Comparative Exam Notes (Industrial Nations)
(Lipset and Rokkan. “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments.”
“Whatever the structure of the polity parties have served as essential agencies of mobilization and as such have helped to integrate local communities into the nation or the broader federation” (91).
Federalists and Democratic Republicans: “they were the first genuinely national organizations; they represented the first successful efforts to pull Americans out of their local community and their state and to give them roles in the national polity” (91).
“This conflict-integration dialectic is of central concern in current research on the comparative sociology of political parties. In this essay the emphasis will be on conflicts and their translation into party systems” (93).
“We have simply chosen to stat out from the latent or manifest strains and cleavages and will deal with trends towards compromise and reconciliation against the background of the initial conflicts” (93).
Parties three functions:
- Expressive: rhetoric of demands
- Instrumental: force spokesmen to strike bargains
- Representative: represent the views of the party (93)
“Our suggestion is that the crucial cleavages and their political expressions can be ordered within the two-dimensional space” (95).
Axis a: interest-specific oppositions (Short term and long term conflicts over resources)
Axis g: oppositions within national established elite (conflicts among elites)
Axis i: ideological oppositions (friend-foe relationships, religious or ethnic conflict)
Axis l: local regional oppositions (British parties pitting landed families against
“Such particularistic, kin-centered, ‘ins-outs’ oppositions are common in the early phases of nation-building: the electoral clienteles are small, undifferentiated and easily controlled, and the stakes to be gained or lost in public life tend to be personal and concrete rather than collective and general” (97).
“In the
“The conflict between landed and urban interests was centered in the commodity market. The peasants wanted to seel their wares at the best possible prices and to buy what they needed from the industrial and urban producers at a low cost” (108).
How does a socio-cultural conflict get translated into an opposition between parties:
Depends on:
- traditions of decision making
- channels for the expression and mobilization of protest
- the opportunities, the pay-offs and the costs of alliances
- the possibilities, implication and the limitations of majority rule (112).
“The decisive contrasts among the Western party systems clearly reflect differences in the national histories of conflict and compromise across the first three of the four cleavage lines distinguished in our analytical schema: the centre-periphery, the State-church and the land-industry…” (122).
Four historical epochs:
Cleavage: Centre-Periphery = Reformation
Cleavage: State-Church = National Revolution; 1789 and after
Cleavage: Land-Industry = Industrial Revolution; 19th century
Cleavage: Owner-worker = the Russian Revolution; 1917 and after (130).
“…the party systems of the 1960s reflect with few exceptions the cleavage structures of the 1920s. This is a crucial characteristic of Western competitive politics in the age of high mass consumption…” (134).
Brubaker, Roger. “Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Gemany.” 1992
“Every modern state formally defines its citizenry, publically identifying a set of persons as its members and residually designating all others as noncitizens or aliens” (21).
“In this respect the modern state is not simply a territorial organization but a membership organization, an association of citizens” (21).
“A reason for the neglect of formal citizenship is the territorial bias in the study of the state. The state is conceived as a territorial organization, not as a membership organization” (22).
“Social interaction may be open to all comers or it may be closed, in the sense that it excludes or restricts the participation of certain outsiders” (23).
“Citizenship is thus both an instrument and an object of closure” (23).
“From the point of view of the noncitizen, then, territorial closure has a decisive bearing on life chances” (24).
In
“The need to coordinate admission and expulsion rules among states in a compact and economically integrated state-system led directly to the codification of the rules governing citizenship” (27).
“That the exclusion of noncitizens from the franchise for national elections has nowhere been seriously challenged, even in many European states with sizable populations of long-tern resident noncitizens, testifies the force – indeed the axiomatic status – of nationalism in modern states” (28).
“All forms of closure presuppose some way of defining and identifying outsiders and insiders” (29).
“Closure based on citizenship is regulated by formally articulated norms and enforced by specialized agents employing formal identification routines” (30).
“From a global perspective, to be sure, citizenship is virtually universal. In this perspective, citizenship is an international filing system, a mechanism for allocating persons to states” (31).
“The ascription of citizenship at birth is based on a presumption of membership. This presumption reflects the fact that at birth certain persons have a high probability of developing the close attachments and loyalties to particular society and state are supposed to underlie citizenship” (32).
“Persons to whom the citizenship of a state is not ascribed at birth may be able to acquire it later in life through naturalization” (33).
“Modern national citizenship was an invention of the French Revolution” (35).
“The Revolution in short, invented both the nation-state and the modern institutionand ideology of national citizenship” (35).
“As a national revolution the French Revolution shaped the institution of modern citizenship in several distinct ways. By leveling legal distinctions inside the nation, it gave a common substance to citizenship, it created the ideological basis for modern nationalism…” (48).
“The development of national citizenship followed a longer and more tortuous path in
“The semantic differentiation in German reflects the independent and sometimes antagonistic course of state-building, nationalism and democracy in
“This chapter, by contrast, is concerned not with the content of citizenship law – the system – the system of pure jus sanguinis – but with the development of citizenship as a legal institution regulating membership of the state” (52).
“As we have seen the development of citizenship is inextricably bound up with that of the modern state and state system. Two phases of this dual development have been outlined” (71).
‘The dual developmental history traced in this chapter reflects the intrinsic duality of modern citizenship, a status at once universal and particularistic, internally inclusive and externally exclusive” (72).
Lapalombara and Weiner. “The Origin of Political Parties.” 1966
“…the circumstances under which parties first arise in a developing political system – together with their initial tone and configuration – clearly have an important effect on the kinds of parties which subsequently emerge” (25).
“An internally created political party is one that emerges gradually from the activities of legislators themselves” (26).
“An externally created party are those that emerge outside the legislature and invariably involve some challenge to the ruling group and a demand for more representation” (27).
“Such parties are more recent phenomena; they are invariably associated with an expanded suffrage, strongly articulated secular or religious ideologies, and, in most of the developing areas, nationalistic and anti-colonial movements” (27-28)
“The real impetus for the creation of some form of party organization as the local level in the West is generally thought to be the extension of the suffrage” (27).
“While some scholars have, as we have seen, stressed the importance of parliament and the expansion of the suffrage as a critical variable in the emergence of parties, others, particularly historians of Eurpean intellectual history, have stressed the role of ideology” (29).
“Indeed most of the mass parties extant in the West would probably not have emerged had there not developed, in addition to an extended suffrage, direct challenges to prevailing ideologies” (30).
Kirchheimer, Otto. “The Catch-All Party.” 1966.
“With these partial exceptions, bourgeois parties showed no capacity to change from clubs for parliamentary representation into agencies for mass politics able to bargain with the integration-type mass parties according to the laws of the political market” (51).
“Following the Second World War the old-style bourgeois party of individual representation became the exception” (52).
“If the party cannot hope to catch all categories of voters, it may have a reasonable expectation of catching more voters in all those categories who interests do not adamantly conflict” (53).
“As a rule, only major parties can become successful catch-all parties” (55).
“Conversion to catch-all parties constitutes a competitive phenomenon. A party is apt to accommodate to its competitor’s successful style because of hope of benefits or fear of losses on election day” (57).
Daalder, Hans. “The Reach of the Party System.” 1966.
“Partly as a consequence of historical factors European parties have differed greatly in the extent to which they have permeated and enveloped other political elites” (78).
“In this section the reach of a party system is briefly analyzed along the following three dimensions: the extent of involvement of traditional political elites in the party system; the measure of absorption of new political claimants; and the degree of homogenization which parties provide between national and local political elites” (78).
“The ‘reach’ of the party system over against other traditional political elites is revealed most clearly in its relation to the permanent bureaucracy. Bureaucracies have been far more responsive to the party system in some countries than in others” (79).
“Just as older elites in certain cases stayed outside (if not above) the party system, so various groups of society remained outside or below it even after the general franchise was introduced” (83).
“The essence of British politics is therefore national politics and British parties are above all national political organizations. In
“The ‘homogenization’ of politics between the centre and the localities is therefore an important factor in the politics of both. An effective linkage helps to legitimize the national political order” (86).
“On the one hand, we argue that politics is best served by a constant dualistic regrouping of political forces in distinct majority minority positions” (89).
“On the other hand, we hold with equal conviction that a political system can quickly be brought to the breaking point if a number of cleavages come to run parallel to one another – for instance, If conflicts about religion, nationality and class each make for the same division of society” (89).
Katz, Richard and Peter Mair. “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy.” 1995.
Duverger: socialist/mass party model of parties
“In the archetypical mass-party model the fundamental units of political life are pre-defined and well-defined social groups, membership in which is bound up in all aspects of the individual’s life.”
“Each of these groups has an interest which is articulated in the program of its party.”
“The models of party that we have been discussing a sharp distinction between parties and the state.”
“The catch-all party while not emerging as part of civil society, but as one that stands between civil society and the state, also seeks to influence the state from the outside, seeking temporary custody of public policy in order to satisfy the short-term demands”
‘The mass party with its organized membership, formal structures and meetings and so on, is the characteristic form of this second stage in the relationships among parties…”
“We see the emergence of a new type of party, the cartel party, characterized by the interpretation of party and state, and also by a pattern of inter-party collusion.”
“As noted above, the most obvious distinction between the different models of party – the elite or cadre party, the mass party, the catch-all party and now the cartel party – concerns the particular social and political context within which each of these parties emerged…”
“With the emergence of the cartel party, comes a period in which the goals of politics, at least for now, become more self-referential, with politics becoming a profession in itself – a skilled profession, the be sure, and one in which the limited inter-party competition that does ensue take place on the basis of competing claims to efficient and effective management.”
“In this revised model, the essence of democracy lies in the ability of voters to choose from a fixed menu of political parties.”
“To put it another way democracy ceases to be seen as a process by which limitations or controls are imposed on the state by civil society, becoming instead a service provided by the state for civil society.”
Kitschelt, Herbert. “European Social Democracy Between Political Economy and Electoral Competition.” 1999.
“In the 1980s and 1990s, social democratic parties have experienced unprecedented difficulties in choosing and implementing economic policies” (317).
“Social democratic party strategies and outcomes can be analyzed in terms of three interconnected dilemmas.”
- political-economic dilemma: thos economic strategies which have allowed social democract in the 1980s and 1990s to gain government office in the short run contribute to serious electoral losses and eventual defeat of left-dominated cabinets in the longer run
- electoral dilemma: winning or preserving government office often may involve sacrificing vote winning or preserving government office may involve sacrificing vote shares, yielding a trade-off between strategic objectives that occur in multiparty systems
- organizational dilemma: a party’s commitment to an internal organization that facilitates strategic flexibility and responsiveness to changing tastes in the electorate and an organization that captures a loyal core electorate (321).
More on dilemmas:
- the political-economic dilemma forces them to choose between a ‘centrist’ programmatic appeal conceding the need for market liberalization that allows them to boost their electoral support initially or to participate in coalition governments with other market-liberalizing parties
- social democratic parties resolve the political-economic dilemma in favor of market liberalization only if the second, electoral dilemma is mild
“Whether or not social democratic parties bite the bullet and sacrifice votes for government office and accept the consequences of gradual electoral decline by embracing market-liberalizing political economic strategies…” (344).
Kersbergen, Kees van. “Contemporary Christian Democracy and the Demise of the Politics of Mediation” 1999.
“This chapter starts from an intriguing observation: the historical fate of the Christian democratic parties of continental Western Europe does not seem to be determined solely or linearly by the declining impact of religion on social and political attitudes” (346).
“The anticipated association between secularization and the decline of religiously motivated social and political movements is variable and puzzling” (346).
“Measured in terms of the frequency of church attendance the decline of religion since the 1960s has been articulate, particularly in countries where Roman Catholics constituted at least a large minority of the population” (348).
‘I am not arguing that secularization is unrelated to the declining electoral appeal of Christian democratic parties. However, political sociology reaches its limits here” (351).
“Christian democracy has historically nurtured and profited from the salient religious cleavage in western Europe” (351).
“Christian democracy is a distinctive political movement that has fostered an equally characteristic political economy and a qualitatively distinctive postwar path to welfare capitalism” (351).
“Cross-class coalitions both among the electorate and within the parties have distinguished Christian democratic parties to a large extent. Particularly the absence of extreme class- distinctiveness as well a high level of institutionalized acceptance of factions has been a property of European Christian democracy” (356).
“The main reason why secularization did not have an immediate and universal negative effect on the electoral position of Christian democratic parties is that the transformation of the social structure was in fact mediated by the institutionalized social coalitions that Christian democratic parties…” (364).
“As Christian democratic politics and policies became increasingly contradictory, the parties found themselves in precarious circumstances” (364).
Berger, Suzanne. “Organizing Interests in
“The energy crisis, the end of rapid growth, inflation and high employment, and rising social conflict challenged common conceptions of how industrial societies operated and of how they were evolving. The inability of social science to illuminate these new realities suggested the weakness of current theories” (1).
“The difficulties that individual scholars faced in their research reopened debate on three great themes: the characteristics of the societies of advanced industrial, capitalst countries; the nature and role of the state in these countries; and the course of the trajectory along which these societies are moving” (2).
“There were several reasons that interest groups moved to the center of the group’s concerns” (2).
“Crosscutting cleavages in society, the overlapping memberships of groups, social mobility – all work to maintain a fluidity in the relations among various organized interests and to undermine the bases on which a situation of permanent domination could be constructed” (5).
‘The interests of industrial societies at the same stage of development differ mainly insofar as conditions in some countries made it possible for interests to emerge and organize freely an in other countries to subordinate interest group interest group formation to ideological politics, thereby deforming the expression of the pragmatic needs, the real interest of society” (6)
“The defining characteristic of interest groups is that they articulate the claims and needs of society and transmit them into the political process” (8-9).
“Among the specificities of national experience that have shaped interest group formation, one stand out in the essays as particularly important: the timing and characteristics of state intervention. The differences among national patterns of interest organization reflect significant variations in the substance of social and economic programs and in the sequence of adoption of policies” (14).
“Corporatism has spread more or less rapidly across the developed countries, depending on a variety of national facilitating conditions or obstacles. The trend is toward its establishment as the stable mode of interest intermediation in advanced industrial capitalist societies” (19).
Streck and Schmitter. “From National Corporatism to Transnational Pluralism: Organized Interests in the Single European Market.” 1991.
“Whatever the differences between the various versions of the theory, or pre-theory of European regional integration, organized interest groups were always assigned a prominent place in it. Especially in the neofuctionalist image of
“In many ways, the status provided for organized interests in the future European polity bore strong resemblance to a model of interest politics that some time later came to be known to students of politics as ‘neocorporatism’” (135).
“As in the latter, the integrated European polity was to be one that was primarily concerned with governing a ‘mixed economy’ according to rules of technical and professional expertise whose prudent application was to help avoid social conflict and disruption” (135).
Neocorporatism: “privileged participation of organized interest in policy and through mutually supportive organizational arrangements between the machineries of government on the one hand and of large, centralized interest organizations on the other” (135).
“But while motivated speculation about the politics of a unified Europe prepared the ground for the rediscovery of corporatism as a concept, at the European level the reality of corporatism was not found” (135).
“Why was it that a centralized pattern of interest politics did not emerge at the European level when it was so common in national politics? Rather than in neofuctionalist terms, the answer to the puzzle of the stagnant record record of European interest politics has to be given in a language that recognizes the significance of conflict and power and does not submerge politics in the technicalities of managing sectoral spillovers” (139).
“As a consequence of fundamental national difference, European union officials always had to face tendencies among their constituents either to seek national solutions for their problems and ignore the supranational level altogether or to pursue their ‘European’ interests through intergovernmental channels…” (140).
“The growing frustration of European unions in the late 1970s with the miniscule results of long and complicated discussions in Brussels and increasingly with the European Community as such, was in large part due to the political strength business was able to draw from its organizational weakness” (141).
“In the history of the Community up to the present, intergovernmentalism and the veto powers of individual nations were always strong enough to preempt or modify centrally made decisions” (143).
“The economic performance of different capitalist economies thus became more divergent than ever in the 1970s and as the history of European integration testifies, divergent performance is not at all conducive to countries giving up a share of their sovereignty – the weak ones being afraid of becoming subservient to the strong ones and the strong ones seeing no need to dilute, and even being afraid of diluting, their national success” (144).
“The main concession governments seem to have made in return for business giving up previous claims for national protection was that the future European political economy was to be significantly less subject to institutional regulation – national or supranational – than it would have been in the social-Democratic 1970s…” (149).
“As neocoropratism has always been conditional on a measure of political strength of organized labor, the prospects for its restoration in the post-192 European nationa-states are therefore dim” (150).
“…today hardly anybody expects that the supranational European polity of the future will be a replication of the European nation-state of the past” (150).
“Regions, not being states, are by definition unable to insert coercive power in the voluntary contractual and communitarian relations between their citizens” (155).
Crouch, Colin. “Sharing Public Space: States and Organized Interests in
“…the variety of experience in the ways in which different nation-states moved into and out of the liberal period deserves separate examination” (177).
“It is my contention that the extent to which modes of behavior based on the pre-parliamentary phase survived during the high period of parliamentary liberalism has a significant impact on the shaping of modern interest politics” (178).
“I wish merely to offer a reminder that complex societies very rarely present tabulae rasae, even after events as shattering as the two world wars, and that recent institutions and behavior have deep historical roots” (178).
“The two decades after the crash of 1873 were such a period of institutional innovation. Everywhere industrialism was moving out of its purely competitive phase into the epoch of ‘organized capitalism’” (179).
“It is a crucial feature of the classic liberal political economy that political space is monopolized by specialized political institutions: legislature, executive and judiciary” (180).
“Theoretically therefore, a pure liberal market economy requires a state that is not only limited and restrained but which is, within its proper sphere, sovereign” (180).
“By concentrating and distilling political sovereignty into itself, the absolutist state depoliticized civil society in a manner useful to the development of market relations, though in many cases it went too far and began to use its accretion of power to interfere in civil society itself” (181).
“Order was typically secured through a combination of direct but external state regulation and market forces, with the state guaranteeing the private property rights necessary for market relations and contract to operate” (181).
Four patterns:
- secular liberalism vs. Catholicism (France)
- where Catholicism generated hegemony (
- Protestant church provided few political challenges (
- Mixture of religious and secular forces, or consociationism (
“It is possible to summarize the previous discussion by treating the different patterns discovered as constituting different pathways: developments and events having pushed a particular society down one path its subsequent development will tend to proceed further down the same way…” (203).
Piattoni, Simona. “Clientelism in Historical and Comparative Perspective.” 2001.
“Political clientlism and patronage are widely diffused phenomena spanning across time and space and touching virtually all political systems in which votes count for something” (1).
“This book starts from the assumption that clientelism and patronage are strategies for acquisition, maintenance, and aggrandizement of political power, on the part of the patrons and strategies for the protection and promotion of their interests, on the part of the clients, and that their deployment is driven by given sets of incentives and disincentives” (2).
“As political strategies clientelism and patronage have the capacity to adapt to the existing circumstances as well as to alter them” (2).
“Patronage and clientelism, then. Are largely the same phenomenon with the latter being more penetrating and all-encompassing than the former” (7).
“With clientelism the emphasis is clearly put on the clients: how to win their vote, retain their support, command their allegiance” (7).
“The way out of this paradox is to follow the lead of Luigi Graziano and interpret patron-client relations strictly as exchange relations. Patronage and clientelism are quid pro quo relations, ruled by economic principles” (11).
“Since clientelism amounts to bending public decision-making to the promotion of individual interests, clientelism implies the pliability of the structures of public decision-making to particularistic considerations” (17).
“Real democracies, as opposed to idealized ones, do not operate only on the basis of categorical interests represented through territorially elected representatives and through functionally selected spokespersons” (193).
“While the inputs of politics may be particularistic, the output is still supposed to have universal applicability” (194).
“Whether or not such exchanges occur on a systematic basis depends on whether the structures of public decision-making – elected government and nonelected bureaucracy – are respectively interested in and available for this kind of exchange and whether the citizens have ways of obtaining access to desired goods other than entering such exchange relations” (195).
(
“The Greek, Spanish and Italian peasants were considerably less empowered than their Swedish, English and Dutch counterparts: they were poorer, less literate and less organized” (197).
“Interest politics is often particularistic: it is the task of political institutions to ensure that particular interests are weighed, ordered and aggregated” (200).
“In historical perspective the sense of crisis that permeated The Crisis of Democracy may have reflected the confluence of two factors: first, the surge of radical political activism that swept the advanced industrial democracies in the 1960s; economic upheavals spurred by the oil crisis…” (4).
“At the outset we want to emphasize a distinction that Crozier and his colleagues felt less need to stress: the distinction between the effectiveness of specific democratic governments and the durability of democratic institutions per se” (6).
“Even where public discontent with the performance of particular democratic governments has become so acute as to overturn the party system, these changes have not included any serious threat to fundamental democratic principles and institutions. In this sense we see no significant evidence of a crisis of democracy” (7).
“The premise of this book is that public confidence in the performance of representative institutions in Western Europe, North America, and Japan has declined since the original Trilateral Commission report was issued, and in that sense most of these democracies are troubled” (7).
“Comparable trends in public opinion in Europe are more variegated, but there, too, the basic picture is one of spreading disillusionment with established political leaders and institutions” (10).
“In general terms, the evidence of declining trust is more convincing in nations where the data series are more extensive and cover longer periods of time” (14).
“A comprehensive look at this pattern of weakening party ties, or ‘dealignment’ reveals that popular identification with political parties has fallen in almost all the advanced industrial democracies” (17).
“Some of us believe that democracy is not just about making citizens happy, and that it is also supposed to facilitate ‘good government’ whether or not citizens are pleased with government actions” (22).
Three explanations for the deterioration:
- declines in the capacity of political agents to act of citizen’s interests and desires
- decline in citizens faith about government officials
- complex relationship between governmental performance, civic trust and social capital
“An erosion of confidence in the major institutions of society, especially those of representative democracy, is a far more serious threat to democracy than a loss of trust in other citizens or politicians” (52).
Confidence in military and church particularly less in the 1990s
“Consistent with the classic ‘funnel of causality’ logic, we first entered the social background variables that are most commonly associated with social and political attitudes (i.e. gender, social class and age); then the cultural variables of social trust and voluntary activism; then the cultural variables of social trust and voluntary activism” (64).
“It is clear from these regressions that people’s confidence in public institutions is only weakly associated with social trust, and its association with voluntary activism is even weaker. Whatever voluntary associations may or may not do for social capital, they seem to hold little importance for political capital” (65).
“This finding, however, is wholly consistent with the position adopted by most of the authors in this volume that is primarily governmental performance that determines the level of citizens confidence in public institutions” (72).
Scharpf, Fritz. “Interdependence and Democratic Legitimation.” 2000.
“My chapter will focus on one particular type of constraint on capacity: growing international economic interdependence” (101).
“Instead, I will examine the analytical and normative arguemtns that could link interdependence to citizen satisfaction and ultimately to democratic legitimacy. I will argue that one should indeed expect such links to exist, but that their effect on legitimacy is strongly mediated by the distinctive characteristics” (101).
“Because of the mobility of economic actors and factors, there is now a much greater degree of interdependence not only among the formerly compartmentalized national economies, but also among national policy choices that affect the economy” (107).
“As interdependence increases the nation-state finds its range of policy options exogenously constrained and some previously legitimated policies become less effective, more costly, or downright unfeasible – which must be counted as a loss of democratic self-determination even if new options are added to the policy repertoire” (115).
“In addition, as external legal and economic constraints multiply under conditions of growing international interdependence, the role of experts and specialized knowledge will increase to an extent that may render the role of authentic but untutored popular preferences practically insignificant” (116).
“Although there is no reason why the larger democracies, too, cannot come to live with international independence, they need to learn from the successful small and open countries that orienting discourses require political leadership” (120).
Tarrow, Sidney. “Mad Cows and Social Activists: Contentious Politics in Trilateral Democracies.”
“What happened to the movement organizations of the 1960s? The memoirs of ‘sixties’ activists tell only part of the story. Some activists dispersed into private life and were never heard from again. Others – particularly in
“Social activism has never been directed at politics alone: social movements have always aimed at the transformation of self and community as well at policy and social change” (283).
“What seems to be unusual about the period since The Crisis of Democracy was published is that activism within civil society has grown out of activism in the public arena” (283).
“…the new activism may be creating networks of working relations between citizens and their governments even as those same citizens express their dismay to survey researchers about the performance of the latter” (288).
Betz, Hans-George. “The New Politics of the Right.” 1998.
“To be sure, right-wing movements and parties are nothing new in advanced Western democracies” (1).
What distinguishes the recent wave of right-wing mobilization:
- the extent to which various right-wing parties and movements have successfully established themselves within roughly the same time span in a substantial number of Western democracies
- the extent to which they have managed to influence the political discourse on a range of significant sociocultural and sociopolitical issues
- the extent to which they have succeeded in gaining significant political offices and positions
“Often led by charismatic figures who are at least as comfortable in press conferences and TV talk shows as they are among their supporters, the new parties of the right are among the most prominent representatives of a new political entrepreneurialism” (2).
Right wing extremism has two traits: a. the fundamental rejection of the democratic rules of the game, of individual liberty and of the principle of individual equality; b. replacement by an authoritarian system (3).
None of the parties are like this definition.
“What united current right wing parties is programmatic radicalism and populist appeal” (3).
“Among the most important targets have been the social welfare state and multicultural society, with country-specific issues also featuring prominently on the contemporary right’s political agenda” (4).
“Core elements of the populist strategy are the claim to speak for the unarticulated opinions, demands, and sentiments of the ordinary people; and the mobilization of resentment against a set of clearly defined enemies” (4).
“The radical right, in the name of what it considers genuine equality, has generally called for the abolition of affirmative action programs and other programs designed to protect minorities” (5).
“The success of the radical populist right thus reflects to a large extent the psychological strain associated with uncertainties produces by large-scale socioeconomic and sociocultural change” (8).
Riedsperger, Max. ‘The Freedom Party of
“When, in 1988, Haider referred to the Austrian nation as a singular ideological miscarriage , he was widely charged with using the language of right-extremism and neo-Nazism” (31).
“The Freedom Party of Austria is appealing to the traditional and implicitly German-Austrian values of the majority as bulwark against trendy multiculturalism” (32).
“As the heir of this tradition, the FPO, in all its programs has called for the reduction of government so as to maximize personal freedom and has emphasized equality of opportunity” (32).
“In the parliamentary campaign that began three months later, the FPO made crime, immigration, moral values, corruption and waste of public monies in the ‘patronage economy’ of the obsolete ‘social partnership’ the dominant issues” (37).
Immerfall, Stefan. “The Neo-Populist Agenda.” 1998.
“Our argument was that the success of the radical populist right is above all a reflection of the psychological strain associated with uncertainties produced by large-scale socio-economic and sociostructural change” (249).
“In a nutshell I will emphasize economic, political and sociocultural marginalization processes as driving forces of the neo-populist parties success” (250).
“Rather than an institutional bulwark against the marginalization impacts of economic transformation, the welfare state and old labor politics are regarded as blocking opportunity structures and closing off mobility channels” (252).
“They gain independence through voluntary contributions and party activism for campaigns, communication, and organizational survival” (253).
“Anti-establishment and nationalistic politics serve as mentally upligting ways out of social deprivation and disintegration” (254).
Karapin, Roger. “The Politics of Immigration Control in
“Antiimmigration mobilization consists of public statements and actions intended to gain political support for policies that will restrict immigration” (423).
“The argument in this article builds on work that explains immigration politics in terms of the actions of subnational politicians and social movements, including violence against immigrants” (425).
Hypothesis:
- the partial autonomy of antimmigration politics
- subnational mobilization
- social movement activity
- dramatic events
- the politics of social movement mobilization
“Socioeconomic conditions create the potential for mobilization strong enough to achieve immigration restrictions, but such mobilization does not automatically develop” (425).
“Antiimigration mobilization by state or local politicians precedes and influences national campaigns for and the adoption of immigration restrictions” (425).
“State and local politicians, not national ones, were in the vanguard of the antiimmigration forces during the long periods when the immigration control issue developed into a major political theme” (438).
“In general, the field of comparative political economy concentrates on two central issues: how to explain patterns of economic performance and policy across nations” (136).
a. National policy styles: “Although the organization of the political economy figures prominently in some of these analyses, the more basic causal factor seems to be differences in the attitudes or orientations of the relevant political and economic actors, with roots deep in national history” (137).
“The great advantages of such analyses is that they are able to capture a range of attitudinal variables, often cultural in character…” (137).
b. Neocorporatist analyses: generally defined as a process of social or economic policy making in which considerable influence over the formulation of implementation of policy is devolved onto the organized representatives of producer groups, often by means of peak-level bargaining about wage settlements (138).
“They linked specific economic outcomes to organizational, as opposed to attitudinal, variables, thereby focusing our attention on the organization of the political economy” (138).
Critiques: Neocorporatist regimes only work well with social democratic parties in power (139).
c. Neoinstitutionalist analyses: proponents of this approach argued that the institutions structuring the flow of funds to industry affect both the behavior of firms and the options available to public policy makers (139).
Three contributions:
- it expanded our conception of the range of organizational variables that might be said to affect policy and performance
- it drew special attention to the impact of the financial system on firm behavior, economic policy and economic performance
- these analyses emphasized the importance of modeling interaction effects between the multiple institutional features of the political economy
d. Organization of production: what unites this literature is the overarching interest in exploring how the organization of production contributes to economic performance and how it changes
“The fundamental contribution of this literature has been to draw our attention to the impact of firm organization, interfirm linkages and work organization on the performance of the economy” (140).
More recent theories:
Sectoral governance mechanisms: public policy at the national, regional or local level can have a significant impact on industrial relationships…this web of relationships, linking firms to other firms, to the labor movement, and to the state can have a significant impact on the nature and success of the strategies that firms pursue (141).
Decentralized coordination: on this view it is not structure that determines strategy, but strategy that will ultimately determine structure (142).
Varieties of capitalism approach: the unit of analysis is the nation-state…looks into why nation-states develop various varieties of capitalist outcomes (143).
This perspective “suggests that we need a more firm-centered approach to the political economy. It argues that nations and the firms within them are likely to follow distinctive adjustment paths that will be conditioned by the institutional structures of the political economy” (162).
“It [also] suggests that interdependence is unlikely to lead to the levels of convergence that many expect” (163).
“What this analysis does suggest is that successful adjustment will require not only the investment in human capital that is rightly popular today, but also investment in social capital, understood as the institutional infrastructure that makes fruitful coordination among firms and other economic actors possible” (163).
Schmidt, Vivien. “The Futures of European Capitalism.” 2002.
“In this book I argue that while both globalization and Europeanization have been tremendous economic, institutional and ideational forces for change, they have not produced convergence” (V).
“Although all have liberalized their economies, their policies still vary, albeit within a more restricted range; their practices continue to diverge, although much less so; and their discourses not only differ, they make a difference” (V).
“They have long represented ideal-typically different systems in terms of economic policies, given traditional British liberalism, French statism, and German corporatism; in terms of economic practices, given British market capitalism, French state capitalism, and German managed capitalism…” (3).
“Globalization seems to prescribe certain kinds of policies, primarily the low government deficits, debts, and inflation that are the cornerstones of monetarist policies, as well as deregulation, privatization, decentralization of labor markets and welfare state retrenchment” (17).
“Individually governments continue to exercise policy choice, even though such choice is no doubt more restricted than in the past. The state still has a role to play, just a different role, since globalization resulting from the internationalization of both the financial markets and trade has indeed reduced governments margins for manoeuvre” (22)
“Financial globalization has served to promote capital mobility while weakening the protective barriers around national financial systems and diminishing government’s ability to pursue independent macroeconomic management strategies” (22).
“Although the close ties of business with governments and/or labour have in many cases eroded, multinationals nevertheless remain connected to the nation-state as a result of continuing political linkages, cultural traits, and economic base” (27).
Ingo and Walter. “European Diplomacy, Institutions and the Financial Area.” 1997.
There were two key dimensions to the structure of European diplomacy:
- states held a dual membership. They were signatories to the EU treaties, and they were participants in the world system of states.
- European political constituencies consistently supported the idea of European cooperation, but repeatedly showed their reservations whenever the member states in the EU sought to disturb their national ways.
“The
“Supranationalists contended that common institutions had to be sufficiently powerful in order to master Europe’s diversity, and to allow Europe to assume its place in world affairs as a singly entity to be taken seriously” (5).
“Intergovernmentalists argued that only the democratically elected representatives of the states could negotiate on behalf of their peoples” (5).
“Since its inception in 1958, the EU has moved uneasily along this spectrum between integration and the assertion of national identities” (6).
“Financial and monetary integration were seen by many of the EU’s founders in the 1950s as a necessary component of the overall process of economic integration. Even so, nowhere was there mention of monetary union as a goal” (6).
EU started as the European Coal and Steel Community
“The Commision’s principal allies in reviving the Rome Treaty’s promise of a unified EU internal market were European businesses, particularly those represented in the Round Table of European Industrialists” (12).
Verdun, Amy. “European Responses to Globalization and Financial Market Integration.” 2000.
Four stages of economic integration;
- free trade areas, in which the associated countries agree to remove the barriers to trade between them but all may have different barriers to third countries
- customs unions, in which a common external tariff is decided upon vis-à-vis non-associated countries
- common markets, which embody a customs union and allow capital and people to move freely in the area
- economic unions, with centralized or harmonized decision-making concerning monetary, fiscal and other policy areas (18).
“Neo-functionalism provided a first systematic theory of regional integration. In explaining European integration the most influential work was carried out by the American political scientist Ernest Haas” (28).
Intergovernmentalism: “Hoffman stressed that the nation would remain the most logical unit in the international system…” (34).
“The intergovernmentalist approach supplies a good insight into how the bargaining mechanism takes place as the level of the European Council meetings” (35).
“Below and eclectic theory of economic integration is presented. It is eclectic as it does not exclusively build on any singly existing theory” (44).
Three Phases of eclectic theory:
- integration shows a country in which citizens are aware of the need to stand together as a nation and willing to cooperate in order to achieve the aim of strengthening the position of the country
- the nation state will try to obtain at least its proportional share of the accumulated trade and production of the integrated whole
- the integration objective is completely fulfilled, the country’s domestic redistributive struggle is bound to return
Menz, Georg. “Reregulating the Single Market: National Varieties of Capitalism and their Responses to Europeanization” 2003.
“It is argued that the organizational power of trade unions and employers’ associations and their preferences critically shape the respective national response in
“This study analyses the process of formulation and implementation of national re-regulatory responses to EU-induced liberalization…” (533).
“The national level is therefore not rendered obsolete through economic liberalization impetus from the EU, but in fact enhanced in its significance” (548).
“Contributing to the varieties of capitalism literature, this study underlines the importance of domestic level institutions in responding to Europeanization” (548).
“Nation response strategies to top-down Europeanization are by no means unitary. They are conditioned by the institutional configuration of domestic interest associations in relevant policy domains” (549).
Anderson-Esping, Gosta. “Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economics.” 1999.
“The problems that beset the welfare state are intimately connected with the malfunctioning of labor markets and families” (1).
“We are, in brief entering a new political economy wracked with dilemmas and trade-offs. Postindustrial society may hold the promise of many wonders, but equality is probably not among them. Hence our growing nostalgia for the Golden Age” (1).
Three lessons from the welfare state:
- welfare state has been attacked from both the left and the right
- all earlier crises dissipated with time…the promised collapse of the 1950s first led to an economic boom and brought with it rights to the poor and minorities
- the present crisis is not from endogenous shocks as previously held, but from exogenous shocks to the system, namely the new global economy (3).
“This book is an attempt to come to grips with the ‘new political economy’ that is emerging. For lack of a better term, I refer to it as the postindustrial economy. One premises of my analyses is that ‘postindustrial’ transformation is institutionally path-dependent” (4).
“The ‘real crisis’ of contemporary welfare regimes lies in the disjuncture between the existing institutional construction and exogenous change. Contemporary welfare states and labour market regulations have their origins in, and mirror, a society that no longer obtains…” (5).
“I agree that the new political economy presents trade-offs that make it exceedingly difficult to harmonize some egalitarian goals with a return to full employment” (5).
“Welfare states today face multiple egalitarian tensions. On the one side there is the problem of how to balance equality and equity; on the other side, how to combine egalitarianism with full employment” (6).
Hacker, Jacob “The Divided Welfare State.” 2002.
“What is distinctive about American social welfare practice is not the level of spending but the source” (7).
“This is the story of America’s public-private welfare regime: what it looks like, how it came about, what its social consequences are, and how it shapes the politics of social policy in the United States” (7).
“Perhaps the most important amendment concerns the political advantages enjoyed by established public social programs. It is now common place to claim that large-scale government programs gain constituencies and condition popular expectations, making them difficult to dismantle or reform” (9).
“Yet widely distributed private social benefits also enjoy many of these same advantages, especially if they become a primary source of social protection for the working population” (9).
“The
“The
“If the exceptionalism of the American welfare regime is tied up with the extensive presence of private social provision within it, then the task of the analyst is considerably more difficult than students of social policy generally acknowledge” (20).
Stone Sweet and Sandholtz. “Integration, Supranational Governance, and the Institutionalization of the European Polity.” 1998.
“Rising levels of transnational exchange trigger processes that generate movement toward increased supranational governance” (217).
“In other words, we emphasize the role of transnational exchange (e.g. trade, investment, the development of Euro-groups, networks and associations) in pushing the EC’s organizations to construct new policy and new arenas for policy-relevant behavior” (217).
“We set ourselves the task of developing and testing a theory of how supreanational governance evolves over time” (218).
“The three constituent elements of our theory are prefigured in neofucntionalism, the development of transnational society, the role of supranational organizations with meaningful autonomous capacity to pursue integrative agendas, and the focus on European rule-making to resolve international policy externalities” (221).
“Globalization, which is integration of a broader geographic scope, can also stimulate movement toward increased supranational governance within
“We have proposed a theory of integration that relies on three causal factors: exchange, organization and rules” (236).
Moravcsik, Andrew. “The Choice for
“My central claim is that the broad lines of European integration since 1955 relfect three factors: patterns of commercial advantage, the relative bargaining power of important governments, and the incentives to enhance the credibility of interstate commitments” (241).
“In short I argue that a tripartite explanation of integration – economic interest, relative power, credible commitments – accounts for the form, substance and timing of major steps toward European integration” (243).
“I conclude instead in favor of an alternative theory of foreign economic policy that holds that there is no hierarchy of interests: national interests tend instead to reflect direct issue-specific consequences” (245).
Moravcsik argued that national preferences were still most important…it became Moravcsik versus the neofucntionalists…
Hooghe, Liesbet and
“In their view, European governance is now dominated by a complex web of interconnected institutions at the supranational, national and subnational levels of government”
“Multilevel governance does not confront the sovereignty of states directly. Instead of being explicitly challenged, states in the European Union are being melded into a multi-level polity by their leaders and the actions are being melded into a multi-level polity by their leaders and the actions of numerous subnational and supranational actors” (309).
Risse, Cowles and Caporaso. “Europeanization and Domestic Change.” 2001.
“This volume explores the impact of Europeanization – which we define as the emergence and the development at the European level of distinct structures of governance – on the domestic structures of the member states” (1).
“We find neither wholesale convergence nor continuing divergence of national policy structures, institutions and other patterned relationships” (1).
“In this book, we choose to focus on the impact of Europeanization domestically – that is, at the national and subnational levels” (4).
“The broad proposition that Europeanization affects domestic politics is noncontroversial” (4).
“Formal institutions, including political and social systems, usually consist of informal structures, too, such as policy networks, epistemic communities, and so on” (5).
posted by Joseph M. Ellis @ 9:48 PM
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