West European Politics articles from October 1997

West European Politics archives from October 1997

States, societies and the European Union.
October 1, 1997... Fortunately, debates about how the European Union (EU) works have begun to move beyond a somewhat fired discourse between advocates of competing neo-functionalist and realist-intergovernmentalist theories. Recent exchanges on 'liberal...

Regulating digital broadcasting in Europe: the limits of policy convergence.
October 1, 1997... The question of policy convergence or policy transfer has received increasing attention recently, with most interest focusing either on areas where there has been rapid technological change, or where a common set of administrative reforms (such...

'Overcoming the divide' between comparative politics and international relations approaches to the EC: what role for 'post-decisional politics'?
October 1, 1997... There was a time when the study of the European Community (EC)(2) was dominated by the academic discipline of international relations (IR). The debate between theorists working in the realist-intergovernmentalist tradition (who commonly regard...

Policy transfers between governments: the case of administrative reforms.
October 1, 1997... Administrative reform has been one of the few growth industries in an era otherwise characterised by a declining concern with the public sector. In almost any national or provincial capital, or any city hall, around the world one might have...

Pension politics in France: patterns of co-operation and conflict in two recent reforms.
October 1, 1997... In November 1995, pension politics was abruptly brought onto the French political agenda by a massive union-led protest movement. In response to government plans to raise the retirement age for public sector employees, a rail strike virtually...

Towards the army of the future: domestic politics and the end of conscription in France.
October 1, 1997... On 22 February 1996, French President Jacques Chirac took to the national airwaves and announced a sweeping reform of the French military, perhaps the most comprehensive reform in the history of France. It calls for a dramatic restructuring of...

The politics of scarcity: social welfare and health care cutbacks in Finland, 1991-1995.
October 1, 1997... A plethora of theories, beginning with the classic formulation of Wagner's law have been developed to explain why the public sector tends to grow. It is also largely true that most of the pivotal budgetary theories, from Niskanen's(1) model of...

Swiss corporatism in comparative perspective.
October 1, 1997... My theme is Swiss corporatism in comparative perspective.(1) By corporatism I mean the concertation of public policy with interest organisations, which in turn perform quasi-public functions. As one of a group of corporatist countries in...

The 1997 British general election: new Labour, new Britain?
October 1, 1997... LABOUR'S RECOVERY AFTER 1992 The April 1992 election had brought the Conservatives under John Major back to power with a slender but workable majority of 21 seats in the 651seat legislature and 42 per cent of the vote. Directly after the...

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: the French parliamentary elections of 25 May and 1 June 1997.
October 1, 1997... In 1995 the mainstream right gained hegemony in French politics: the election of Jacques Chirac as president was the remaining trophy for the RPR-UDF alliance to win, since it had won the 1993 parliamentary elections by a landslide, had a...

Governance in the European Union.
October 1, 1997... Democracy, Sovereignty and the European Union Governance is both process and outcome. How does the Union operate in relation to the member states and what are the results? These questions may be posed in relation to the extensive literature now...

Comparative European Politics: The Story of a Profession.
October 1, 1997... This book is the result of a gathering of comparativists who have attempted to leave 'amateurism' behind and become 'professional' political scientists. Many of those who contributed to this book can be considered to be the (grand)fathers of the...

Cabinet Ministers and Parliamentary Government.
October 1, 1997... This volume presents 15 case studies of the operation of cabinet government in individual countries. The editors, in introductory and concluding chapters and in the guidelines originally given to their team, attempt to elucidate and develop a...

The Force of Labour: The Western European Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century.
October 1, 1997... This collection consists of the editors' introduction; essays on Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, France; and Stefan Berger's concluding remarks. The standard is, throughout, remarkably high. I strongly recommend it...

Public Opinion Polling and Politics in Britain.
October 1, 1997... Why did the polls 'get it wrong' in the 1992 British general election? This is the central question Broughton addresses in this review of political-opinion polling in Britain, which takes him into a wider examination of survey methodology and the...

Italian Regionalism: History, Identity and Politics.
October 1, 1997... Italian Regionalism is divided into two sections: the first concentrates on the construction of regional identities from unification to the present, while the second looks at the role that regionalism has played in the Italian Republic, in terms...

Greece in a Changing Europe: Between European Integration and Balkan Disintegration?
October 1, 1997... This is a set of papers first presented at a conference held at the London School of Economics in June 1994. The central theme of the conference was Greece's place in a fast-changing European geopolitical environment and it brought together a...

From State to Market? The Transformation of French Business and Government.
October 1, 1997... Vivien Schmidt's book about business-government relations in France is a magisterial work which is likely to be seen as the definitive survey of this subject for some time to come. It includes an historical overview of the dirigiste state and...