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This paper explores varieties of state intervention in corporatist political economies. Focusing on recent reforms in social policy, labor-market policy, and wage policies in Germany and the Netherlands, it suggests that the neglect of the role of the state in corporatist systems has led to a failure to capture important dimensions of how they adjust to shifting political, economic, and social challenges. Furthermore, it argues that the state’s role in promoting needed institutional and policy reforms has been particularly important during the contemporary period of fiscal austerity, slow growth, and intense pressures on inherited policy arrangements. In some policy areas, the Dutch and German states have worked within existing corporatist frameworks, while, in others, they have suspended, by-passed, or even dismantled them in order to secure urgently needed reforms. The paper concludes that the character of state intervention not only varies with the challenges posed by particular policy areas, it has also been shaped in important ways by the national institutional frameworks within which corporatist institutions are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the welfare state literature implicitly assumes that labor movements everywhere would choose roughly the same set of institutions if only they possessed the power resources to do so. Sweden is implicitly or explicitly seen as the model, with a large public sector providing comprehensive social services and income maintenance during sickness, unemployment, and old age. That countries such as Germany and the Netherlands fell short of achieving this standard is typically attributed to the inferior power resources of labor movements in these countries (i.e. they had to share power with strong Christian Democratic and/or Liberal Parties) and/or an unfavorable institutional context. An issue which has received less attention is whether labor movements in Germany and the Netherlands even wanted to follow a more "Swedish" strategy. In short, labor movements have developed their own, nationally distinct understandings of the role of the state in the provision of social welfare and regulating the market. This paper asks how labor movement visions of "the good society" in Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany shaped their responses to pressures for welfare state restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s. To do so, the paper first compares and contrasts the ideas, norms and cognitive understandings embedded in the Swedish, German and Dutch social democratic cognitive framing of the welfare state and asks how these understandings shaped welfare state restructuring processes in the 1990s and 2000s. What were the core values that social democratic parties and unions sought to defend when faced with pressures to reform? How did the embeddedness of norms and cognitive understandings in specific welfare state institutions shape labor's approach to restructuring? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of social movements theories, this paper seeks to uncover the determinants of protest mobilization. During the ups and downs of protest cycles various political factors are so intertwined that it is not unambiguous to explicate what are the driving forces behind the rise and fall of social movement mobilization. To solve this problem, I derive a set of competing hypotheses from established theories of social movements and conduct an empirical test based on a pooled cross-section time-series analysis with a negative binomial random-effects model by using Kriesi et al.?s protest event data on New Social Movements (NSMs), which covers four Western European countries ? France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland ? from 1975 to 1989. Empirical results demonstrate that the more Left government partisanship is associated with the less protest mobilization over time and that the institutionalization of a social movement decrease the likelihood of further protests, but in situations where the government becomes more conservative, an institutionalized social movement leads to a higher level of political protests. This finding implies how we can operationalize the murky term ?political opportunity? in comparative social movement studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates economic voting in four countries in Western Europe - Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, and Norway - with reference to variations in institutional structure, the internal dimensions of the voting model, and economics vs. cleavages and ideology as determinants of the vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, governments and industry have entered into dialogues resulting in voluntary agreements that represent alternatives to "command and control" regulatory measures. It is argued that voluntary agreements provide firms greater flexibility in the methods and timing of activities, thus reducing the overall costs of environmental protection as well as stimulating innovation. Moreover, voluntary approaches are said to further understanding and trust between government and industry, thereby promoting faster implementation and compliance. Questions, however, have been raised about their environmental effectiveness: critics argue that voluntary agreements are not likely to move beyond what industry would have done in the absence of such commitments; in foregoing formal laws or ordinances, such commitments fall well short of what could have been achieved. This paper attempts to sort through the conflicting claims about the environmental effectiveness of voluntary approaches by comparing voluntary agreements concluded between government and industry in Germany and the Netherlands to reduce CO2 emissions. Special attention is paid to the agreements between government and the electric utility industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates voting participation in three countries in Western Europe - Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway - from the 1960s to the late 1990s. Results show that there is no general trend of decline in turnout. However, aggregate turnout figures show somewhat lower levels in more recent elections. Turning to the individual level, the influence of demographic and attitudinal factors is investigated. Political interest show the strongest impact on electoral participation, generation the second largest. Education has effects in the expected direction. These results point to a ??puzzle of electoral participation??: from turnout statistics one would conclude that political interest should have gone down. However, this is not true. This ??puzzle?? points to the fact that context has to be taken into account. This is done here by relating the judgments about political supply of political parties to turnout. Using the classical rational choice notion of alienation and indifference reveals that for example judgments about political offers are related to turnout, also when controlling for educational level. That this relationship is not just subjective but is related to what parties offer in election campaigns is demonstrated by relating programmatic polarization and differentiation to alienation and indifference. The main conclusion to be drawn from our analyses is, that many variables are related to turnout. However, even if they show to have effects consistently over time and across countries it is obvious that their explanatory power altogether is rather weak. This probably has to do with the fact that electoral participation has a low-cost, low benefit nature. Under such circumstances neither an approach concentrating on resources like the SES model nor rational choice considerations can contribute considerably to the explanation of turnout. On the other hand, these variables obviously matter considerably for turnout, given the differences between different socioeconomic groups, or between those being alienated or not. Since the strength of these effects appears to be shaped by the context of an election, it is worthwhile to investigate to which degree the effects of different variables are shaped by the specific context in a given election, be it the closeness of the race, the campaign strategies, the strategic placement of parties and the like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain how international factors influence the outcomes of political conflicts at the national level. The particular focus is on the religious/ideological division over education in Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland around the turn of the 19th century. The interstate rivalry that dominated European politics at the time had a direct impact on domestic politics. For countries participating in the interstate power struggle, domestic uniformity was seen as a precondition for strength. Germany, Austria and France needed internal solidarity to project state power. These countries could not afford the perceived international weakness of internal divisions and domestic plurality. Thus, the conflict became a zero-sum one over the hegemonic control of the state. Neutral countries without similar pressures, on the other hand, were able to reach compromises between opposing camps. Belgian, Dutch and Swiss neutrality was either recognised or imposed by the Great Powers and by international law. So when there was less pressure to speak with one voice in international relations, the attainment of a compromise between feuding sides became more likely. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]