West European Politics articles from October 1995

West European Politics archives from October 1995

The impact of parties and unions on welfare statism.
October 1, 1995... In this article an attempt will be made to analyse the consequences of the changing relationship between parties and trade unions for welfare statism in 13 West European countries.(1) Welfare statism (the dependent variable) is here defined as...

Legitimacy through referendum? The nearly successful domino-strategy of the EU-referendum in Austria, Finland, Sweden and Norway. (European Union)
October 1, 1995... The political landscape of Europe has been changing dramatically in the last five years. Most notably, the breakdown of the East and West bloc politics has altered the policy orientation of most West European nations. Furthermore the recession in...

Institutional transfer, social learning and economic policy in Eastern Germany.
October 1, 1995... Much has been said and written about the remarkable degree to which the West Germans transferred virtually all of their institutions with relatively little modification to eastern Germany. For scholars of West Germany this fact has many...

An institutional dinosaur: Austrian corporatism in the post-industrial age.
October 1, 1995... From an evolutionary perspective, institutions exist as long as they are useful. This evolutionary concept also implies the converse: if institutions are becoming obstacles to societal development they will have to adapt or perish. The purpose...

Local policy networks in France and Britain: policy co-ordination in fragmented political sub-systems.
October 1, 1995... Recent theorising has replaced traditional notions of local government with those of urban governance. Whilst the focus of classic British local government studies was on institutions, finance, functions and central-local relations, there is now...

French Communism: the challenge of environmentalism and ecologism.
October 1, 1995... When it comes to dealing with new social issues, existing political parties are often slow to react, whether wittingly or not. They pay little attention to questions which are not directly 'political' and recognised as such. In the mid-nineteenth...

The end of the Whitehall model?
October 1, 1995... The state of the bureaucracy in Britain and its relationship with politicians has become a matter of almost public attention. Long an area that was of limited interest to practitioners and relegated to the unfashionable subfield of political...

The privatisation of welfare: the impact of parties in the private/public mix in pension provision.
October 1, 1995... It is often said that the disjuncture between the public policy of the 1970s and that of the 1990s is not as great as is commonly supposed and that there are distinct continuities linking the policy outputs of both decades. Marsh and Rhodes have...

The British Conservative Party: divisions over European policy.
October 1, 1995... The Conservative Party has long been divided over Europe. Britain finally joined the Community in 1973 under the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath only after a parliamentary battle and much opposition from Tory anti-Marketeers. Tensions...

Suprisingly unsurprising: the Icelandic parliamentary elections of 1995.
October 1, 1995... Parliamentary elections, elections to the Althing, were held in Iceland on 8 April 1995. The main victor seemed to be the 'the old four-party system', which has come under criticism for several years for being outdated and not representing the...

The March 1995 Finnish election: the Social Democrats storm back.
October 1, 1995... The competition between the party leaders to outdo each other's spending cuts was reminiscent of the old men in sauna who torture themselves by casting ever more water on the stones to see if they can steam their neighbours out! - Pekka...

Parliaments in the Modern World.
October 1, 1995... The problem with the 'modern world' is that it keeps changing. Indeed, this is a central premise of this worthy collection of essays: 'legislatures are... vibrant and integral to the viable functioning of a wide range of political systems. The...

Government by the Market? The Politics of Public Choice.
October 1, 1995... This book surveys the numerous policies, mainly introduced in Britain and the United States in the 1980s, based on the belief in the sovereignty of market forces. Peter Self summarises the economic approach to politics, in particular public...

Privatization in Western Europe: Pressures, Problems and Paradoxes.
October 1, 1995... These two books cover somewhat similar ground, but with considerably different emphases. The Wright volume offers comprehensive and well informed reviews of the progress (or otherwise) of privatisation in ten West European countries, including...

Privatization and Regulatory Change in Europe.
October 1, 1995... These two books cover somewhat similar ground, but with considerably different emphases. The Wright volume offers comprehensive and well informed reviews of the progress (or otherwise) of privatisation in ten West European countries, including...

Innovative Leadership in Democracy: Policy Change Under Thatcher.
October 1, 1995... Innovative leadership, so we are told, is the purposive behaviour of office-holders to secure relatively-radical policy change. It occurs when a leader with a strong political will possesses the capacity to enact that will. It is the opposite of...

The French Voter Decides.
October 1, 1995... 'French elections', Andre Siegfried wrote, 'resemble censuses where the people tirelessly repeat, every four years, that they are republican, or Catholic, or anti-clerical.' This stability underpinned the geographical tradition of electoral...

The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic.
October 1, 1995... The limitations of the concept of 'totalitarianism' have long been recognised by most analysts of authoritarian political movements. It was particularly clear that this notion offered an inadequate conceptual basis for exploring the tensions,...

Mapping the West European Left.
October 1, 1995... The mid-1990s is an appropriate moment to re-examine the political identity of European socialism. Just six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall neo-liberal claims to have witnessed the 'death of socialism' appear exaggerated. The plethora of...

Modern European Socialism.
October 1, 1995... The mid-1990s is an appropriate moment to re-examine the political identity of European socialism. Just six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall neo-liberal claims to have witnessed the 'death of socialism' appear exaggerated. The plethora of...

La Gauche Face Aux Mutations en Europe.
October 1, 1995... What is left of the left and what's left of the left of the left? The book edited by Pascal Delwit and J-M De Waele is an ambitious series of articles which look at the main parties of the European left after the collapse of the Berlin Wall....

De La Nation a L'Europe.
October 1, 1995... What is left of the left and what's left of the left of the left? The book edited by Pascal Delwit and J-M De Waele is an ambitious series of articles which look at the main parties of the European left after the collapse of the Berlin Wall....

The Individualizing Society: Value Change in Europe and North America.
October 1, 1995... This Dutch volume reports the results from the second wave of the European Values Study, data for which were collected in 1990 (first wave: 1981). Aside from the major West European nations (13 in all), the surveys were also carried out in the...

New Politics in Trade Unions: Applying Organization Theory to the Ecological Discourse on Nuclear Energy in Sweden and Germany.
October 1, 1995... Few areas of comparative politics have produced scholarship of greater intellectual excitement and conceptual innovation than those about trade unions, labour, work and industrial relations on the one hand; and new social movements,...

Wahlen und europaische Einigung.
October 1, 1995... As aptly demonstrated by Otto Schmuck and Oskar Niedermayer in the first part of Wahlen und europaische Einigung the power of the EU parliament is quite limited. Even more limited is the knowledge citizens have of, and their interest in, the EU's...

Inside European Identities.
October 1, 1995... It might be argued that questions of 'culture' and 'identity' are central to any complete discussion of European integration. Most obviously, the success of projects to unify Europe are likely to be judged by the extent to which genuinely...

National Cultures and European Integration. Exploratory Essays on Cultural Diversity and Common Policies.
October 1, 1995... It might be argued that questions of 'culture' and 'identity' are central to any complete discussion of European integration. Most obviously, the success of projects to unify Europe are likely to be judged by the extent to which genuinely...

Political Restructuring in Europe.
October 1, 1995... This is a valuable collection of essays, some produced for a scholarly conference and others specifically for the volume. The collection is divided into four main parts. The first has an essay on the legal aspects of secession by Cass R. Sunstein...

Nordic Security in the 1990s.
October 1, 1995... This edited book includes an impressive cast of primarily Nordic academics and sets itself the task of beginning to redefine the concept of 'Norden' and to suggest alternative scenarios for the future development of Nordic security and for...