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Recent reforms in welfare states generate new challenges to social citizenship. Social citizenship depends on the readiness of voters to support reciprocity and social inclusion and their trust in welfare state institutions as services that will meet their needs. Reform programmes in most western countries combine New Public Management, linking market competition and regulation by targets to achieve greater efficiency and responsiveness to service-users, and welfare-to-work and make-work-pay activation policies to manage labour market change. Both developments rest on a rational actor approach to human motivation. The UK has pursued the reform programme with more vigour than any other major European country and provides a useful object less of its strengths and limitations. The book provides a detailed analytic account of social science approaches to agency. It shows that the rational actor approach has difficulties in explaining how social inclusion and social trust arise. Policies based on it provide weak support for these aspects of citizenship. It is attractive to policy-makers seeking solutions to the problem of improving the efficiency and responsiveness of welfare systems in a more globalised world, in which citizens are more critical and the authority of national governments is in decline. Recent reform programmes were undertaken to meet real pressures on existing patterns of provision. They have been largely successful in maintaining mass services but risk undermining social inclusion and eroding trust in public welfare institutions. In the longer term, they may destroy the social citizenship essential to sustain welfare states.

Since the early 1990s, Europe's economies have been facing several new challenges: the 1992 single market programme, the collapse of the Berlin wall and eastward enlargement, and monetary unification. Building on the influential Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) perspective, this book critically analyses these developments in the European political economy and their effects on the continental European economies. The chapters include debate about how VoC can help understand the political-economic challenges that Europe is facing today, and how understanding these new challenges can in turn enrich and enhance the VoC perspective. Thematically, the contributions to this volume are organised in four sections: how the macro-economics of EMU influenced different European models of capitalism; how the Single Market programme was received in the different institutional regimes in European capitalism; how welfare and labour market reforms are debated and implemented; and how European capitalism travelled east after 1989. The book aims to demonstrate that the VoC approach remains — as the editors put it in their introduction — a rich seam to mine, capable of accommodating new developments, and theoretically flexible enough to branch out into new arguments.

Defends a theory of social justice for education from within an egalitarian version of liberalism. The theory involves a strong commitment to educational equality, and to the idea that children's rights include a right to personal autonomy. The book argues that school reform must always be evaluated from the perspective of social justice and applies the theory, in particular, to school choice proposals. It looks at the parental choice schemes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in England and Wales, and argues that they fall short of the requirements of justice, but that not all such schemes must do so. It elaborates an abstract voucher scheme that would combine choice with justice, and offers ways by which actual choice‐based reform can be modified to meet the requirements of justice.

The era of economic liberalization, spanning 1978 to 2008, is often regarded as a period in which government was simply dismantled. In fact, government was reconstructed to meet the needs of a globalized economy. Central banking, fiscal control, tax collection, regulation, port and airport management, infrastructure development—in all of these areas, radical reforms were made to the architecture of government. A common philosophy shaped all of these reforms: the logic of discipline. It was premised on deep skepticism about the ability of democratic processes to make sensible policy choices. It sought to impose constraints on elected officials and citizens, often by shifting power to technocrat-guardians who were shielded from political influence. It placed great faith in the power of legal changes—new laws, treaties, and contracts—to produce significant alterations in the performance of governmental systems. Even before the global economic crisis of 2007-2009, the logic of discipline was under assault. Faced with many failed reform projects, advocates of discipline realized that they had underestimated the complexity of governmental change. Opponents of discipline emphasized the damage to democratic values that followed from the empowerment of new groups of technocrat-guardians. The financial crisis did further damage to the logic of discipline, as governments modified their attitudes about central bank independence and fiscal control, and global financial and trade flows declined. It was the market that now appeared to behave myopically and erratically, and which now insisted that governments should abandon precepts about the role of government that it had once insisted were inviolable. An account of neoliberal governmental restructuring across the world, The Logic of Discipline offers an analysis of how this undemocratic model is unravelling in the face of a monumental and ongoing failure of the market.

This book examines the dynamics between informal groups of states and the UN Security Council in the management of conflicts in Namibia, El Salvador, and Kosovo. It sets forth three main arguments. Firstly, that informal groups of states are agents of incremental change. They proliferated in the 1990s out of the increasing demands on the United Nations to adapt to the new security environment of the post-bipolar world, without formally changing the constitutional foundation of the Organization. Secondly, that informal mechanisms may narrow the operational and participatory gap growing out of the multiple incapacities that prevent the Security Council from formulating an effective response to crisis situations. Informal groups of states may enhance Council governance if they strike a balance between competing demands of inclusiveness, efficiency, informality, transparency, and accountability. Thirdly, that the post-Cold War era has fostered an environment where the substance of conflict resolution and the process of its legitimation have become increasingly detached. The former tends to be delegated to informal groups or coalition of states, while the Security Council provides the latter. The successful merger of right process and substantive outcome may strengthen the legitimacy of the Council and make actions taken by informal settings more acceptable.

Most democratic citizens today are distrustful of politicians, political parties, and political institutions. Where once democracies expected an allegiant public, citizens now question the very pillars of representative democracy. This book documents the erosion of political support in virtually all advanced industrial democracies. Assembling a large array of cross-national public opinion data, this book traces the current challenges to democracy primary to changing citizen values and rising expectations. These dissatisfied democrats are concentrated among the young, the better educated, and the politically sophisticated. At the same time, the evidence debunks claims that such trends are a function of scandals, poor performance, and other government failures. Changing public opinion is born from the successful social modernization of these nations. A creedal passion for democracy is sweeping across the Western democracies, and people now expect more of their governments. This book concludes by examining the consequences of these changing images of government. The book finds that these expectations are making governing more difficult, but also fuelling demands for political reform. The choices that democracies may in response to these challenges lead to a further expansion of the democratic process and a new relationship between citizens and their government.

The EU's activity under its intergovernmental pillars — The Common Foreign and Security Policy and Justice and Home Affairs — has traditionally been beyond the scope of judicial control offered by the central EC legal system. The increasing importance of this activity, and its growing intrusion into the lives of individuals, has led to a sense that the level of judicial oversight and protection is insufficient and that the constitutional balance of the Union stands in urgent need of reform. While the need for reform is widely recognised, wholesale constitutional change has been stalled by the failure to ratify the Constitutional Treaty and the delay in ratifying the Treaty of Lisbon. This book charts the attempts to develop more satisfactory judicial control over the intergovernmental pillars in the face of such constitutional inertia. It examines the leading role played by the European Court of Justice in reforming its own jurisdiction, and analyses the ECJ's development as a constitutional court in comparison with more established constitutional adjudicators. Throughout the book the current constitutional position is compared extensively to the reforms introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon, offering a timely snapshot of the EU's federal structure in a state of flux.

This book poses the question: how and why do institutions change? Institutions, understood as rules of behaviour constraining and facilitating social interaction, are subject to different forms and processes of change. A change may be designed intentionally on a large scale and then be followed by a period of only incremental adjustments to new conditions. But institutions may also emerge as informal rules, persist for a long time and only be formalized later. The causes, processes, and outcomes of institutional change raise a number of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical questions. While we know a lot about the creation of institutions, relatively little research has been conducted about their transformation once they have been put into place. Attention has focused on politically salient events of change, such as the Intergovernmental Conferences of Treaty reform. In focusing on such grand events, it is easy overlook inconspicuous changes in European institutional rules that are occurring on a daily basis. Thus, the European Parliament has gradually acquired a right of investing individual Commissioners. This has never been an issue in the negotiations of formal treaty revisions. Or, the decision-making rule(s) under which the European Parliament participates in the legislative process have drastically changed over the last decades starting from a modest consultation ending up with codecision. The book discusses various theories accounting for long-term institutional change, and explores them on the basis of five important institutional rules in the European Union. It proposes typical sequences of long-term institutional change and their theorization which hold for other contexts as well, if the number of actors and their goals are clearly defined, and interaction takes place under the ‘shadow of the future’.

This book examines the Catholic participation in the “Long Sixties” in the United States, a decade that, for Catholic Americans, began in 1964 (the year the first reforms mandated by the Second Vatican Council began to be implemented) and continued into the 1970s. The book argues that the most important result of that era was the emergence of the awareness among many of the Catholic faithful that everything in history changes, including the Church. This seemingly obvious insight generated considerable turmoil within the American Catholic community, which was accustomed to thinking of their religious beliefs and practices as timeless. The battles generated by that insight largely shaped the debates within the community during the final quarter of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the process of narrating those turbulent events, the book offers a new master narrative of American Catholicism during the 1960s that seeks to displace the older politicized narrative of “liberals versus conservatives.”

This book represents the relaunching of the State of the European Union series sponsored by the European Community Studies Association. It features 19 papers on the ‘four Rs’ that embody the EU experience: risk, reform, resistance and revival. Risk is defined in terms of the stakes attached to the European project. Reform is the attempt to shape and reshape the European project in its pursuit of efficiency, effectiveness, and avoidance of the risk of non-reform. Resistance refers to the forces that oppose reform. Revival refers to the breakthroughs precipitated by shifts in the balance between risk, reform, and resistance.