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This chapter revisits the long‐standing debate about Leftist politics and poverty. It begins by outlining the contributions and limitations of power resources theory, a key starting point for the study of politics and poverty. Next, the chapter articulates how institutionalized power relations theory moves beyond power resources theory. This chapter then provides an empirical evaluation of the causal hypotheses derived from institutionalized power relations theory with six different measures of Leftist politics. Ultimately, the aim is to both theoretically and empirically advance the understanding of the economic consequences of politics and the political causes of poverty. This chapter builds on Chapter 4 in developing the institutionalized power relations theory. Broadly, the analyses demonstrate that Leftist politics do influence poverty. Proportional representation electoral systems appear to be the most consequential measure of Leftist politics. The effects are mostly channeled through the welfare state and only partly combine with the welfare state. Leftist politics fundamentally influence a society's amount of poverty, but the welfare state remains the proximate and direct influence on poverty.

This chapter considers the balance between central control and subsidiary autonomy in HR policy and practice. US multinationals have been shown to centralize control of international HR policy compared with multinationals of other nationalities. This chapter examines the organizational processes whereby particular patterns of centralization or autonomy are maintained, and how such patterns evolve over time. In explaining the mechanisms that drive changes in the centralization-autonomy balance, the chapter highlights the ability of actors at different levels of the multinational to influence policy choices through the deployment of a variety of power resources; the latter includes the leverage that local managers derive from their expert knowledge of the distinctive constraints and possibilities of their host business system. The factors that explain differences in the balance of centralization and autonomy between different multinationals are also explored.

This chapter presents the power structure explanation of organizational wrongdoing. This explanation is the third of five alternative accounts of wrongdoing considered in the book. It is rooted in a theoretical perspective that views organizations as arenas of conflict, and views organizational participants as combatants. The chapter offers a definition of power and describes the two main types of power: formal authority and informal power (also known as resource dependence-based power). It then delineates how both types of power can cause those who possess power and those who are subject to it to engage in wrongdoing. It also explores how formal authority, informal power, and organizational wrongdoing can co-evolve over time. The chapter uses an extensive case analysis of illegal special purpose entities at Enron Corporation to illustrate its central ideas. It concludes with an overall assessment of the power structure explanation.

This chapter summarizes the course of events during the civil war. It is divided into three parts. Part one documents the efforts made to keep the IRA united and prevent the Treaty split resulting in civil war, which resulted in the making of the Collins de Valera electoral pact in the spring of 1922. Part two describes the conventional fighting between June and September. Part three explores the guerrilla phase and the executions which accompanied it. The significance of the death of Michael Collins is discussed, as is the formation of a Republican Government on the anti-Treaty side. The disintegration of republican military opposition in 1923 is chronicled, and the one-sided outcome to the fighting was attributed to the unequal distribution of power resources between the two sides.

This chapter identifies the main power resources which trade unions have deployed. It explores how changes in the world of work (‘post-Fordism’), in the relationship between national economies and the global level (globalization), in social attitudes (often viewed as a trend to individualism) and in political environments have weakened some traditional resources. This in turn has encouraged a search for alternatives. The chapter summarizes the relative importance of the key challenges facing unions in each of the ten countries examined in the book, noting that what are objectively similar challenges may have very different implications because of different histories, institutions and identities. Finally it summarizes the main routes to union ‘revitalization’ which have been discussed in recent literature on trade unionism.

Chapter 1 provides the conceptual and theoretical frame to answer comprehensively the two main questions we pose in this book. It briefly introduces the concepts to capture the major building blocks of the bilateral Franco-German order—its regularized intergovernmentalism, predominantly symbolic acts and practices, and parapublic underpinnings—in order to grasp the logic and political implications of this special bilateral connection, and to explain its resilience and adaptability. Integrating factors located at the bilateral, domestic, regional European, and international levels, this chapter outlines a framework to explain why France and Germany’s combined impact on Europe has varied as widely as it has across political domains and time. To that end, the chapter also considers different types of joint bilateral leadership in regional politics and reviews the evolution of the joint French–German resources of power and authority in European affairs over time.

Structuralist transformation approaches were first developed by neo-Marxist critics dissatisfied with classic modernization theory. Rather than assuming a universal path to democracy that all countries eventually follow, structuralist explanations view democratization as merely one possible outcome of more fundamental changes in a society’s class and power relations. After discussing Barrington Moore’s early attempt to identify the social origins of dictatorship and democracy, this chapter turns to the role of the state and international power relations. World-system and dependency theory link the emergence of bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in newly industrialized countries to their late integration into the capitalist world economy. Dependent development changes the nature of class relations and the outlook of the bourgeoisie thereby hampering democracy. Yet the chapter continues to show that the final push for democratic inclusion has typically been by the working class. Finally, a synthesis of different structuralist arguments and Vanhanen’s Index of Power Resources are presented.

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of the three empirical chapters and discusses the extent to which the theoretical explanations presented in Chapter 2 help understand the politics of job security regulations. It shows that the new argument presented in Chapter 2 is more apt to explain the observed variations than the alternative explanations put forward in the literature. Subsequently, the chapter relates the theoretical argument to recent advances in historical institutionalism and demonstrates why the combination of historical institutionalism with the power resources approach is particularly fruitful. The final section discusses the future of job security regulations in Western Europe, exploring whether two-tier labour markets, as part of a larger trend towards dualization, can be more than just a transitory phenomenon in a much more general trend towards liberalization and whether the financial crisis in the late 2000s has changed the politics of job security regulations in Western Europe.

This chapter analyses the reform of job security regulations from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s, a period during which numerous reforms of job security regulations were enacted in Western Europe. The chapter explains why the labour movement grew increasingly dissatisfied with the post-war order and why it had the power resources to challenge the political and economic elite. Subsequently, it discusses the reforms of job security regulations in eight Western European countries. The chapter shows that the reform of job security regulations was only possible after the labour movement had radicalized its demands and began to challenge the established economic and political order. Facing demands for radical change and a mobilized labour movement, the employers#amp;#x2019; associations and their political allies decided to make a series of concessions, which, however, they tried to reverse as soon as the mobilization of the labour movement began to abate.

This chapter studies trade union responses to the precarization of work in the retail sector in three post-socialist East European countries: Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia. The aim of the chapter is to analyse the influence of sectoral specifics, different institutional factors, and trade unions’ power resources on union approaches towards precarious work, and to explore the potential for new patterns of solidarity. The main thrust of the argument is that unions’ power is crucial for developing and sustaining the industrial relations institutions, which in turn shape constraints and opportunities for trade unions’ actions. However, the strategic choices exerted by trade union leaders also matter. While higher institutional and associational power still enables Slovene unions to regulate the conditions of precarious workers to a certain extent, the institutional weakness of Estonian and Polish unions make them increasingly reliant on their network embeddedness and narrative resources to mobilize against precarization.

Sociologists have rarely imagined elites as capable of delivering for society the promise of a better future. More frequently, labor unions and left-wing parties, or grassroots social movements, have been looked to as champions of social progress. This chapter explores the broader theoretical contributions of the book and situates the key concepts of “professional movements” and “heightened political competition” in the literature. First, whereas scholarship has emphasized the way in which democratization empowers the masses, this book turns conventional wisdom on its head by suggesting that democratization empowers elites. Second, it calls attention to the role that newly empowered (and public-minded) professionals play in expanding access to healthcare and medicine on behalf of the poor and those in need. Third, it highlights the importance of differences in the character of political competition in the wake of democratic transition in conditioning the possibilities for well-organized professional movements to institute such changes.

Chapter 4 develops arguments and hypotheses about the political agency of billionaires, in terms of capacities, goals, and power. It draws upon insights from the “structure-agency” discussion and the political sociology of elites. While all billionaires control vast amounts of money, only few of them venture into world politics. A billionaire’s motivation to act transnationally may stem from material interests or a sociopolitical identity whose commitments reach across national borders. Wealth can be a highly fungible power resource, but its activation depends on what can be purchased, which is regulated by laws and norms. Entrepreneurial success in business can foster self-efficacy beliefs as well as social and cultural capital, yet whether this can be put to use in politics is contingent upon the political field that a billionaire is trying to enter. Further analysis thus needs to take the specificities of a billionaire’s international actions into account. This chapter is developing the analytical tools for the following case studies (chapter 5), which are structured around three goals that are often assumed to drive the international behavior of states: security, wealth (economy), and esteem (social entrepreneurship).

The chapter scrutinizes how German and Danish unions are navigating the increasingly integrated slaughterhouse industry, based on a case study of a large Danish multinational slaughterhouse company with operations in both Denmark and Germany. The German slaughterhouse industry is highly affected by increasing fragmentation of production and the widespread use of low-paid workers often posted from Eastern Europe, which the Danish multinational company utilizes to lower its production costs. The Danish slaughterhouse workers’ union was more successful in safeguarding workers’ wage and working conditions and preventing labour market segmentation, while their German peers faced much more precarious work. These differences are explained by the vast differences in the unions’ power resources in the two systems. Danish unions were in a much stronger position in terms of membership, where unionization remains a social custom, with stronger collective agreements and local representation compared with the German union.

The chapter outlines a lacuna in the welfare state literature, namely the almost total neglect of the Right. No positive theory exists about what these parties do with the welfare state when in government. After discussing the shortcomings of the existing literature, the chapter briefly presents a new theory of the Right and the welfare state. The chapter also explains the approach and plan of the book.

This chapter examines the effects of national level politics and institutions on the long-term evolution of diversified business groups. A central goal of this chapter is to connect the analysis of business groups to broader debates on the political economy of advanced capitalism, especially varieties of capitalism, power resource theory, legal families, and entrenchment. States (through regulations) and firms (via their corporate practices, especially concentrated ownership and cross-ownership) across much of continental Europe and Japan protected business groups by forestalling takeovers, while capital markets in liberal economies encouraged the formation of new kinds of business groups (especially private equity) by facilitating takeovers. Brief summaries of the evolution of business groups over the past century in Sweden and the United States illustrate these different dynamics in coordinated and liberal economies.

Chapter 1 presents the structured comparative analysis of postauthoritarian Iberia, which defines the empirical terrain of the book. It first provides an overview of the very different sets of social protection institutions adopted by the Spanish and Portuguese in the early postauthoritarian period. These liberal (Portuguese) and protective (Spanish) models, the chapter argues, represented two fundamentally different strategies for managing economic risk and insecurity. The chapter then reviews common explanations in the literature for different patterns of social protection and labor relations, including those focusing on levels of economic development, culture, power resources, employer interests, and political institutions, and shows how and why they fail to explain the Iberian divergence.

Chapter 7 reviews the evidence presented in the previous chapters. It summarizes the support for my theories of fiscalization, presents an extensive discussion of alternative arguments, and explains why these other theories are wrong or cannot explain as well as my theories do the timing or the shape that fiscalization took in the US, the UK, and Canada. It concludes with a discussion of the theoretical implications of for the study of culture and political institutions and its practical implications for reform-oriented advocates interested in the politics of tax and antipoverty policies. This discussion includes a detailed blueprint for a politically viable consolidation of child-related tax benefits that would bring the US’s child poverty rate down in line with other liberal welfare regimes.