bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
CRISIS, CHANGE, AND PUBLIC POLICY Considerations for a Comparative Analysis of Environmental Policies
Authors: LUNDQVIST LENNART J. 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThe environmental “crisis” is now a top priority in many industrialized countries. Perceived of as a threat to a society's resources, the environmental problem raises important questions regarding competing system goals. The problem cuts across traditional political and administrative structures and thus carries several implications for political change. Since the environmental issue has gained political recognition at the same time in many political systems, the auspices for comparative research are good.This paper contains an analysis of the Swedish response to the environmental problem. The most spectacular changes seem to have appeared in policy content, and in the performance levels of the actors, while the structures of the system remain almost unchanged. A general framework for comparative environmental analysis is developed, followed by a discussion of certain aspects of environmental policy and political change. Drawing from Swedish, American and Canadian data, the complex adaptation processes between innovative agents, public opinion and institutionalized power mechanisms are discussed. Some propositions are offered for further comparative research.
ON POWER, ITS INTENSITY AND DISTRIBUTION
Authors: PASSIGLI STEFANO 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThe inadequate results and the lack of progress of all attempts at measuring power are primarily due to two factors: 1) the tendency to focus on a single dimension of the measurement problem, that is, either on the intensity of power in interpersonal relations, or on the distribution of power within a given social system, failing to link these two aspects; and 2) the inadequacy of community power studies to provide comprehensive models, and the continuing stubborn tendency to conceive measurement in strict, quantitative terms, failing to recognize the value of other less exact forms of measurement. The two problems of the intensity of power in interpersonal relations and of its systemic distribution may be tackled simultaneously by representing the actual impact and behaviour of power in a given system rather than measuring it quantitatively. This is done by means of a graphic, curvilinear representation of the power process, which allows the identification of different “phases”, where power has a substantially different nature (authority, influence, force), elicits different responses (obedience, passive resistance, submission), and results in different power relations (anarchy, legitimacy, bargaining, coercion). The curve bears considerable resemblance to the heuristic instruments of classical economics, and – though it is not without limitations – it offers substantial advantages, particulary its capacity to provide an instrument for comparing the power process in different political systems.
THE VISIBLE HAND OF THE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION A REVIEW
Authors: HERNES HELGA 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThis article is a taxonomy of a new field of interest to political scientists, namely the study of multinational corporations as political actors on the local, national and international level. It describes the interests and activities of the four major actors involved: parent companies, subsidiaries, investor countries, and host countries. The article bases itself in part on seven books which represent these various actors'perspectives, and suggests what kind of further research is needed to describe the cooperative and conflictual relations among them. The theoretical challenges presented by the multinationals are related in part to their dual character as economic and political actors, and in part to the fact that they integrate activities among various levels of political organization, thus cutting across traditional divisions of scholarly disciplines such as local, comparative and international politics, as well as economics, international business, and industrial relations.
CULTURAL MODELS AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS
Authors: EISENSTADT S.N. 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTIn this paper an attempt is made to indicate some possible relations between the working of political systems and, on the one hand, some aspects of “culture” and, on the other hand, various aspects of power and market relations. The discussion begins with some recent attempts to explain the variability of modern and modernizing societies in other terms than those offered in the earlier studies of modernization which heavily emphasized the difference between “traditional” and “modern” societies and attempted to explain many of the differences. The revision of these assumptions stresses both the importance of cultural continuities (and “traditions”) and various internal and international constellations of power relations in explaining the variety and variability of “modern, modernizing and transitional societies.”The analyses presented here present a fuller specification of some of the institutional loci of such continuity, the nature of the cultural orientations or codes (similar to Weber's Wirtschaftsethik) which may influence the working of political systems, and the mechanisms through which such influence is exerted. These codes or models are not just abstract or intellectual orientations. They provide rather specific institutional directives. They help to define boundaries of collectives, the coalescence of different types of such collectivities – the cultural, political, ethnic and religious –, the rights of membership in these collectivities, the specification of collective goals and public goods prevalent in them, and the centers and various counter‐cultures. The paper attempts to trace the influence of such codes on some crucial aspects of social and political organization in both the traditional and modern phases of the “same” society – W. Europe, Russia, and various patrimonial societies in S.E. Asia and Latin America.It attempts also to analyze some of the crucial differences between traditional and modern social phases, to indicate the nature of the process of struggle which takes place during transition, and to relate these changes to cultural models and codes.
THE IMPACT OF FEDERALISM ON EDUCATION FINANCE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS*
Authors: CAMERON DAVID R. , HOFFERBERT RICHARD I. 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTDrawing on the implications suggested by several recent studies in comparative public policy, this article examines the impact of the structure of intergovernmental relations on the patterns of distribution of educational funds. The fundamental hypothesis underlying this analysis is that differences in this structure, and in particular the distinction between federal and unitary systems of government, are systematically related to differences in distribution across and within nations. The variations in total educational allocations among eighteen nations in Europe and North America are considered in order to discover whether the aggregate funding of education, relative to a nation's wealth, is related to the structure of intergovernmental relations. Then, in a more intensive analysis, the intranational patterns of distribution are compared in four federal and four unitary systems. This analysis suggests that there is a significant difference between the two types of system in the degree to which educational policy outputs equalize the territorial disparities in wealth and effect a redistribution of funds within the nation.
THE POSITION OF SMALL POWERS IN THE WEST EUROPEAN NETWORK OF ECONOMIC RELATIONS*
Authors: VÄYRYNEN RAIMO 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThe purpose of the investigation is to explore, by using data on trade structures and multinational corporations, the extent to which the relatively homogeneous group of West European countries is characterized by the existence of dominance relations. The analysis indicates that smaller and not‐so‐rich West European nations tend to be systematically worse‐off, judged on the basis of the premises of the investigation, in the network of trade and investment relations. Furthermore the size dimensions, viz. Gross National Product, tend to have more explanatory power in relation to the position of smaller and not‐so‐rich nations than the level of development variable, viz. GNP/capita. The consequences of this state of affairs are for from clear because of the complexify and the multidimensionality of the dependent variable. In any case it appears to be important to make a distinction between mere growth of national economies ‐ which may be of parasitic nature as the case of Portugal illustrates – and development which implies a given degree of equality and autonomy in the economy concerned. Traditional theories concerning the position and external policy of small powers is of little help in describing and explaining these kinds of phenomena and consequently a reorientation in these theories is needed, if they are to be useful.
POLITICAL CLEAVAGES, PARTY POLITICS AND URBANISATION IN IRELAND: THE CASE OF THE PERIPHERY‐DOMINATED CENTRE*
Authors: GARVIN TOM 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTIrish political parties cannot be easily fitted into a conventional left‐right framework. The Lipset‐Rokkan centre–periphery concept is employed to explain this situation, and, in particular, to throw light on the persistent success of Fianna Fáil, the nationalist‐populist party which has dominated the system since 1932. It is argued that Ireland affords an example of a polity in which the political concerns and style of the rural periphery came to “invade” and dominate the urban centre for more than a generation. Evidence from a study of urban party activists indicates a persistence of rural political styles and ideological perspectives in a social context which has been urban for well over half a century.
THE CHANGING PARTY SPACE IN DANISH VOTER PERCEPTIONS, 1971–1973
Authors: RUSK JERROLD G. , BORRE OLE 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study is to analyze the changing cleavage lines in Danish politics as reflected in people's perceptions of and votes for the various political parties in the system. The focus is on “change” between the 1971 and 1973 elections and what cause this change. Multidimensional scaling techniques help to uncover the differing cleavage lines in Danish politics in the 1971 and 1973 elections and to give us some understanding of the voting patterns underlying them. Direct analysis of correlates of the vote further specifies the causal factors involved in 1971 and 1973 in forming these different cleavage structures. Implications of these findings for the future of the Danish political system are then discussed.
THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN THE SETTLEMENT OF LABOR DISPUTES IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Authors: ELVANDER NILS 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to examine, by comparative analysis, the role played by the state in resolving labor disputes in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland and to suggest reasons that may explain why these roles have assumed different forms in these four countries. Three forms of state action in the settlement of disputes are considered: implementation decisions in cases involving disputes about rights; mediation in cases in which interests are in dispute; and forcible intervention in cases in which it appears that public safety is threatened. These three forms are regarded as dependent variables that vary from country to country depending on two sorts of independent variables: first, historical factors of a political and economic nature (background variables) and second, organizational‐structural factors and parliamentary power factors (intermediate variables). The economic background variables have to do with the character of the industrialization process: the date it began, the pace at which it unfolded, and the kind of economic structure (and in consequence the organizational structure) it brought into being. The political variables have to do first of all with the point in time the political system became democratic and the way this was accomplished; but more special and unique factors are also considered, such as national “traumas” like civil war (Finland) and general strike (Sweden), together with special features of the countries'political cultures.
THE STATE AND SECTIONAL INTERESTS: THE BOLIVIAN CASE*
Authors: WHITEHEAD LAURENCE 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThe article presents a case study of the contemporary Bolivian state in interaction with the major interest groups and locates the Bolivian example in its comparative context. An analysis of the internal organisational problems of the Bolivian state is followed by an account of its exceptional vulnerability to international pressures of various types and a description of the unusually intractable domestic political problems it confronts. These conditions are held to explain (if not to justify) many of the techniques of government adopted by successive Bolivian régimes. There follows a discussion of the pattern of political behaviour which major domestic interests are constrained to adopt in response to the normal conduct of the Bolivian state. In general such interests are highly insecure, aggressive in their pressure group tactics, deeply politicised and subject to wildly fluctuating fortunes. However, it is also recognised that they vary widely in the resources they command, the aims they pursue, and the alliances they can enter into. In the conclusion the uniqueness, or otherwise, of the Bolivian case is assessed and this country study is related to the general debate on the degree to which military bureaucratic régimes in the Third World may be considered autonomous from sectional interests and capable of promoting some forms of ‘modernisation’.
COOPERATIVENESS IN A MULTI‐PARTY SYSTEM: A MEASURE AND AN APPLICATION*
Authors: LAAKSO MARKKU 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTMost measures of legislative voting behavior have been created to suit two‐party systems. Many special characteristics of multi‐party systems (e.g. coalition formation) can thus not be taken into account sufficiently. Consequently, there has been an increasing interest in methods that especially fit multi‐party systems. This article proposes one such method and illustrates it visually by simple vector algebra.The method is applied to data which consist of 450 divisions of the Finnish Parliament from 1964 to 1966. An attempt is made to interpret the results by taking into consideration the special characteristics of the Finnish political system and the country's political dynamics. The interpretation also uses Gunnar Sjöblom's classification of the basic goals of political parties. Finally, the observations concerning political coalition theory are condensed into broader generalizations, which, however, need further study.
ON THE NOTION OF POLITICAL FEASIBILITY*
Authors: MAJONE GIANDOMENICO 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTIn a positive, as opposed to a normative or prescriptive, approach to policy analysis, the critical examination of the conditions of feasibility of public policies assumes paramount importance. A proposal is feasible if it satisfies all relevant constraints. But while the notion of economic or technical feasibility can be explicated by pointing to the corresponding constraints, “political feasibility” is generally used in a much less precise sense; and lack of conceptual precision severely restricts its analytical usefulness. For instance, questions of political feasibility are often confused with considerations of political costs or of political opportunity. I argue that the analyst should always be prepared to translate a judgment of political feasibility or infeasibility in terms of the specific political constraints operating in the problem under consideration. In this paper, three main groups of political constraints are considered: those resulting from the limitation of the available political resources; those relating to the permissible distribution of the benefits and costs of a policy (distributional constraints); and those imposed by the institutional framework.
THE PIVOTAL PARTY: DEFINITION AND MEASUREMENT
Authors: RÉMY DOMINIQUE 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTAnalyses of party strategy in multiparty parliamentary systems often refer to the idea of a pivotal party. But this notion is not uniformly treated and rarely covers the same entities. This essay is an attempt to clarify the concept and to isolate its characteristics. Among four types of “dominated” parties, the name of pivotal party should only be given to that party which controls the maximum of potentialities belonging to these parties, namely the power to modify the government majority by bestowing or withdrawing its support. This perspective also suggests the utility of an index measuring the extent of this modification.
FORMAL THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS*
Authors: HERNES HELGA 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThis article is an attempt to extract pervasive modes of thinking about nations and their foreign policies from three classical political theories and to examine to what extent it is possible to speak of “cognitive archetypes”. The study consists of two cases. The first is a treatment of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, in particular an analysis of the debate at Sparta as a rational choice model. The conclusion is that the assumptions underlying rational actor models and the argument as presented by Thucydides closely coincide. The second case is a comparison of the logical structure of the prisoner's dilemma and the state of nature as presented by Hobbes and Rousseau. It concludes that Rousseau presents a clearer exposition of the dilemma than Hobbes who by differentiating between the security of the individual in the state of nature and that of states in the international system finds the establishment of the Leviathan an adequate solution to the problem of order.
A CLASSIFICATION OF PARTIES AND PARTY SYSTEMS ACCORDING TO COALITIONAL OPTIONS*
Authors: DE SWAAN ABRAM 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTTraditionally, party systems are classified by the number of parties they include. More recently their coalitional possibilities have been taken into account, even though policy positions of parties were ignored. Closed Minimal Range Theory holds that parliamentary coalitions in support of a government will consist of parties that are adjacent on an ordinal scale of social‐economic policy positions, and will span a range along that scale that is no larger than is necessary for the coalition in order to control a majority of seats in the voting body. This theory, which has achieved very satisfactory empirical results, allows the classification of parties according to the number of closed minimal range coalitions they are part of in a given situation. There is always a party that is a member of every such closed minimal range coalition; in actual fact such pivotal parties may maintain this position for very long periods and were found to be a member of the government in 104 out of 108 coalitions studied. Party systems may be classified according to the number of closed minimal range coalitions they present in a given situation and whether or not all parties are included in at least one such coalition. Coalitional situations in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden since 1918, and in Israel since 1948, Italy since 1945, in the French IVth Republic, and the German Weimar Republic are presented in a table and discussed briefly.
INSTITUTIONAL INERTIA AND POLITICAL IMPETUS IN FRANCE AND BRITAIN *
Authors: HAYWARD JACK 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThe concern with immobilism or stalemate in France and Britain is analysed in terms of the concept of institutional inertia, defined as structural overinstitutionalisation and processual pluralism and incrementalism. Examples from economic policy indicate that French governments, relying principally on the techno‐bureaucracy, have a greater innovative capacity than British governments, relying primarily on the major interest groups. That this is so even when the French governments are Right‐wing and the British governments are Left‐wing suggests the operation of culturally‐based dominant values that inhibit or preclude some kinds of government action and favour others.Though the political factor may not be of decisive importance in determining whether a country experiences economic “success”, it is pivotal in explaining how countries cope with economic “failure”. A comparison between the relative capacity of France and Britain to mobilise consent and to overcome dissent indicates that French étatisme has worked more successfully than British tripartite power sharing between government, business and labour organisations. A reforming impetus coming from a French government is less likely to be impeded and more likely to be furthered by interest groups (pressured rather than pressure groups) than is the case in Britain. The culturally‐determined addiction to crisis‐avoidance characteristic of Britain has prevented the emergence of “new men” and encouraged a foredoomed reliance on salvation through attempted imitations of French institutions such as national planning or the ENA.
PARLIAMENTARY ATTITUDES TOWARDS LABOR MARKET POLICIES *
Authors: PETTERSEN PER ARNT 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTLabor force mobility, both between economic sectors and between different regions of a country is one of the major consequences of industrialization and urbanization in Western societies. There is reason to believe that the attitudes toward this development at the political elite‐level have changed quite drastically, both when it comes to the theoretical understanding of what benefits a society would have from such a redistribution of labor and what means should be used to control or advance this development. In this paper we have described the attitude development at the Norwegian parliamentary level toward the problem mentioned above for the postwar period. We have also formalized a model which we think would make comparative research more feasible on attitudes towards labor market policies, labor market mobility, development of different economic sectors and related areas.
ECONOMETRICS AND ARMS RACES: A CRITICAL REVIEW AND SOME EXTENSIONS *
Authors: RATTINGER HANS 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTRecent years have witnessed an increasing use of econometric analysis in arms race studies. The present article reviews this past and the potential future contribution of econometrics to arms race research and concludes that so far the main impact of the new approach has been on efforts at parameter estimation. Therefore, a number of problems typically arising in the application of econometric techniques to the estimation of arms race models from empirical time series data are discussed, and the need for a thorough investigation of the small‐sample properties of the results of common procedures is demonstrated. Finally, the considerable potential of econometrics for refining current arms race models is illustrated in the context of asymmetric response and distributed lag hypotheses.
THE FUNCTIONAL PROPERTIES OF THE REFERENDUM*
Authors: SMITH GORDON 
Published: May 2006

ABSTRACTThis article outlines a way in which the wide range of experience of the referendum in Western Europe can be brought together by means of a “functional” approach. Two important perspectives appear to be: the degree of “control” exercised by the political authorities and the general “hegemonic effect” as seen in the consequences of the referendum. The variations that are possible, both in control and effect, provide the basis for a matrix of functional variance from which a broad typology can be established. The five basic types of referendum – including a non‐functional category – are illustrated and elaborated by reference to a range of examples. These show that each referendum poses problems of interpretation. The conclusion is that a functional analysis of this type could be further refined by concentrating on the relationship a referendum bears to the prevailing party system.