the net benefit of continued affiliation with the central authority. To the degree that the centre provides minority nationals with protection, and economic and social welfare, the demand for sovereignty will be attenuated. Hence, nationalist secession is most likely to occur in multinational states whose centres are subject to military and economic setbacks. However, the demand for sovereignty also depends on the nation's capacity to engage in collective action, which is affected by state institutions.

The rapid rise of the entrepreneurial private sector in China is one of the key reasons for the success of its transition from a centrally planned economy toward becoming a market-oriented one since the late 1970s, which was explored in part in the last chapter. At the same time, China is a country known for its incomplete legal system, which includes the lack of an independent judiciary, and adjudication is not free from interference from the executive branch. In addition, there is evidence of financial repression whereby legal and institutional constraints impede the development of financial intermediaries, thereby retarding the development of the financial sector. In China, this is manifested insofar as the rules favour state-owned enterprises (SOEs) despite three decades of reform. SOEs still dominate credit allocation, such that the majority of private small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) obtain no bank financing even in 2006 (Lin 2007). This chapter investigates the impact of lagging financial and legal systems on private sector development and complements the previous one.

This chapter takes up black social institutions as central locations where in-group political norms are defined and propagated. It outlines a basic history of black social institutions, including how their creation was a direct response to the denial of access to white spaces. The importance of these institutions as sites for in-group political discourse and the enforcement of norms are noted. These institutions are places where blacks are reminded of group expectations. Using survey data, the chapter demonstrates the frequency with which blacks Americans interact within black institutions. The analysis shows that black institutions continue to be centers for daily engagement, reinforcing black social ties. The chapter then turns to another lab-in-the-field experiment to directly test the power of black institutions to facilitate racialized social constraint.

This chapter reflects on the 'counter-realism' code of institutional constraint. In terms of audience understandings, the 'counter-realist' code of institutional constraint is engaged, for example, when spectators assure themselves that a lead character cannot die before the last reel — precisely because they are played by a highly paid star. For producers, the code implies that the profit principle militates in favour of rounded stories with feel-good endings and against films where film makers forsake the safe and familiar and take audiences into new territory. The 'true story' genre seems to provide a firm basis for debating the effects of 'institutional constraint' on realism and truth. The chapter then considers a pair of 'true story' films: In The Name Of The Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993) and Erin Brokovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000).

This chapter discusses the role of technology diffusion in the area of pharmaceutical treatments. It is an up-to-date literature review of the main determinants of technology diffusion, including a discussion of the social, economic, and institutional constraints that enable pharmaceuticals to reach their targeted market.

This chapter addresses the themes that are raised in the fieldwork chapters and views them from a more theoretical perspective. It focuses mostly on the institutional constraints and opportunities for mobilisation that affect refugee communities. The chapter discusses the role of networks, resources, and social capital in the creation of refugee organisations. It also looks at the broader issue of refugee settlement and social cohesion in the UK.

Chapter 3 provides a quantitative analysis of the politics of law and order. It is presented in three steps. First, it is tested whether party competition affects how much parties emphasize law and order issues in their programs and whether this is different for issue owners. The study reveals that high public salience of security-related issues pushes all parties to emphasize law and order more strongly and that issue owners react strongly to the pressure of right-wing populist parties by emphasizing law and order in their manifestos. Second, the quantitative analysis tests whether these different programmatic stances translate into more spending on law and order. This is indeed the case, but only if constitutional courts are weak. Third, the analysis takes a closer look at legislation in France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom and finds the main results of the analysis on public spending corroborated.

Whether foreign policy should be exempted from democratic politics has been discussed since the early days of modern democracy. While this debate has oscillated between executive-friendly and democracy-friendly positions, it has neglected the role of political parties as essential actors in democratic decision-making and in providing cues to the public more broadly. Institutionalist and ideational theories of the so-called Democratic Peace in particular have neglected political parties, even though they silently assume that foreign and security policy is a matter of party-political contestation. Therefore, the theoretical framework outlined in this chapter also draws on scholarship in Foreign Policy Analysis that examined the role of ‘government ideology’. It suggests two propositions to inform the empirical analyses, namely 1) that foreign affairs are systematically contested, rather than shielded from democratic politics; 2) that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right dimension.

Recently the demand for evidence-based policy-making and therefore analytical capacity in administration resurged. Beginning by defining different types of analytical capacity, and considering who within executive government can perform analytical tasks, this chapter discusses the main challenges governments face in exerting analytical skills. The discussion then moves to institutional and methodological constraints in the use of analytical capacity. However, this is not the only challenge for governments. The questions of quality assessment and how analytical capacity can be measured need to be raised. Any such discussion will have to consider the institutional background of the given polity, and the different vulnerabilities and levers that influence the transfer of analytical knowledge into real executive politics. Finally, the chapter offers some innovative examples of how to improve the analytical capacity of government.

This chapter explains how Mettray, once universally recognized as a progressive, humanitarian endeavor, come to be understood as a brutal and anachronistic institution. It provides insight on how Mettray had somehow changed or grown callous and cruel with the passage of time. Louis Roubaud, a journalist who conducted a lengthy investigation of Mettray, denounced its staff as intellectually and morally unfit to be educators. Roubaud emphasized that the preventative or repressive severity by which the staff conducted themselves distorted their character and developed in them a certain cruelty and some of them, in turn, became truly crazy persecutors. Subordinates of Mettray regularly bypassed institutional constraints to advance their own ends and perceived needs and sometimes, exceeding their authority, meted out harsh punishments to young inmates in an arbitrary and abusive manner.

This chapter looks to the possibility of a new economic culture superseding that of the recent past. The global financial crisis is viewed a direct outgrowth of the institutional arrangements and practices adopted as capitalism shifted into a global informational economy in the late twentieth century. Financialization had allowed global imbalances to grow more and more extreme, but seeds of a new economy began to sprout. Experiments in barter and alternative currencies to cooperatives and projects like urban farming are generally of very small scale today. Nonetheless, they suggest that alternatives are possible if the institutional constraints of conventional capitalism are reduced. Technological innovation, networking, and higher levels of education underwrite this new economy. They were important to capitalism in its ascendant financial phase, though it blocked their transformative potential by concentrating capital and limiting wages. And they support alternative-lifestyle communities today.

This chapter takes the negative road to the question by considering what bad democratic leadership looks like. In confronting the contrary issue of defining “badness”, the author notes how the cultural and institutional restrictions of liberal democracies generally prevent the worst types of badness—oppression, violence, murder. Democratic citizens more often identify bad leadership with ineffectiveness or inefficiency rather than with unethical behavior. The author performs a comparative survey seeking patterns of bad leadership across democracies but finds none that are compelling. Bad leadership, it seems, can occur anywhere at any time and, moreover, is suspected by citizens of being more prevalent now than formerly. The lesson seems to be that, while democracies are effective in institutionally minimizing certain types of bad leadership, they have no clear way of normatively ensuring or promoting good leadership.