This book examines the impact of increased legislative power and political authority on the internal development of the European Parliament and the supranational party group system. This is done through an analysis of changes in the hierarchical structures that regulate the internal organization of both the European Parliament as a whole and the individual party groups. In addition, the changing pattern of coalition formation between party groups across time and legislative procedure is analyzed.

This major study examines one of the most surprising developments in East Central European politics after the democratic transitions of 1989: the completely unexpected regeneration of the former communist parties. After the collapse of the communist regimes in 1989, these ruling communist parties seemed consigned to oblivion. However, confounding scholarly and popular expectations, all of the parties survived, with some even returning to power.

This study examines the process by which the seemingly impossible in 1987--the disintegration of the Soviet state--became the seemingly inevitable by 1991. It provides an original interpretation of not only the Soviet collapse, but also of the phenomenon of nationalism more generally. Probing the role of nationalist action as both cause and effect, Beissinger utilizes extensive event data and detailed case studies from across the U.S.S.R. during its final years to elicit the shifting relationship between pre-existing structural conditions, institutional constraints, and event-generated...

Evan Lieberman's analysis focuses on the politics of taxation as a way of understanding the development of governments. He compares Brazil and South Africa because of their similarities: They are upper-middle-income countries, and highly unequal--both in terms of income and racial status. Lieberman argues that different constitutional approaches to race (whether or not to grant equal citizenship to blacks) and federalism (whether to have it or not) shaped the organization of politics in the two countries, leading to the development of very different tax systems. The findings are based on...

This book presents empirical research on the nature and structure of political violence. While most studies of social movements focus on single-nation studies, Donatella della Porta uses a comparative research design to analyze movements in two countries--Italy and Germany--from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through extensive use of official documents and in-depth interviews, della Porta is able to explain the actors' construction of external political reality, and to build a theory on political violence that synthesizes the various interactions among political actors.

In most post-colonial regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, state power has been used to structure economic production in ways that have tended to produce economic stagnation rather than growth. In this book, Catherine Boone examines the ways in which the exercise of state power has inhibited economic growth, focusing on the case of Senegal. She traces changes in the political economy of Senegal from the heyday of colonial merchant capital in the 1930s to the decay of the neo-colonial merchant capital in the 1980s and reveals that old trading monopolies, commercial hierarchies and patterns of wealth...

This book argues that European economies were not deregulated in the 1980s. While old, politically-centralized institutions have lost importance, institutional arrangements continue to shape economic behavior of peripheral actors. The book's importance lies not just in showing that the prevailing deregulation view is wrong as far as continental European countries are concerned, but especially in outlining an alternative pattern of "micro-social" regulation of their economies.

This book presents, through an extensive and novel inductive approach, an analysis of the temporal dynamics of postwar Italian strikes in the industrial sector. The author begins by highlighting a set of characteristics in the strike data that call for explanation: the pieces of the puzzle. Then, chapter by chapter, the author uses a broad range of available strike theories - business cycle, economic, hardship, resource mobilization, bargaining structure, political exchange, and Marxist - as clues to assemble the puzzle. The study has the organizational structure of a mystery story, with its...

This book is about politics in Brazil during the military regime of 1964-85 and the transition to democracy. Unlike most books about contemporary Brazilian politics that focus on promising signs of change, this book seeks to explain remarkable political continuity in the Brazilian political system. It attributes the persistence of traditional politics and the dominance of regionally-based, traditional political elites in particular to the manner in which the economic and political strategies of the military, together with the transition to democracy, reinforced the clientelistic,...

Money, Markets, and the State provides in-depth explanations behind the various successes and failures of the economic policies of social democratic governments in five Western European countries: Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. Dr. Notermans examines these economic systems from the inflation of the early twenties, through the Great Depression of the thirties, and then continues his analysis up to present-day mass unemployment. Drawing on a wide range of historical and statistical sources, Dr. Notermans argues that the fate of social democratic economic policy...