The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of judgments on social rights around the world. However, we know little about whether these rulings have been implemented. Social Rights Judgments and the Politics of Compliance is the first book to engage in a comparative study of compliance of social rights judgments as well as their broader effects. Covering fourteen different domestic and international jurisdictions, and drawing on multiple disciplines, it finds significant variance in outcomes and reveals both spectacular successes and failures in making social rights a reality on the ground. This variance is strikingly similar to that found in previous studies on civil rights, and the key explanatory factors lie in the political calculus of defendants and the remedial framework. The book also discusses which strategies have enhanced implementation, and focuses on judicial reflexivity, alliance building and social mobilisation.
German Unification and the Union of Europe discusses some of the most interesting questions in the study of comparative politics and international relations. The book studies the sources of continuity and change in German policy toward the European Union, set in the context of the competing pulls of integration into the EU, and unification of East and West Germany. Employing a framework of analysis premised on the interaction of interests, institutions and ideas, the book asks: how has the domestic politics of unification influenced German policy toward Europe? Why has continuity reigned in some areas, whereas in others significant changes, sometimes reversals, have been registered? What are the implications of this checkered pattern of outcomes for Germany and for Europe? Jeffrey Anderson's book focusses on the political economy issues (such as trade, internal market, energy, and industrial policy) which represent key components of both German domestic politics and Germany's relations
Conflicts between environmental protection laws and human rights present delicate trade-offs when concerns for social and ecological justice are increasingly intertwined. This book retraces how the legal ordering of environmental protection evolved over time and progressively merged with human rights concerns, thereby leading to a synergistic framing of their relation. It explores the world-making effects this framing performed by establishing how 'human' ought to relate to 'nature', and examines the role played by legislators, experts and adjudicators in (re)producing it. While it questions, contextualises and problematises how and why this dominant framing was construed, it also reveals how the conflicts that underpin this relationship - and the victims they affect - mainly remained unseen. The analysis critically evaluates the argumentative tropes and adjudicative strategies used in the environmental case-law of regional courts to understand how these conflicts are judicially mediat
Health is a defining feature of life and its politics vital. Governments and international organizations have promoted community participation in public health since the late 1970s. However, we lack comparative studies of these participatory institutions in public health. This Element proposes a conceptualization of programmatic participation and distinguishes between two types, monitoring and policy-making. Falleti and Cunial review the origins of state-sanctioned institutions that mandate community participation in health in the two world regions with most advanced social welfare systems, Western Europe and Latin America, implying a comparative analysis of eleven health care systems. They argue that the origins of participatory institutions help account for the resulting types of programmatic participation. They delve deeper into the study of the experience of participation for policy making and analyze two hundred local participatory projects in public health. Falleti and Cunial foc
What explains contemporary variations in African legislative institutions – including their strengths and weaknesses? Compared with the more powerful executive branches, legislatures throughout the continent have historically been classified as weak and largely inconsequential to policy-making processes. But, as Ken Ochieng' Opalo suggests here, African legislatures actually serve important roles, and under certain conditions, powerful and independent democratic legislatures can emerge from their autocratic foundations. In this book, Opalo examines the colonial origins of African legislatures, as well as how postcolonial intra-elite politics structured the processes of adapting inherited colonial legislatures to local political contexts and therefore continued legislative development. Through case studies of Kenya and Zambia, Opalo offers a comparative longitudinal study of the evolution of legislative strength and institutionalization as well as a regional survey of legislative develo
Ethnic conflict often focuses on culturally charged symbols and rituals that evoke strong emotions from all sides. Marc Howard Ross examines battles over diverse cultural expressions, including Islamic headscarves in France, parades in Northern Ireland, holy sites in Jerusalem and Confederate flags in the American South to propose a psychocultural framework for understanding ethnic conflict, as well as barriers to, and opportunities for, its mitigation. His analysis explores how culture frames interests, structures demand-making and shapes how opponents can find common ground to produce constructive outcomes to long-term disputes. He focuses on participants' accounts of conflict to identify emotionally significant issues, and the power of cultural expressions to link individuals to larger identities and shape action. Ross shows that, contrary to popular belief, culture does not necessarily exacerbate conflict; rather, the constructed nature of psychocultural narratives can facilitate
Contemporary debates give the impression that the presence of immigrants necessarily spells strife. Yet as Immigration and Conflict in Europe shows, the incidence of conflict involving immigrants and their descendants has varied widely across groups, cities, and countries. The book presents a theory to account for this uneven pattern, explaining why we observe clashes between immigrants and natives in some locations but not in others and why some cities experience confrontations between immigrants and state actors while others are spared from such conflicts. The book addresses how economic conditions interact with electoral incentives to account for immigrant-native and immigrant-state conflict across groups and cities within Great Britain as well as across Germany and France. It highlights the importance of national immigration regimes and local political economies in shaping immigrants' economic position and political behavior, demonstrating how economic and electoral forces, rather
The movement for European integration has yielded a European Union of fifteen states with a unified monetary system that will eventually embrace over 370 million people. If current trends continue, an average of one in ten of these people will be unemployed. Not surprisingly, the European public ranks joblessness among its primary political concerns. This book focuses on both unemployment and economic unification. It examines the consequences of each and their interconnections. With chapters on the policy implications of European union, on current workings of domestic bargaining institutions and on how unemployment affects political behavior, this book yields a message with important policy implications: the organized managed economies of Europe should be reformed but not replaced, and a united Europe should be wary of modeling itself on the United States.
Conflicts involve powerful experiences. The residue of these experiences is captured by the concept and language of emotion. Indiscriminate killing creates fear; targeted violence produces anger and a desire for vengeance; political status reversals spawn resentment; cultural prejudices sustain ethnic contempt. These emotions can become resources for political entrepreneurs. A broad range of Western interventions are based on a view of human nature as narrowly rational. Correspondingly, intervention policy generally aims to alter material incentives ('sticks and carrots') to influence behavior. In response, poorer and weaker actors who wish to block or change this Western implemented 'game' use emotions as resources. This book examines the strategic use of emotion in the conflicts and interventions occurring in the Western Balkans over a twenty-year period. The book concentrates on the conflicts among Albanian and Slavic populations (Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, South Serbia), along
Ethnic conflict often focuses on culturally charged symbols and rituals that evoke strong emotions from all sides. Marc Howard Ross examines battles over diverse cultural expressions, including Islamic headscarves in France, parades in Northern Ireland, holy sites in Jerusalem and Confederate flags in the American South to propose a psychocultural framework for understanding ethnic conflict, as well as barriers to, and opportunities for, its mitigation. His analysis explores how culture frames interests, structures demand-making and shapes how opponents can find common ground to produce constructive outcomes to long-term disputes. He focuses on participants' accounts of conflict to identify emotionally significant issues, and the power of cultural expressions to link individuals to larger identities and shape action. Ross shows that, contrary to popular belief, culture does not necessarily exacerbate conflict; rather, the constructed nature of psychocultural narratives can facilitate
Why do women protest? Under what conditions do women protest on the basis of their gender identity? Professor Baldez answers in terms of tipping, timing and framing. She relies on the concept of tipping to identify the point at which diverse organizations converge to form a women's movement. She argues that two conditions trigger this mobilization among women: partisan realignment, understood as the emergence of a new set of issues around which political elites define themselves, and women's decision to frame realignment in terms of widely held norms about gender difference. To illustrate these claims, she compares two very different women's movements in Chile: the mobilization of women against President Salvador Allende (1970–3) and that against General Augusto Pinochet (1973–90). Despite differences between these two movements, both emerged amidst a context of partisan realignment and framed their concerns in terms of women's exclusion from the political arena.
This 1997 book addresses the current debate regarding the liabilities and merits of presidential government. Does presidentialism make it less likely that democratic governments will be able to manage political conflict? With the unprecedented wave of transitions to democracy since the 1970s, this question has been hotly contested in political and intellectual circles all over the globe. The contributors to this volume examine variations among different presidential systems and skeptically view claims that presidentialism has added significantly to the problems of democratic governance and stability.
The ultimate goal of environmental policy is reducing pollution. Attention to environmental problems in the social sciences has brought some bold generalizations about causes of good results, but almost no systematic cross-national studies that flesh out major theoretical arguments and test those claims with data. This study makes a seminal contribution to that effort in two ways. First, by taking environmental outcomes over the last thirty years as the central dependent variable, it provides a basis for evaluating national performance in reducing environmental problems. Second, by developing a data set including performance in a number of countries and elaborating on major explanations of environmental performance found in the literature, this study provides the most rigorous available analysis of the determinants of environmental performance. In so doing, it challenges what is probably the conventional wisdom in the social sciences.
Most African countries have a population composed of a multitude of language groups and most African citizens have a varied repertoire allowing them to rely on different languages for use in the home, at school, in the market, at work and in communicating with political authorities. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa analyses the complex language scene in Africa today and asks whether this distinctive web of language use is symptomatic of the early stage of state construction. If so, one would expect that as each of these states develops there will be a rationalisation of language use and agreement on a common language within the country's borders. Alternately, Africa's language scene may be the result of a particular historical context of state construction, with the implication that political development will not lead to the one-state, one-language outcome typical of the idealised nation-state.
This 1997 book addresses the current debate regarding the liabilities and merits of presidential government. Does presidentialism make it less likely that democratic governments will be able to manage political conflict? With the unprecedented wave of transitions to democracy since the 1970s, this question has been hotly contested in political and intellectual circles all over the globe. The contributors to this volume examine variations among different presidential systems and skeptically view claims that presidentialism has added significantly to the problems of democratic governance and stability.
Between States is the first book that assesses systematically the broad implications of interim governments in the establishment of democratic regimes and on the existence of states. Based on historical and contemporary democratisation experiences, the book presents four ideal types of interim government: opposition-led provisional governments, power-sharing interim governments, incumbent-led caretaker governments, and international interim government by the United Nations. The first part explores the theoretical problems of each of these models from a broad comparative perspective. It uses as illustrations historical and contemporary cases that present a wide spectrum of contexts for comparison. The second part provides extensive case studies that are intended to illustrate, appraise, amplify and criticise the analysis in volume one. These include Iran, East Germany, Portugal, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.
Most African countries have a population composed of a multitude of language groups and most African citizens have a varied repertoire allowing them to rely on different languages for use in the home, at school, in the market, at work and in communicating with political authorities. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa analyses the complex language scene in Africa today and asks whether this distinctive web of language use is symptomatic of the early stage of state construction. If so, one would expect that as each of these states develops there will be a rationalisation of language use and agreement on a common language within the country's borders. Alternately, Africa's language scene may be the result of a particular historical context of state construction, with the implication that political development will not lead to the one-state, one-language outcome typical of the idealised nation-state.
The ultimate goal of environmental policy is reducing pollution. Attention to environmental problems in the social sciences has brought some bold generalizations about causes of good results, but almost no systematic cross-national studies that flesh out major theoretical arguments and test those claims with data. This study makes a seminal contribution to that effort in two ways. First, by taking environmental outcomes over the last thirty years as the central dependent variable, it provides a basis for evaluating national performance in reducing environmental problems. Second, by developing a data set including performance in a number of countries and elaborating on major explanations of environmental performance found in the literature, this study provides the most rigorous available analysis of the determinants of environmental performance. In so doing, it challenges what is probably the conventional wisdom in the social sciences.
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.
