Craig Parsons

Constructing the International Economy

The world is, as they say, complicated. The world economy is especially so. Unpredicted events often infl uence markets in improbable ways. Individuals and organizations—fi rms, governments—surprise observers by behaving in ways that appear contrary to their presumed material interests as events defy the categories and concepts we construct to contain them. Crises recur with worrisome frequency. As the world internationalizes, these complications become more profound. Yet it would be diffi cult to fi nd evidence of these complications in much of the scholarly study of international political economy (IPE). Scholars of IPE have arrived at a comfortable certainty about how the world works. Most see the environment in which fi rms and governments operate as predominantly material. The incentives, they argue, that actors derive from the material structure of the economy determine what fi rms and governments do. These scholarly constructs are generally presumed by their constructors to correspond to reality rather than to represent stylizations of the heuristics that, we assume, inform decision making within organizations (Blyth 2007a). As their materialist theories and rationalist models become more sophisticated, these scholars have hoped that the world will become more knowable. And to some extent, progress has, in fact, been made. We grow more and more satisfi ed with our ability to explain the world to ever more detailed degrees. Tremendous gaps in our understanding still exist, however, because scholarship based on the connection between observer-deduced material incentives _S _E _L

Cross-Cutting Issues and Party Strategy in the European Union

Has European integration affected national electoral politics beyond the margins? Experts describe its main impact as empowerment of radical voices. Mainstream parties avoid European Union (EU) issues that divide their left-or right-based organizations; extreme parties attack the EU and the center’s silence. But EU issues also generate important dynamics inside mainstream parties. The authors theorize cross-cutting EU issues as an example of a general model of cross-issue interference. Two mechanisms of interference alter party strategizing. When electoral victories have strengthened leaders, cross-cutting issues produce muffling of more recently emerged issues. Divided parties cling to left—right issues and suppress fights over integration. But interference also runs the other way. When leadership is weak, muffling fails and challengers aggravate dissent. Internal fights on newer (EU) issues affect the selection of leadership on older (left—right) issues, generating displacement from electorally competitive positions. The authors document these mechanisms and their generality with mixed methods: pan-European panel analysis and interview-based accounts.

Ideas and power: four intersections and how to show them

ABSTRACT The notion that ideas powerfully shape policies seems highly intuitive. How actors think about policy matters, and their thinking is not just a mechanistic function of uninterpreted conditions around them. Yet turning this intuition into clear claims about the influence of ideas is challenging. This contribution extracts guidelines from the growing literature on ideas to suggest how to best display four common kinds of intersections between ideas and context that make the ideas powerful. We can show that certain ideas gain influence because ‘believers’ obtain power for unrelated reasons; because the ideas somehow empower actors to achieve power; because they make possible new coalitions of actors; or because they inform the crafting or retooling of institutions that matter. The essay highlights what some of the strongest literature on ideas does well and how it can become still more persuasive.

Revisiting the Single European Act (and the Common Wisdom on Globalization)

The European program of liberalization launched by the Single European Act (SEA) of 1987 is commonly seen as a powerful instance of “globalization” trends of economic integration, liberalization, and international institution building. This article revisits the origins of the SEA to argue that the extent and success of its liberalizing program depended on a causally distinct push for European institutional reform. A retracing of concrete political patterns behind the SEA greatly strengthens broader statistical and theoretical challenges to the notion of strong universal trends of globalization.

Dynamic party unity: the US Congress in comparative perspective

Moises Ostrogorski once denounced political parties for burying diverse concerns of pluralistic societies under monolithic electoral options. E.E. Schattschneider celebrated them for the same reason: organizing choice and ‘responsible party government’ amid pluralistic complexity. Comparativists have found both dynamics in European legislatures: most European parties exhibit the high average levels of voting unity that Schattschneider’s theory implies, but also display rather Ostrogorskian cycles of discipline, stifling dissent on divisive issues at election time. We use comparativists’ tools to explore the dynamics and normative quality of party unity in the different terrain of the US Congress. We find similar cycles of unity in roll-call voting, but in the American context – with more loosely organized parties, especially historically but still today – Ostrogorskian stifling of dissent operates against a less Schattschneiderian background. In comparative perspective, Congressional parties muffle divisive issues more effectively than they deliver governance, with tenuous implications for representation.

Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment

Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment. By Isabela Mares. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 288p.

A certain idea of Europe

70.00 cloth,

Showing Ideas as Causes: The Origins of the European Union

27.99 paper. Just three years after publishing The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development, a prize-winning book on the role of employers in the development of European welfare states, Isabela Mares offers an overarching explanation of labor market performance in postwar Europe. She builds on the institutionalist literature in political economy, but combines its best-known models of labor markets with other elements. As foundations, she takes the Calmfors-Driffil model, which stressed that unemployment varies with labor union centralization (since more centralized unions are better at delivering wage moderation), and the Soskice-Iversen model, which stressed that unemployment varies with the independence and policies of central banks (since union moderation is encouraged by nonaccommodating monetary policy, which adjusts to cancel out wage inflation that exceeds productivity growth). Mares notes, however, that in most cases, neither union centralization nor monetary policy institutions have varied as much as unemployment over time—leaving these models better able to account for cross-national variation than for cross-temporal patterns.