West European Politics articles from July 1993

West European Politics archives from July 1993

Party attitudes towards referendums in Western Europe.
July 1, 1993... The referendum is once again playing an important role in the European unification process. In Denmark, Ireland and France it was employed for the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty; in other countries, the possibility has been discussed....

Domino effect or internal developments? The influences of international events and political id eologies on Catalan and Basque nationalism.
July 1, 1993... Recent political upheavals in the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe and the Horn of Africa and other countries in Africa have spurred international fears of a possible 'domino effect' which successful nationalisms can allegedly...

Top-down to bottom-up? Centre-periphery relations and power structures in France's Gaullist Party.
July 1, 1993... The last 15 years have seen radical transformations in the central-local administrative and political systems of most European countries. One consequence of this, manifested in different ways in different countries, has been the growing political...

Organisational competition and the neo-corporatist fallacy in French agriculture.
July 1, 1993... French agricultural politics during the Fifth Republic has been notable for the collusiveness of its institutions of interest intermediation. Through this system, a set of organisations has enjoyed a prominent, statutorily mandated role in the...

Hypotheses on the Italian administrative system.
July 1, 1993... This article attempts to explain why, in Italy, besides the North-South dualism there is another dualism between the private and public sectors. The analysis is divided into three parts. The first part analyses the structures and procedures of...

Atlantic capitalism versus Rhine capitalism in the European Community.
July 1, 1993... IS THERE A EUROPEAN MODEL OF CAPITALISM? As the turbulence in the European Community's Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992-93 clearly shows, market frontiers now bear little or no relationship to state frontiers. Traditional macro- and...

Change in Dutch political culture: a silent or a silenced revolution?
July 1, 1993... In 'How New is Dutch Politics?',(1) Thomassen and Van Deth point out that the Netherlands has one of the highest proportions of postmaterialists of any country. Consequently it should, according to their interpretation of Inglehart's value change...

The third sector in Switzerland: the transformation of the subsidiarity principle.
July 1, 1993... The current debate within the European Community has given prominence to the theme of the subsidiarity principle. This principle introduces a division of tasks between institutions and arises either inside the state organisation, or in the...

Regional co-operation in Central Europe.
July 1, 1993... In the early 1990s, the Iron Curtain ('From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic . . .') that Winston Churchill referred to in his speech at Fulton in 1946 has collapsed, creating new hope and opportunity, but also new or rather...

Affairs, partner-swapping, and spring tides: the Irish general election of November 1992.
July 1, 1993... The coalition government of Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats (PDs) which had ruled the Republic of Ireland since summer 1989 collapsed in early November 1992. The PDs' ministers resigned after comments made by Irish Prime Minister and...

After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism.
July 1, 1993... These books represent, to some extent, the beginning of a new phase -- and urgency -- in the study of 'democratic socialism' and 'social democracy', a product of a combination of factors: the failure of state socialism in eastern Europe, the...

Politics in Western Europe. An Introduction to the Politics of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the European Community.
July 1, 1993... Given the range of this book the expertise of the authors and the fact that each of the six entries is rather substantial, with a useful 'common analytical framework' focusing in turn on context, institutional structure, power holders (parties,...

Policy and Party Competition.
July 1, 1993... The last decade has seen an unprecedented growth in the comparative information available about political parties and governments, and particularly about the government-related activities of political parties. Who would have dreamed, in 1980,...

Electoral Change: Responses to Evolving Social and Attitudinal Structures in Western Countries.
July 1, 1993... This book provides powerful new ammunition for the battle over the relevance of social structure to party choice and political change. Contrary to Bartolini and Mair (1990; see WEP 13/4, Oct. 1990, pp.1-16) who question whether changes in...

Electioneering: A Comparative Study of Continuity and Change.
July 1, 1993... This book seeks to document and place in context the development of electioneering in a range of countries. The picture that emerges from the country/regional chapters is one of increasing centralisation, driven by mass media, and accompanied by...

British Elections and Parties Yearbook: 1991.
July 1, 1993... This is the first (hopefully of many!) yearbook of the recently formed Elections, Public Opinion and Parties in Britain (EPOP to the cognoscenti) specialist group of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom. It fulfils two main...

Green Party Members: A Profile.
July 1, 1993... This book presents the major findings of an extensive survey into the members of the UK Green Party, carried out in autumn 1990. It provides a uniquely detailed account of the general membership of a new politics type party. Previous research on...

Christian Democracy in Europe.
July 1, 1993... Arising from a conference held in 1990, the five essays that make up this compilation inevitably suffer from being dated. And the collection as a whole has more serious defects. While there is work on the DC, the Belgian and German parties and...

Bargaining for Change: Union Politics in North America and Europe.
July 1, 1993... This volume is a collection of eight case studies, covering six European countries plus the USA and Canada, of the reactions of trade unions to changes in their political and economic environment since 1979. Most of the studies take an...

Industrial Relations in the New Europe.
July 1, 1993... This scholarly, well-edited collection of country essays usefully documents the retreat of organised labour in western Europe since the 1970s. How far this retreat reflects recession and mass unemployment, structural economic change or...

The Struggle for Economic Democracy in Sweden.
July 1, 1993... The fate and fortunes of the Left in Sweden keep attracting international interest, in particular from scholars sympathetic to the aims and methods of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the SAP, and its trade union movement, the LO. Hardly had...

The Birth of Judicial Politics in France: The Constitutional Council in Comparative Perspective.
July 1, 1993... Alec Stone has written a comprehensive description of the inception and subsequent evolution of the French Constitutional Council, but he has also done much more. What he modestly calls a 'hypothesis generating or heuristic case study' is...

British Cabinet Government.
July 1, 1993... In recent years more attention has been given to the Cabinet system in Britain, partly in recognition that Britain is a highly centralised state and, consequently, that core institutions are likely to be especially important. However, until...

Policy Networks in British Government.
July 1, 1993... The concepts of policy communities and networks have been much debated. This book provides a definitive account of the matters at issue, coupled with a group of excellent case studies and an assessment of where the debate ought to go next. It...

Der verkappte Einheitsstaat.
July 1, 1993... The extent of the consequences of unification only gradually dawned on Germans, east and west. What they now have in common is the sober realisation that unification has not been an unmitigated benefit. The prospect was anyway viewed with less...

Deutschland in einer neuen Weltara.
July 1, 1993... This is a closely-argued analysis of the post-unification position of Germany in the international order. It begins by claiming that unification, and the more general changes which have occurred in eastern Europe, have shaken-up the parameters...

Asylpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Entwicklung und Alternativen.
July 1, 1993... These two volumes complement each other and make useful contributions to the existing literature, although in the case of Heinelt and Lohmann the title promises more than the book delivers. Not the treatment of 'immigrants' as such but only that...

The State of the European Community: Policies, Institutions and Debates in the Transition Years.
July 1, 1993... The European Community is characterised by its perpetual state of fermentation, fragmentation and complexity. Studies of integration are therefore most useful where they are most realistic: few can be little more than snapshots of a particular...

European Political Co-operation.
July 1, 1993... While 1992 has been dominated by an often emotional political debate as to whether Maastricht goes too far or not far enough along the road towards European political union, two new books have been published which attempt to examine European...

A Modern Companion to the European Community: A Guide to Key Facts, Institutions and Terms.
July 1, 1993... As the role of the European Community (EC) in governing member states has grown, the publication of reference guides to the EC has itself become a new growth industry. The two reference books under review highlight the diversity of works in this...

High-tech Europe: The Politics of International Cooperation.
July 1, 1993... Programmes to promote European technological collaboration remain understudied both in the literatures on European integration and international regimes. This book is a much needed and ambitious analysis of the creation and operation of schemes...