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This book uses data from 21 OECD countries for the period 1980 to 1998 to test a variety of hypotheses suggesting that contemporary welfare states are in crisis and to establish the factors shaping the trajectory of welfare state development during these years. It assesses the validity of arguments that globalization leads to a ‘race to the bottom’ in social spending and that population ageing poses a threat to public budgets. It finds both of these arguments wanting and, instead, suggests that contemporary welfare states have been converging to a steady state over recent decades. The book also examines the extent to which welfare states across the OECD have been restructured in recent years and whether there are signs of the emergence of a distinctive European ‘social model’. Again, it finds that accounts of substantial welfare state restructuring and of the Europeanization of the welfare state are much exaggerated. Finally, the book identifies a potential threat to the viability of existing societies in a trend to declining fertility throughout the advanced world, but argues that the welfare state in the form of family-friendly policy is actually our best protection against this trend.

Does globalization erode the nation state's capacity to act? Are nation states forced to change their policies even if this goes against the democratic will of their electorates? How does government action change under conditions of globalization? Questions like these have not only featured highly in political debates in recent years, but also in academic discourse. This book contributes to that debate. The general question it addresses is whether globalization leads to policy convergence — a central, but contested topic in the debate, as theoretical arguments can be advanced both in favour of and against the likelihood of such a development. More specifically, the book contains detailed empirical case studies of four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland) in a policy area where state action has been particularly challenged by the emergence of world-wide, around-the-clock financial markets in the last few decades, namely that of the regulation and supervision of the banking industry. Based on careful analysis of historical developments, specific challenges, the character of policy networks and institutions, and their interaction in the political process, this book argues that nation states still possess considerable room for manoeuvre in pursuing their policies. Even if they choose supranational coordination and cooperation, their national institutional configurations still function as filters in the globalization process.

The book proposes a unifying conception which shows that the differences between ‘majoritarian’, ‘consensus’ and other forms of representative democracy are superficial compared to what unites them. The common element is the empowerment of the median voter by making the party (s)he votes for the median party in the legislature. Comparative evidene covering 21 democracies from 1950-1995 is assembled to check out the descriptive credentials of this idea, in contrast to the government mandate which forms the normal description and justification of democracy as providing ‘a necessary link between popular preferences and public policy’. Although, spontaneous majorities rarely emerge, median voter - median party correspondences do (72% of all governments, 82% under PR). Policy correspondence, distortion, long term bias, and responsiveness are examined in both static and dynamic terms. They reveal that underneath short-term fluctuations, the long-term equilibrium positions of governments and median voters map each other closely. Many other questions about democracy are also raised and investigated — economic and retrospective voting (‘ kicking the rascals out’): policy incrementalism, etc. — giving the book an appeal to different groups of specialists in political science. The comparative data on voting, on electoral party and government preferences, and on actual policy outputs are unsurpassed with regards to comprehensiveness over nations and time.

Environmental political philosophy has generally been framed around the differing axiologies of ecocentrism (nature‐centred) and anthropocentric (human‐centred) forms of ethics. This book seeks to challenge the political relevance of this philosophical dispute with respect to the problem of nature preservation as public policy. A detailed analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of both ecocentric and ‘ecological humanist’ positions shows that the ‘embedded humanism’ within ecocentric arguments offers an opportunity to move beyond the ecocentric‐anthropocentric divide. Furthermore, a principle of ‘strong irreplaceability’ with regard to natural goods can provide the basis for a political argument for nature preservation that is compatible with both human‐centred and nature‐centred concerns.

When constructing environmental policies in democratic regimes, there is a need for a theory that can be used not only by academics but also by politicians and activists. So why has the major part of environmental ethics failed to penetrate environmental policy and serve as its rationale? Obviously, there is a gap between the questions that environmental philosophers discuss and the issues that motivate environmental activists. Avner de‐Shalit attempts to bridge this gap by combining tools of political philosophy with questions of environmental ethics and environmental politics. He defends a radical position in relation to both environmental protection and social policies, in order to put forward a political theory, which is not only philosophically sound, but also relevant to the practice of environmental activism. The author argues that several directions in environmental ethics can be at odds with the contemporary political debates surrounding environmental politics. He then goes on to examine the environmental scope of liberalism, communitarianism, participatory democracy, and socialism, and concludes that while elements of liberalism and communitarianism may support environmental protection, it is participatory democracy and a modified version of socialism that are crucial for protecting the environment.

Contributors to this edited book consider the normative issues at stake in the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice. If future generations are owed justice, what should we bequeath them? Is ‘sustainability’ an appropriate medium for environmentalists to express their demands? Is environmental protection compatible with justice within generations? Is environmental sustainability a luxury when social peace has broken down? The contested nature of sustainable development is considered––is it a useful concept at all any longer? Is it reconcilable with capital accumulation? Liberal––particularly Rawlsian––and socialist notions of justice are tested against the demands of sustainability, and policy instruments for sustainability––such as environmental taxation––are examined for their distributive effects.

Offers a detailed critical analysis of the ideal of ‘community’ in politics. Traces elements of the idea of community in a number of social, philosophical, and political contexts over the last century, exploring how these have been and continue to be articulated in recent political and public policy debates. ‘Community’ is invoked as a justification for reorganization of state institutions, as the source of care and support for individuals, and as an entity that is valuable in its own right and must therefore be sustained and defended. In community development, community action, community care and community politics, the tensions and contradictions within the concept are invariably felt. Community is both inclusive and exclusive, both organized and unstructured, both hierarchical and egalitarian. The book argues that analysis of the concept ‘community’ reveals the role of ideas and ideals in shaping political action, the barriers to the realization of community in practical contexts, and ultimately the untenability of the ideal itself.

Why does the regulation of risks to human health and safety vary so dramatically from one policy domain to another? Why are some risks regulated aggressively and others responded to only modestly? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? This book addresses these important questions by systematically examining variety amongst risk regulation regimes across policy domains, analysing the significant driving forces shaping those regimes, and identifying the causes of regulatory failure and success. In order to do so, the book develops a systems‐based concept of a ‘risk regulation regime’, which enables comparative description and analysis of the rules, institutional arrangements, and cultures that are bound up with the handling of risk within and between regimes. Using that framework, the book analyses how regimes and their constituent components are differentially shaped by three major driving forces—namely, the pressures exerted by market failure, by public opinion, and by organized interests inside and outside the state apparatus—and blame‐avoidance responses of regimes in the face of pressures for greater openness. The book applies the method to analyse a range of risk regulation regimes that cross the divide between ‘natural’ and ‘socially created’, state‐created and market‐created, ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’, high‐tech and low‐tech, individually, and corporately produced risks. Those regimes include the release of paedophiles into the community, air pollution, local road safety, radon, pesticides, and dangerous dogs. The analysis reveals both variations and paradoxes that can neither be identified by single case studies, nor be easily explained by macro‐oriented approaches to understanding risk regulation. The Government of Risk shows how such an approach is of high policy relevance as well as of considerable theoretical importance.

This book explores current thinking on corporate governance by way of a detailed study of the governance practices of fourteen Japanese companies. The author of this book was granted extensive access to these Japanese companies, as well as to their partner companies, their shareholders, and their banks, and was therefore able to provide a detailed insight into the way that Japanese companies are actually governed on a day-to-day basis. The book suggests that current mainstream conceptualizations of corporate governance are inadequate, as they do not help to understand the way that these Japanese companies are directed and controlled in practice. In the majority of cases, governance operates through a system which draws on the reciprocal obligations, responsibilities, and trust generated in everyday interactions at the individual and organizational level. The conclusions of the research have important implications not only for our understanding of the Japanese system of corporate governance, but also for international corporate governance policy and research in general. In particular, the book commends greater recognition that alongside the currently dominant concern ‘controlling’ the behaviour of company managers, the governance of companies might equally be considered in terms of the responsibilities, reciprocal obligations, and trust inherent in everyday interactions.

The goals of healthcare and health policy, and the health-related dilemmas facing policy makers, professionals, and citizens are analysed and debated in a range of disciplines, including public health, sociology, and applied philosophy. The book's core argument is that clinical ethics needs to be understood in the context of public health ethics. This entails healthcare ethics embracing ‘the social dimension’ of health in two overlapping senses: first, the various respects in which health experiences and outcomes are socially determined; and second, the ways in which health-related goods are better understood as social rather then purely individual goods. This broader approach to the ethics of healthcare includes a concern with the social construction of both healthcare goods and the roles, ideals, and obligations of agents; that is to say it focuses upon the ‘value field’ of health-related action and not only upon the ethics of action within this value field. This book thus ‘opens up’ the agenda of healthcare ethics both methodologically and substantively: it argues that population-oriented perspectives are central to all healthcare ethics, and that everybody has some share of responsibility for securing health-related goods including the good of greater health equality. One of its major conclusions is that the rather limited tradition of health education policy and practice needs a complete re-think.

The analysis in this book disputes entrenched interpretations of the comparative political economy of industrialized democracies. It questions, in particular, the widely-held assumption that social democratic governments will defend the interests of labour. The evidence shows that labour has become split into two clearly differentiated constituencies: those with secure employment (insiders) and those without (outsiders). The book focuses on three policy areas: employment protection (representing the main concern of insiders), and active and passive labour market policies (the main concern of outsiders). The main thrust of the argument is that the goals of social democratic parties are often best served by pursuing policies that benefit only insiders. The implication of the book's insider-outsider model is that social democratic government is associated with higher levels of employment protection legislation but not with labour market policy. The book also argues that there are factors that can reduce insider-outsider differences and weaken their influence on social democratic governments. These hypotheses are explored through the triangulation of different methodologies. The book provides an analysis of surveys and macrodata and a detailed comparison of three case-studies: Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands.

This book explores the complex relationship between women’s presence and impact in two strikingly different, consecutive congresses. Drawing on hundreds of elite interviews and archival information, the case studies of three highly visible policy areas (reproductive rights, women’s health, and health care policy) move beyond the question of ‘Do women make a difference?’ to confront the oft-ignored, contested issues surrounding gender difference and impact: its probabilistic nature, contested legitimacy, and disputed meaning. The analysis enhances understanding of how gendered forces at the individual, institutional, and societal levels combine to reinforce and redefine gendered relationships to power in the public sphere, and suggests strategies to strengthen substantive representation of women.

Theoretical research undertaken over the last decades showed that the nature of nominal rigidities plays a key role in determining the effects of different shocks on the economy. This research has made clear that a thorough understanding of the extent and causes of the sluggish adjustment of nominal prices is crucial to the design and conduct of monetary policy. This book presents the main results of a research program undertaken by the Eurosystem central banks on price setting decisions by firms in the euro area. Its objective is to deepen our understanding of the behavioral mechanisms driving agents' pricing decisions, adopting a methodological approach—asking firms directly about how they set the price of their output (their pricing strategies) and why (the rationale of these strategies)—that is particularly well suited for the purpose at hand. The book also compares results for the euro area to similar analyses for other countries and summarizes the main findings of studies based on individual quantitative micro data on consumer and producer prices carried out for most euro area countries. Finally, the book explores the monetary policy implications of the main findings.

Evidence — its nature and interpretation — is the key to many topical debates and concerns such as global warming, evolution, the search for weapons of mass destruction, DNA profiling, and evidence-based medicine. In 2004, University College London launched a cross-disciplinary research programme ‘Evidence, Inference and Enquiry’ to explore the question: ‘Can there be an integrated multidisciplinary science of evidence?’ While this question was hotly contested and no clear final consensus emerged, much was learned on the journey. This book, based on the closing conference of the programme held at the British Academy in December 2007, illustrates the complexity of the subject, with seventeen chapters written from a diversity of perspectives including Archaeology, Computer Science, Economics, Education, Health, History, Law, Psychology, Philosophy, and Statistics. General issues covered include principles and systems for handling complex evidence, evidence for policy-making, and human evidence-processing, as well as the very possibility of systematising the study of evidence.

Mediatic representation has become an integral part of politics and policy. The dominance of incident-oriented media formats has led students of politics and media to fear a trend of ‘dumbing down’: the privileging of style over content. This book takes issue with the ‘dumbing down’ thesis both on theoretical and empirical grounds. In particular it investigates how an authoritative governance is possible in crisis-ridden circumstances in a mediatized environment. Maarten Hajer comes up with a communicative understanding of authority, creating a new basis for an authoritative governance in a world marked by political and institutional fragmentation. Extending his discourse-analytical framework, Hajer uses both discursive and dramaturgical methods to study policy makers in their struggle for authority. Three elaborate case studies provide a wealth of details of the dynamics of authority in today's mediatized polity and the peculiar role of crisis and incidents in this. The message of the book is that in the age of mediatization governance needs to be performed. Hajer illuminates contours of a new authoritative governance that encompass different elements than usually get represented in the media or indeed in textbooks on media studies, public policy, or governance. The book shows new ways to recombine traditional government of standing institutions to notions of network governance. The book thus provides new ideas about authoritative governance which is based on the need to actively create relations with a variety of publics.

In many Western democracies, ethnic and racial minorities have demanded, and sometimes achieved, greater recognition and accommodation of their identities. This is reflected in the adoption of multiculturalism policies for immigrant groups, the acceptance of territorial autonomy and language rights for national minorities, and the recognition of land claims and self-government rights for indigenous peoples. These claims for recognition have been controversial, in part because of fears that they make it more difficult to sustain a robust welfare state by eroding the interpersonal trust, social solidarity and political coalitions that sustain redistribution. Are these fears of a conflict between a ‘politics of recognition’ and a ‘politics of redistribution’ valid? This book aims to test this question empirically, using both cross-national statistical analyses of the relationships among diversity policies, public attitudes and the welfare state, and case studies of the recognition/redistribution linkage in the political coalitions in particular countries, including the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and in Latin America. These studies suggest that that there is no general or inherent tendency for recognition to undermine redistribution, and that the relationship between these two forms of politics can be supportive as well as competitive, depending on the context. These findings shed light, not only on the nature and effects of multiculturalism, but also on wider debates about the social and political foundations of the welfare state, and indeed about our most basic concepts of citizenship and national identity.

Ever since the 1970s, the problem of unemployment has defined politics in Western Europe, but governments have responded in different ways. In the 1970s and 1980s, some governments used macroeconomic policy to support domestic economic activity and maintain full employment. In the 1990s and 2000s, on the other hand, some governments made large labor market policy changes to ensure that the unemployed were looking for jobs, well-trained, and matched with employers willing to hire them. Comparing Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, this book shows that governments made different choices because of underlying political differences: the development of party systems, corporatism, and norms regarding the purpose of political authority. Low unemployment was the linchpin of political arrangements in Western Europe after the Second World War. When mass unemployment became a threat again in the 1970s, Austria and Sweden – where the post-war political order remained intact – used economic policies to preserve full employment. In the 1990s and 2000s, governments in Denmark and the Netherlands – who had lived with high unemployment for a long period of time and reformed their political models in the course of the 1980s – undertook far-reaching labor market policy changes.