Books

Why do international organizations (IOs) look so different, yet so similar? The possibilities are diverse. Some international organizations have just a few member states, while others span the globe. Some are targeted at a specific problem, while others have policy portfolios as broad as national states. Some are captured almost entirely by their member states, while others have independent courts, secretariats, and parliaments. Variation among international organizations appears as wide as that among states. The purpose of this book is to explain this variation, both across IOs and within IOs over time. We show how each IO is an attempt to balance two forces in tension: the functional impetus to tackle problems that spill beyond national borders through joint decision-making, and the communal desire for self-rule, which can dampen international cooperation where transnational community is thin. The implications of postfunctionalist theory for an IO’s membership, policy portfolio, contractual specificity, and authoritative competences are tested using annual data for 76 IOs for 1950-2010.

Chapter previews: Table of Contents and Introduction || The basic set-up

This book sets out a measure of authority for seventy-six major international organizations (IOs) from 1950 to 2010. On the premise that transparency is key in the production of data, we chart a path in laying out the assumptions that underpin the measure. Successive chapters detail the authors’ theoretical, conceptual, and coding decisions. Profiles of regional, cross-regional, and global IOs explain how they are composed and how they make decisions. A distinctive feature of the Measure of International Authority (MIA) is that it breaks down the concept of international authority into discrete dimensions, which are built up from coherent ingredients—the composition and role of individual IO bodies at each stage in policy making, constitutional reform, the budget, financial compliance, membership accession, the suspension of members, and dispute settlement. These observations can be assembled—like Lego blocks—in diverse ways for diverse purposes.

Chapter preview: Concept and Measure || Selection of IO profiles: EU profile || ASEAN profile.

The book argues that jurisdictional design is shaped by functional and communal pressures. Functional pressures arise from the character of the public goods provided by government: their scale economies, externalities, and informational asymmetries. However, to explain demands for self-rule one needs to understand how people think and act in relation to the communities they conceive themselves belonging. The authors demonstrate that scale and community explain basic features of governance, including the growth of multiple tiers over the past six decades; how jurisdictions are designed; why governance within the state has become differentiated; and the extent to which regions exert authority.

Chapter previews: Introduction || Designing Jurisdictions || Differentiated Governance || Conclusion

This is the first of four ambitious volumes theorizing the structure of governance above and below the central state. This book sets out a measure of regional authority for 81 countries in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific from 1950 to 2010. Subnational authority is exercised by individual regions, and this measure is the first that takes individual regions as the unit of analysis. On the premise that transparency is a fundamental virtue in measurement, the authors chart a new path in laying out their theoretical, conceptual, and scoring decisions before the reader. The book also provides summaries of regional governance in 81 countries for scholars and students alike.

This book measures and explains the formal authority of intermediate or regional government in 42 advanced democracies, including the 27 EU member states plus Britain. It tracks regional authority on an annual basis from 1950 to 2006. The measure reveals wide variation both cross-sectionally and over time. The authors examine four influences – functional pressures, democratization, European integration, and identity – to explain regionalization over the past half-century. This unique and comprehensive volume will be a vital resource for students and scholars of comparative politics, public administration and public management, federalism, democratization, nationalism, and multilevel governance.

Europe has experienced the most radical reallocation of authority that has ever taken place in peacetime over the past half-century. The ideological conflicts emerging from this development are only now becoming apparent. This collection investigates patterns of conflict arising in the European Union. The contributors conclude that political contestation concerning European integration is rooted in the basic conflicts that have shaped political life in Western Europe for decades.

Table of Contents
Introduction: Models of political conflict in the European Union (Marco R. Steenbergen & Gary Marks)
1. The structure of citizen attitudes and the European political space (Christopher J. Anderson & Matthew J. Gabel)
2. Potential for contestation on national matters at national elections in Europe (Cees Van Der Eijk & Mark N. Franklin)
3. Don’t rock the boat: expectations, fears and opposition to EU level policymaking (Leonard Ray)
4. Varieties of capitalism and political divides over European Integration (Adam P. Brinegar, Seth K. Jolly & Herbert Kitschelt)
5. Defining the EU political space: an empirical study of the European elections manifestos, 1979–99 (Matthew J. Gabel & Simon Hix)
6. Does Left/Right structure party positions on European integration? (Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks & Carole J. Wilson)
7. Political competition in the European Parliament: evidence from roll call and survey analyses (Jacques J. A. Thomassen, Abdul G. Noury & Erik Voeten)
8. Contesting Europe? The salience of European integration as a party issue (Marco R. Steenbergen & David Scott)
9. Contestation potential of interest groups in the EU: emergence, structure and political alliances (Bernhard Wessels)
10. Contestation in the streets: European protest and the emerging Euro-polity (Doug Imig)
11. Conclusion: European integration and political conflict (Gary Marks)

European politics has been reshaped in recent decades by a dual process of centralization and decentralization. At the same time that authority in many policy areas has shifted to the supranational level of the European Union, so national governments have given subnational regions within countries more say over the lives of their citizens. At the forefront of scholars who characterize this dual process as multi-level governance, Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks argue that its emergence in the second half of the twentieth century is a watershed in the political development of Europe. Hooghe and Marks explain why multi-level governance has taken place and how it shapes conflict in national and European political arenas. Drawing on a rich body of original research, the book is at the same time written in a clear and accessible style for undergraduates and non-experts.

Why socialism has failed to play a significant role in the United States―the most developed capitalist industrial society and hence, ostensibly, fertile ground for socialism―has been a critical question of American history and political development. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks “survey with subtlety and shrewd judgment the various explanations” (Wall Street Journal) for this phenomenon of American political exceptionalism. “Clearly written, intelligent, filled with new information” (Times Literary Supplement), this “splendidly convincing” (Michael Kazin, Georgetown University) work eschews conventional arguments about socialism’s demise to present a fuller understanding of how multiple factors―political structure, American values, immigration, and the split between the Socialist party and mainstream unions―combined to seal socialism’s fate. “In peak form, two master political sociologists offer a must-read synthesis.”―Theda Skocpol, Harvard University.

Capitalist democracies have always displayed considerable diversity in their key political and economic institutions, such as the organization of economic interest groups and private enterprises, the public sector and the welfare state, as well as political parties and social movements. This book asks whether the challenges of new technologies, citizens’ preferences, and growing political and economic interdependence in the 1980s and 1990s force all polities to adopt similar institutional reforms. The authors argue that established arrangements have become difficult to sustain, but that countries choose unique trajectories of reform, not a common approach. The diversity among capitalist democracies persists in a new fashion.

This book presents a fresh alternative to traditional state-centered analyses of the process of European integration. Leading experts analyze the state in terms of its component parts and show the interaction of subnational, national and supranational actors in the emerging European polity. This “multi-level politics’ approach offers a powerful lens through which to view the future course of European integration.

Table of Contents
1. Examining the Present Euro-Polity with the Help of Past Theories (Philippe C. Schmitter)
2. Negative and Positive Integration in the Political Economy of European Welfare States (Fritz Scharpf)
3. Competencies, Cracks, and Conflicts (Gary Marks, Francois Nielsen, Jane Salk)
4. Neo-Voluntarism (Wolfgang Streeck)
5. Social Movements and the Changing Structure of Political Opportunity in the European Union (Gary Marks and Doug McAdam)
6. Imagining the Future of the Euro-Polity with the Help of New Concepts (Philippe C. Schmitter)

This book combines the tools of political science, sociology, and labor history to offer a wide-ranging analysis of how unions have participated in politics in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Rather than focus exclusively on national union federations, Gary Marks investigates variations among individual unions both within and across these countries. By examining the individual unions that make up union movements, he probes beyond national descriptions of British laborism, German socialism, and American business unionism while bringing the analysis closer to the actual experiences of people who joined labor organizations. Marks examines state repression of unions, the Organizational Revolution, the contrasting experiences of printing and coalmining unions, and American Exceptionalism.
“A rich study of union political activity that allows us to think through the influence of differing compositions of the labor force on national patterns of labor militancy.” – Charles Tilly, The New School for Social Research