This book presents a historical account of the relationship between state and capital from independence to the liberalization episodes of the 1980s and after. It provides a focused analysis of the organization of business houses, corporate governance structures, labour laws, and the institution of the family and personal laws, and explains the institutional basis of regional differences in accumulation and uneven development in independent India. By addressing questions of agrarian, capital, technology and fiscal constraints which were characteristic of the economy at independence, this book provides an insightful study of the political economy of the role of changing social relations in India after independence.
This revisionary perspective on South Africa's celebrated Constitutional Court draws on historical and empirical sources alongside conventional legal analysis to show how support from the African National Congress (ANC) government and other political actors has underpinned the Court's landmark cases, which are often applauded too narrowly as merely judicial achievements. Standard accounts see the Court as overseer of a negotiated constitutional compromise and as the looked-to guardian of that constitution against the rising threat of the ANC. However, in reality South African successes have been built on broader and more admirable constitutional politics to a degree no previous account has described or acknowledged. The Court has responded to this context with a substantially consistent but widely misunderstood pattern of deference and intervention. Although a work in progress, this institutional self-understanding represents a powerful effort by an emerging court, as one constitutiona
Why is there such a large gap between the declarations that countries make about human rights and their imperfect implementation of them? Why do states that have enacted laws and signed treaties about human rights choose to not enforce these laws in daily life? Why have activists failed to achieve the goals of ensuring human rights domestically and internationally? This book examines the issue of human rights in the Israeli domestic arena by analyzing the politics and strategies of defending human rights. To do so, it integrates the tools of social choice theory with a unique institutionalist perspective that looks at both formal and informal, and local and international factors. The book offers an analysis explaining the processes through which Israel is struggling to promote human rights within a specific institutional environment, thus determining the future of Israeli democracy and its attitude toward human rights.
Central bank collateral frameworks are an often overlooked feature of monetary policy that play a key role in the monetary and financial system. Readers will discover how central banks conduct and implement monetary policy beyond merely setting interest rates, and develop their understanding as to how collateral policies may affect financial markets, financial stability, and the real economy. This book studies the collateral framework in the euro area in detail, and levers this analysis to provide an account of the euro crisis from the perspective of collateral policy. Readers gain access to a wealth of institutional and economic data and information with a level of density and accessibility unavailable elsewhere. This book, the first of its kind, is a valuable read for academic monetary and financial economists, those working in banking and policy-making financial institutions, and anyone who wishes to learn more about the role of central banks in society.
There is growing interest in Israel's political system from all parts of the world. This Handbook provides a unique comprehensive presentation of political life in Israel from the formative pre-state period to the present. The themes covered include: political heritage and the unresolved issues that have been left to fester; the institutional framework (the Knesset, government, judiciary, presidency, the state comptroller and commissions of inquiry); citizens' political participation (elections, political parties, civil society and the media); the four issues that have bedevilled Israeli democracy since its establishment (security, state and religion, the status of Israel's Arab citizens and economic inequities with concomitant social gaps); and the contours of the political culture and its impact on Israel's democracy. The authors skilfully integrate detailed basic data with an analysis of structures and processes, making the Handbook accessible to both experts and those with a genera
This book undertakes a specialised analysis of a topic that is highly significant both theoretically and practically. At the theoretical level, it discusses questions that have remained insufficiently answered in the fields of international human rights and institutional law. Notably, it clarifies how international human rights law conditions member states' governance role within international financial institutions and how this role is to be accommodated in the regime of international responsibility. Furthermore, the book's thorough discussion of member states' human rights due diligence duties offers a practical contribution to the understanding of what tools may be used by states to secure their human rights obligations when participating in international financial institutions. Its practical significance also relates to the examination of the various elements that must be demonstrated by an individual wishing to invoke member State responsibility for alleged human rights violations
This book proposes an institutionally embedded framework for analyzing voter choice. Voters, Orit Kedar argues, are concerned with policy, and therefore their vote reflects the path set by political institutions leading from votes to policy. Under this framework, the more institutional mechanisms facilitating post-electoral compromise are built into the political process (e.g., multi-party government), the more voters compensate for the dilution of their vote. This simple but overlooked principle allows Kedar to explain a broad array of seemingly unrelated electoral regularities and offer a unified framework of analysis, which she terms compensatory vote. Kedar develops the compensatory logic in three electoral arenas: parliamentary, presidential, and federal. Leveraging on institutional variation in the degree of power sharing, she analyzes voter choice, conducting an empirical analysis that brings together institutional and behavioral data in a broad cross section of elections in dem
This book explains how international financial law 'works' and presents an alternative theory for understanding its purpose, operation, and limitations. Drawing on a close institutional analysis of the post-crisis financial architecture, it argues that international financial law is often bolstered by a range of reputational, market, and institutional mechanisms that make it more coercive than classical theories of international law predict. As such, it is a powerful, though at times imperfect, tool of financial diplomacy. Expanded and revised, the second edition of Soft Law and the Global Financial System contains updated material as well as an extensive new chapter analyzing how international standards and best practices have been operationalized in the US and EU in the wake of the financial crisis. It remains an essential tool for understanding global soft law for political scientists, lawyers, economists, and students of financial statecraft.
The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr Ostrom uses institutional analysis to explore different ways - both successful and unsuccessful - of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the 'tragedy of the commons' argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisherie
Switching parties is arguably the most important decision a politician will ever make. This book is the first-ever systematic study of the causes and consequences of legislative party switching in the United States. The author argues that re-election alone does not explain party switching. He proposes an ambition-based theory that accounts for multiple goals (including higher office aspirations and the desire for influence in the legislature) with a focus on the electoral costs and the institutional benefits of the decision. The book combines the statistical analysis of electoral data and legislative careers in the US Congress and state legislatures with elite interviews of party switchers, non-switchers, and a party leader. The case study of a party switcher's decision in 'real time' documents the complexity of the decision in a politician's own words prior to and following the switch. The book raises important questions regarding the meaning of a party label.
Is the Death Penalty Dying? provides a careful analysis of the historical and political conditions that shaped death penalty practice on both sides of the Atlantic from the end of World War II to the twenty-first century. This book examines and assesses what the United States can learn from the European experience with capital punishment, especially the trajectory of abolition in different European nations. As a comparative sociology and history of the present, the book seeks to illuminate the way death penalty systems and their dissolution work, by means of eleven chapters written by an interdisciplinary group of authors from the United States and Europe. This work will help readers see how close the United States is to ending capital punishment and some of the cultural and institutional barriers that stand in the way of abolition.
The Continental Shelf Delimitation Beyond 200 Nautical Miles provides an up-to-date and informed analysis of the now fast developing, yet confusing, field of the law of maritime delimitation. It examines the procedural matters in relation to the competence of international courts and tribunals in the light of the institutional framework of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and discusses the methodological questions arising out of the delimitation process. The book engages with the key concepts of maritime entitlement, delineation and delimitation with a view to developing a coherent and consistent approach to the delimitation of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles. Essentially, it argues that the delimitation of the continental shelf will be unified with existing maritime delimitation, and a common approach to maritime boundary-making within and beyond 200 nautical miles is likely to emerge.
Comparative Regional Integration: Governance and Legal Models is a groundbreaking comparative study on regional or supranational integration through international and regional organizations. It provides the first comprehensive and empirically based analysis of governance systems by drawing on an original sample of 87 regional and international organizations. The authors explain how and why different organizations select specific governance processes and institutional choices, and outline which legal instruments - regulatory, organizational or procedural - are adopted to achieve integration. They reveal how different objectives influence institutional design and the integration model, for example a free trade area could insist on supremacy and refrain from adopting instruments for indirect rule, while a political union would rather engage with all available techniques. This ambitious work merges different backgrounds and disciplines to provide researchers and practitioners with a unique
For the first time since Mao, a Chinese leader may serve a life-time tenure. Xi Jinping may well replicate Mao's successful strategy to maintain power. If so, what are the institutional and policy implications for China? Victor C. Shih investigates how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the elite and achieve true dictatorship, governing without fear of internal challenge or resistance to major policy changes. Through an in-depth look of late-Mao politics informed by thousands of historical documents and data analysis, Coalitions of the Weak uncovers Mao's strategy of replacing seasoned, densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or inexperienced officials. The book further documents how a decentralized version of this strategy led to two generations of weak leadership in the Chinese Communist Party, creating the conditions for Xi's rapid consolidation of power after 2012.
Why does secularization proceed differently in otherwise similar countries? Secular Conversions demonstrates that the institutional structure of the state is a key factor shaping the course of secularization. Drawing upon detailed historical analysis of religious education policy in the United States and Australia, Damon Mayrl details how administrative structures, legal procedures, and electoral systems have shaped political opportunities and even helped create constituencies for secular policies. In so doing, he also shows how a decentralized, readily accessible American state acts as an engine for religious conflict, encouraging religious differences to spill into law and politics at every turn. This book provides a vivid picture of how political conflicts interacted with the state over the long span of American and Australian history to shape religion's role in public life. Ultimately, it reveals that taken-for-granted political structures have powerfully shaped the fate of religio
The growth of institutional capacity in the developing world has become a central theme in twenty-first-century social science. Many studies have shown that public institutions are an important determinant of long-run rates of economic growth. This book argues that to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of state building in the contemporary world, it is necessary to analyze previous efforts to create institutional capacity in conflictive contexts. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the process of state and nation building in Latin America and Spain from independence to the 1930s. The book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century - without much success. The Spanish and Latin American experience of the nineteenth century was arguably the first regional stage on which the organizational and political dilemmas that still haunt states were faced. This book provides an unprecedented perspective on
The regulation of innovation and the optimal design of legal institutions in an environment of uncertainty are two of the most important policy challenges of the twenty-first century. Innovation is critical to economic growth. Regulatory design decisions and, in particular, competition policy and intellectual property regimes can have profound consequences for economic growth. However, remarkably little is known about the relationship between innovation, competition and regulatory policy. Any legal regime must attempt to assess the trade-offs associated with rules that will affect incentives to innovate, allocative efficiency, competition, and freedom of economic actors to commercialize the fruits of their innovative labors. The essays in this book approach this critical set of problems from an economic perspective, relying on the tools of microeconomics, quantitative analysis and comparative institutional analysis to explore and begin to provide answers to the myriad challenges facing
The Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem) pioneered new ways to conceptualize and measure democracy, producing a multidimensional and disaggregated data set on democracy around the world that is now widely used by researchers, activists, and governments. Why Democracies Develop and Decline draws on this data to present a comprehensive overview and rigorous empirical tests of the factors that contribute to democratization and democratic decline, looking at economic, social, institutional, geographic, and international factors. It is the most authoritative and encompassing empirical analysis of the causes of democratization and reversals. The volume also proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework and presents an up-to-date description of global democratic developments from the French Revolution to the present. Each chapter leverages the specialized expertise of its authors, yet their sustained collaboration lends the book an unusually unified approach and a coherent theory and narra
In the late 1980s regional integration emerged as one of the most important developments in world politics. It is not a new phenomenon, however, and this 1999 book presents an analysis of integration across time, and across regions. Walter Mattli examines projects in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, but also in Latin America, North America and Asia since the 1950s. Using the tools of political economy, he considers why some integration schemes have succeeded while many others have failed; what forces drive the process of integration; and under what circumstances outside countries seek to join. Unlike traditional political science approaches, the book stresses the importance of market forces in determining the outcome of integration; but unlike purely economic analyses, it also highlights the impact of institutional factors. The book will provide students of political science, economics, and European studies with a framework for the study of international cooperation.
First published in 1955, with a revised edition appearing five years later, H. G. Adler's Theresienstadt, 1941–1945 is a foundational work in the field of Holocaust studies. As the first scholarly monograph to describe the particulars of a single camp - the Jewish ghetto in the Czech city of Terezin - it is the single most detailed and comprehensive account of any concentration camp. Adler, a survivor of the camp, divides the book into three sections: a history of the ghetto, a detailed institutional and social analysis of the camp, and an attempt to understand the psychology of the perpetrators and the victims. A collaborative effort between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Terezin Publishing Project makes this authoritative text on Holocaust history available for the first time in the English language, with a new afterword by the author's son Jeremy Adler.
