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Includes all relevant information on representative political institutions and elections held in Qatar. It summarizes Qatari political history and development and outlines the evolution of electoral provisions for a Shura and Municipal Councils (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system).

Having argued in Chs 3 and 4 that there are cosmopolitan principles of civil and political justice and cosmopolitan principles of distributive justice, one is logically led to the question, ‘if one affirms cosmopolitan principles of justice, what kind of political framework (political structures) should one accept— a system of states, or of global political institutions, of autonomous nations (including even statehood)? This chapter seeks to answer these questions. It is arranged in 17 sections: Section I provides a conceptual analysis of some possible political frameworks; the following six sections (II–VI) consider cosmopolitan approaches to the question of how political power should be institutionalized (II), present three possible approaches—intrinsic, right-based, and instrumental (III–V), and examine the nature of the political framework offered by these three approaches (VI); Sections VII–XI analyse five challenges to the cosmopolitan political proposals, first, those voiced by statists (including both realists and those who affirm the ‘society of states’) (VIII–X) and, second, those voiced by those sympathetic to the idea of a global civil society (XI); Sections XII–XVI evaluate four nationalist claims that any defensible account of political institutions should grant autonomy to nations (provide national self-determination), and they aim to defend a cosmopolitan political programme—one in which there are democratic supra-state institutions charged with protecting people’s civil, political, and economic rights—and to rebut the challenges of statists and nationalists or to show that they can be accommodated by cosmopolitans. Section XVII summarizes and concludes that, overall, a cosmopolitan political order should grant a very heavily qualified role to national self-determination.

This chapter begins by looking briefly at some of the overarching theoretical issues confronting the field of institutional design and the rival approaches to political engineering on which they are based. It then assesses the merits of the three most coherent models of political engineering in the contemporary world: consociationalism, centripetalism, and communalism. It concludes by assessing the empirical record of each approach in the Asia-Pacific region.

Includes all relevant information on national elections and referendums held in the former two Yemeni states and today's Republic of Yemen. Part I gives a comprehensive overview of Yemen's political history, outlines the evolution of electoral provisions, and presents the current electoral legislation in a standardized manner (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system, organizational context of elections). Part II includes exhaustive electoral statistics in systematic tables (numbers of registered voters, votes cast, the votes for candidates and/or parties in parliamentary and presidential elections and referendums at both the national and regional level, the electoral participation of political parties, the distribution of parliamentary seats, etc.).

As no elections and referendums have been held in Saudi Arabia, the chapter gives an overview of the political institutions and history of the Saudi kingdom. The developments leading to the establishment of the appointed Consultative Council and the legal provisions governing the activities of the Council are presented in detail.

The first of three chapters on the implications of electoral politics and the design of political institutions for welfare state adjustment. Swank first provides an overview of two key domestic and international pressures on developed welfare states: domestic fiscal stress and international capital mobility. He then outlines the theoretical argument that democratic institutions fundamentally determine government responses to domestic and international structural change, focusing on formal and informal institutions and drawing on and fusing insights from ‘power resources’ theory, the new institutionalism, and new cultural arguments about the determinants of social policy in advanced capitalist democracies. The next two sections utilize new data on social welfare effort, national political institutions, and internationalization to provide an econometric assessment of the social policy impacts of domestic fiscal stress and capital mobility during the period 1965 to 1995, looking first at the direct impacts of rises in public sector debt and in international capital mobility on social welfare provision, and second at the welfare state effects of fiscal stress and global capital flows across nationally and temporally divergent democratic institutional contexts; the initial focus is on total social welfare effort and then the analysis is shifted to changes in cash income maintenance and social services. The conclusion assesses the implications of the arguments and findings for the future course of social policy in developed democracies, and potentially bolsters the evidence for the central assertion that domestic institutions systematically determine the direction of welfare state restructuring.

This concluding chapter summarizes the most important results of this investigation into the development of political effectiveness in western democracies since 1974, and the impact of political institutions. The findings are discussed with respect to their theoretical and practical implications. The study stresses that the effect of institutions is more complicated than most of the neo-institutionalist approaches assume. No clear predictions can be made on the basis of institutional factors. Consequently, the analyses do not support the widely-held assumption that fundamental political problems can simply be resolved through institutional reforms of liberal democracies.

The authors examine how formal political institutions mute or amplify the impact of losing on attitudes toward the political system. They can do so in one of several ways: by defining the rules of the process by which losers are produced in the first place, usually through the electoral system; by determining the substance of government policy, and how close policy is to the preferences of the losers; and, finally, by determining the boundaries of how power, once allocated, can be exercised by the winners, that is, the constraints on the ability of the winners to bring about policy change. We find that specific institutions, and not just combinations of institutions, help to shape the response of losers. Losers express less negative views about the political system than winners when electoral rules are more proportional, when the political system has a greater number of veto players, and when power is shared within the political system. We also show that federalism allows losers some say in the system, and therefore helps make losers more positive towards the system.

Transitional administrations are, by their nature, interim arrangements that envisage the eventual transfer of full responsibility for governance to local authorities. In some cases, no formal political structures exist or, if they do, international authorities may consider them inadequate because they are undemocratic, unrepresentative, or incapable of implementing international obligations. Looks at the political designs and objectives that international authorities have promoted or imposed and the instruments they have employed, including the holding of elections, in their efforts to establish democratic political institutions.

This introductory chapter defines the questions and goals of the study, and provides a brief overview on the state of research regarding the performance of democracies. It seeks to answer two questions: Is the effectiveness of western democracies in decline and do institutions matter for political effectiveness? The continuous decline in the effectiveness of democratic systems was a prominent theme in various crisis theories (ungovernability, legitimation crisis) since the 1970s. Since the early 1990s, it has been taken up by globalization theories. The assertion that institutions matter for political performance reaches back to the emergence of the —new institutionalism— in the early 1980s. The most relevant precursor for this study of the performance of democracies is Arend Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy (1999). His book along with other contributions from the fields of comparative public policy and comparative sociology on the quality of life is used to clarify the contribution of this study on the institutional basis of political performance, and to elaborate to what extent it goes beyond the current state of research.

Does membership in a political society obligate one to support the political institutions of that society? Dubbed the membership problem, its terms are given some initial clarification. Among other things, a society is construed as a social group in a relatively narrow sense illustrated with examples. The membership problem is carefully distinguished from several distinct but closely resembling problems familiar from the literature of political philosophy. Importantly, it concerns obligations that are genuine but not necessarily best referred to as moral obligations.

This is the second of three chapters on the implications of electoral politics and the design of political institutions for welfare state adjustment. Bonoli explores the relationship between political institutions and patterns of welfare retrenchment, both on a theoretical level and on the basis of the observation of welfare reforms adopted in countries characterized by different levels of institutional power concentration. The main empirical focus is on Britain, an exemplar of strong power concentration, Switzerland, which has a political system characterized by high levels of power fragmentation, and France, an intermediate case. For each of the three countries, narrative accounts are provided of how selected welfare reforms (pension reform in all three countries and unemployment insurance reform in Switzerland) have been adopted. The comparison suggests that the relationship between constitutional structures and welfare adaptation is not a linear one, whereby power concentration is directly linked to a higher or lower rate of success in achieving restructuring, or to the amount of restructuring that can be obtained. Power concentration does, however, appear to be related to the form that welfare state adaptation takes: in contexts of strong power concentration, reform tends to be unilateral and geared towards retrenchment; in contrast, in institutional contexts characterized by veto points, reform tends to combine measures of retrenchment with expansion and improvements of existing programmes.

Describes the aims, approaches, and structure of the book. The basic issue addressed is the political principles that should govern global politics, and to analyse this the book posits six sets of questions, each of which is addressed in separate chapters that separately examine (moral) universalism, civil and political justice, distributive justice, political structures, just war, and humanitarian intervention. The author makes four points: that his concern is with political philosophy; that he refers to global rather than international political theory; that he examines global political theory rather than global ethics; and that he distinguishes three levels at which global political theory may operate—its relation to domestic political theory, the principles and institutions involved, and the application of these principles to specific issues. He also identifies the aims of the book, which are: to provide a defence of what is commonly termed a cosmopolitan political morality; to explore in depth and evaluate competing philosophical perspectives on these issues; and to emphasize that the topics examined in the book are very closely intertwined and cannot be engaged satisfactorily in isolation from one another. The four competing approaches that may be taken to global political theory (cosmopolitanism, realism, the ‘society of states’, and nationalism) are outlined in turn in order to provide a framework within which the six questions posited in the book are examined, and to stake out and defend the cosmopolitan approach taken.

This chapter reveals the influence of economic development, national economic and political institutions, and social diversity on labor conditions. Putting globalization aside, the foremost positive influence on labor conditions is level of development (a country’s real per capita income). Policies that raise per capita income improve virtually all labor conditions. At any level of development, however, countries still differ in their labor conditions. The chapter shows how democratic government, protection of property rights, and the degree of ethnic and religious diversity influence this remaining international variation in labor conditions.

This chapter argues that a fully satisfactory theory of political obligation will pass certain tests. It will offer an affirmative answer to the membership problem and, among other things, it will show how membership in a political society gives one obligations to uphold that society’s political institutions. There are discussions of A. John Simmons’s ‘generality test’ and of some broad notions of membership: membership through residence and imputed membership.