Denne artikel identificerer nogle væsentligste udviklinger i den politologiske litteratur om politiske beslutninger i det ny årtusind. Ved at bruge den traditionelle skelnen mellem struktur- og ...aktørforklaringer finder vi, at dansk politologi har arbejdet meget med at forklare både stabilitet og forandring i offentlig politik og politiske beslutninger. Det har bidraget til en bedre kombination af aktør- og strukturforklaringer, selvom litteraturen langtfra er i mål. Der er flere forhold vedrørende tilblivelsen af politiske beslutninger, som vi ved for lidt om. For eksempel mangler vi viden om, hvad der sker i den tidlige beslutningsfase, som gennem de senere år forekommer mere og mere lukket. Hertil kommer begrænset viden om den rolle, embedsværket spiller i forberedelsen af de politiske beslutninger. Endelig er der mangel på kvalitative casestudier af nyere politiske beslutninger og dermed på komparative analyser af disse. Artiklen efterlyser forskning med dette for øje.
Political scientists have long classified systems of government as parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multiparty, and so on. But such distinctions often fail to provide useful insights. For ...example, how are we to compare the United States, a presidential bicameral regime with two weak parties, to Denmark, a parliamentary unicameral regime with many strong parties?Veto Playersadvances an important, new understanding of how governments are structured. The real distinctions between political systems, contends George Tsebelis, are to be found in the extent to which they afford political actors veto power over policy choices. Drawing richly on game theory, he develops a scheme by which governments can thus be classified. He shows why an increase in the number of "veto players," or an increase in their ideological distance from each other, increases policy stability, impeding significant departures from the status quo.
Policy stability affects a series of other key characteristics of polities, argues the author. For example, it leads to high judicial and bureaucratic independence, as well as high government instability (in parliamentary systems). The propositions derived from the theoretical framework Tsebelis develops in the first part of the book are tested in the second part with various data sets from advanced industrialized countries, as well as analysis of legislation in the European Union. Representing the first consistent and consequential theory of comparative politics,Veto Playerswill be welcomed by students and scholars as a defining text of the discipline.
From the preface to the Italian edition:
"Tsebelis has produced what is today the most original theory for the understanding of the dynamics of contemporary regimes. . . . This book promises to remain a lasting contribution to political analysis."--Gianfranco Pasquino, Professor of Political Science, University of Bologna
As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the ...rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined. The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199568048/toc.html
What kind of policy analysis is required now that governments increasingly encounter the limits of governing? Exploring the contexts of politics and policy making, this 2003 book presents an original ...analysis of the relationship between state and society, and new possibilities for collective learning and conflict resolution. The key insight of the book is that democratic governance calls for a new deliberatively-oriented policy analysis. Traditionally policy analysis has been state-centered, based on the assumption that central government is self-evidently the locus of governing. Drawing on detailed empirical examples, the book examines the influence of developments such as increasing ethnic and cultural diversity, the complexity of socio-technical systems, and the impact of transnational arrangements on national policy making. This contextual approach indicates the need to rethink the relationship between social theory, policy analysis, and politics. The book is essential reading for all those involved in the study of public policy.
Education Policy Olssen, Mark; Codd, John A; O′Neill, Anne-Marie
SAGE Publications (UK),
2004, 2004-00-00, 2004-06-08
eBook, Book
`This is the new policy bible for educationalists - it is at once systematic, provocative and instructive′ - Michael A Peters, Research Professor, University of Glasgow This book provides an ...international perspective on education policy, and of the role and function of education in the global economy. The authors present a Foucauldian perspective on the politics of liberal education, within a theoretical framework necessary for the critical analysis of education policy.
There is a widespread belief, among both political scientists and government policymakers, that "democracies don't fight each other." Here Joanne Gowa challenges that belief. In a thorough, ...systematic critique, she shows that, while democracies were less likely than other states to engage each other in armed conflicts between 1945 and 1980, they were just as likely to do so as were other states before 1914. Thus, no reason exists to believe that a democratic peace will survive the end of the Cold War. Since U.S. foreign policy is currently directed toward promoting democracy abroad, Gowa's findings are especially timely and worrisome.
In many Western democracies, ethnic and racial minorities have demanded, and sometimes achieved, greater recognition and accommodation of their identities. This is reflected in the adoption of ...multiculturalism policies for immigrant groups, the acceptance of territorial autonomy and language rights for national minorities, and the recognition of land claims and self-government rights for indigenous peoples. These claims for recognition have been controversial, in part because of fears that they make it more difficult to sustain a robust welfare state by eroding the interpersonal trust, social solidarity and political coalitions that sustain redistribution. Are these fears of a conflict between a "politics of recognition" and a "politics of redistribution" valid? This volume is the first systematic attempt to empirically test this question, using both cross-national statistical analyses of the relationships among diversity policies, public attitudes and the welfare state, and case studies of the recognition/ redistribution linkage in the political coalitions in particular countries, including the United States, Britain, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, and in Latin America. These studies suggest that that there is no general or inherent tendency for recognition to undermine redistribution, and that the relationship between these two forms of politics can be supportive as well as competitive, depending on the context. These findings shed important light, not only on the nature and effects of multiculturalism, but also on wider debates about the social and political foundations of the welfare state, and indeed about our most basic concepts of citizenship and national identity. As a ground-breaking attempt to connect the literatures on multiculturalism and the welfare state, this volume will be of great interest to a wide range of scholars and practitioners who work on issues of ethnocultural diversity and social policy. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/politicalscience/0199289174/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Willem Assies, Van Vollenhoven Institute of the Faculty of Law of Leiden University in the Netherlands. Keith Banting , Queen's University Markus Crepaz, University of Georgia Han Entzinger, Erasmus University, Rotterdam Geoffrey Evans, University of Oxford Rodney E. Hero, University of Notre Dame Matt James, University of Victoria Richard Johnston, University of British Columbia Peter Kraus, Humboldt University in Berlin Will Kymlicka, Queen's University Nicola McEwen, University of Edinburgh David Miller, University of Oxford Robert R. Preuhs, University of Colorado at Boulder Karen Schonwalder, Social Science Research Center, Berlin Stuart Soroka, McGill University Sebastien St-Arnaud, University of Toronto Donna Lee Van Cott, Georgetown University
Children have served as soldiers throughout history. They fought in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and in both world wars. They served as uniformed soldiers, camouflaged insurgents, and even ...suicide bombers. Indeed, the first U.S. soldier to be killed by hostile fire in the Afghanistan war was shot in ambush by a fourteen-year-old boy.Does this mean that child soldiers are aggressors? Or are they victims? It is a difficult question with no obvious answer, yet in recent years the acceptable answer among humanitarian organizations and contemporary scholars has been resoundingly the latter. These children are most often seen as especially hideous examples of adult criminal exploitation.In this provocative book, David M. Rosen argues that this response vastly oversimplifies the child soldier problem. Drawing on three dramatic examples-from Sierra Leone, Palestine, and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust-Rosen vividly illustrates this controversial view. In each case, he shows that children are not always passive victims, but often make the rational decision that not fighting is worse than fighting.With a critical eye to international law, Armies of the Young urges readers to reconsider the situation of child combatants in light of circumstance and history before adopting uninformed child protectionist views. In the process, Rosen paints a memorable and unsettling picture of the role of children in international conflicts.
The concepts of formal and informal remain central to the theory and practice of development more than half a century after they were introduced into the debate. They help structure the way that ...statistical services collect data on the economies of developing countries, the development of theoretical and empirical analysis, and, most important, the formulation and implementation of policy. This volume brings together a significant new collection of studies on formality and informality in developing countries. The volume is multidisciplinary in nature, with contributions from anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and political scientists. It contains contributions from among the very best analysts in development studies. Between them the chapters argue for moving beyond the formal-informal dichotomy. Useful as it has proven to be, a more nuanced approach is needed in light of conceptual and empirical advances, and in light of the policy failures brought about by a characterization of the 'informal' as 'disorganized'. The wealth of empirical information in these studies, and in the literature more widely, can be used to develop guiding principles for intervention that are based on ground level reality. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance//toc.html Contributors to this volume - Rajeev Ahuja, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations Krister Andersson, Indiana University Martha Alter Chen, Harvard University Robert K. Christensen, Indiana University Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, UNU-WIDER Keith Hart, Goldsmiths College, University of London Ravi Kanbur, Cornell University Robert Lensink, University of Groningen Norman V. Loayza, The World Bank Mark McGillivray, UNU-WIDER M. R. Narayana, Institute for Social and Economic Change Jeffrey B. Nugent, University of Southern California Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University Ana Maria Oviedo, University of Maryland Diego Pacheco, Indiana University Sally Roever, University of California, Berkeley Amos Sawyer, Indiana University Luis Serven, The World Bank Alice Sindzingre, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris Fredrik Soderbaum, Goteborg University Shailender Swaminathan, University of Alabama Pham Thi Thu Tra Pham, University of Groningen Liz Alden Wily, Independent Land Tenure and National Resources Management Adviser
Contents: Introduction -- Why should we care about inequality? -- Sources of equality and inequality : wages, jobs, households, and redistribution -- Measuring and analyzing employment performance -- ...Low-end wages -- Employment protection regulations -- Government benefits -- Taxes -- Skills -- Women-friendly policies -- Toward a high-employment, high-equality society.
