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Politics Literature (politics + literature)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	75%

Selected Abstracts

Constitutional courts as veto players: Divorce and decrees in Italy

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2001
MARY L. VOLCANSEK
This article argues that constitutional courts in Western European parliamentary systems should be integrated into discussions of how public policies are changed, rather than being viewed as an external veto point. It attempts to bridge a gap between a judicial politics literature that focuses on the micro,level of individual judges' votes and comparative scholarship that operates at the macro,level. A model for viewing constitutional courts as veto players, as a third institutional actor, is proposed and is then illustrated using the cases of legalizing divorce and blocking the executive reissuing decree laws in Italy. The model considers both the indirect and direct influences that constitutional courts can exert on the policy,making process. It also facilitates understanding and explaining the role of courts, as well as legislatures and executives, in conducting the interactions and bargaining that result in policy change. [source]

Examining and Explaining the Northern League's ,U-Turn' from Europe

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 3 2004
Raj S. Chari
Set in the context of the larger literature on regionalist parties and specifically on the Italian Northern League, this paper examines and explains why the party moved from Euro-positivism to Euroscepticism. Drawing on concepts raised in the larger comparative politics literature, five explanations of this U-turn towards Europe are evaluated. It is argued that, despite the strength of explanations that focus on the desires of party supporters, the role of public opinion, the potential influence of economic investors or the role of EU-level institutions in shaping party preferences, a more cogent explanation focuses on domestic-level developments. The conclusions will underscore the general implications of this research for the study of parties, particularly regionalist ones in the EU, highlighting that a party's changing stance towards supranational integrationist polices can be best understood as a consequence of its experience in a political system's electoral system. [source]

Interests, Institutions and Industrial Relations

BRITISH JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 4 2003
Nick Wailes
In the comparative politics literature there are two main approaches to the impact of international economic change on national policy patterns. The first , new institutionalism , has been very influential in comparative industrial relations scholarship. The second, which focuses on the role of interests, has been less prominent. Comparing industrial relations reform in Australia and New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990s, this paper argues that there are a number of limitations to an institutionalist approach and outlines a framework for the comparative study of the impact of international economic change on national patterns of industrial relations which integrates both institutionalist and interest-based approaches. [source]

,Beyond Left and Right': The New Partisan Politics of Welfare

GOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2000
Fiona Ross
The ,new politics of the welfare state,' the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries' capacities to pursue contentious measures and avoid electoral blame. Policy structures, vested interests, and institutions play a prominent role in accounting for cross-national differences in leaders' abilities to diffuse responsibility for divisive initiatives. One important omission from the ,new politics' literature, however, is a discussion of partisan politics. ,Old' conceptualizations of the political right and left are implicitly taken as constants despite radical changes in the governing agenda of many leftist parties over the last decade. Responding to this oversight, Castles (1998) has recently probed the role of parties with respect to aggregate government expenditures, only to concludethat parties do not matter under ,conditions of constraint.' This article contends that parties are relevant to the ,new politics' and that, under specified institutional conditions, their impact is counterintuitive. In some notable cases the left has had more effect inbruising the welfare state than the right. One explanation for these cross-cutting tendencies is that parties not only provide a principal source of political agency, they also serve as strategies, thereby conditioning opportunities for political leadership. By extension, they need to be situatedwithin the ,new politics' constellation of blame-avoidance instruments. [source]