What will gain the system's attention? "Explores the dynamics of a broad range of policy issues in different countries . . . an important scholarly contribution." — Political Studies ReviewBefore making significant policy decisions, political actors and parties must first craft an agenda designed to place certain issues at the center of political attention. The agenda-setting approach in political science holds that the amount of attention devoted by the v...

In ten years 80 per cent of the legislation related to economics, maybe also to taxes and social aff airs, will be of Community origin.” This declaration has been largely quoted, paraphrased and deformed by different authors, creating a persistent myth according to which 80% of the legislative activity of the national legislatures would soon be reduced to the simple transposition of European norms”. This book addresses the topic of the scope and impact of Europeanization on national legisl...

The southern African region has the worst HIV/AIDS epidemic in the world. In some countries, HIV infection affects nearly 40% of the adult population. This work shows that, despite the formal commitment of the governments of the region to follow international guidelines to combat the epidemic and the technical and financial support of powerful donors, three countries - Botswana,Mozambique and South Africa - showed significant variations in internal assimilation of international prescriptio...

The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg are well-known cases of consensus politics. Decision-making in the Low Countries has been characterized by broad involvement, power sharing and making compromises. These countries were also founding member states of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors. However, the relationship between European integration and the tradition of domestic consensus politics remains unclear.In order to explore this relationship this book offers in-depth ...

In the first study of comparative direct-democracy, Laurent Bernhard explores the nature of direct-democratic campaigning in Switzerland. The author examines four policy areas: immigration, healthcare, welfare and economic liberalism focussing on interviews with campaign managers to provide a comprehensive analysis of direct-democratic campaigning.

The Oxford Handbook on the World Trade Organization provides an authoritative and cutting-edge account of the World Trade Organization. Its purpose is to provide a holistic understanding of what the WTO does, how it goes about fulfilling its tasks, its achievements and problems, and how it might contend with some critical challenges. The Handbook benefits from an interdisciplinary approach. The editorial team comprises a transatlantic partnership between a political scien...

This book investigates Parliaments’ capacity to oversee government activities, policies and expenditures. Utilising a comparative approach, the book presents a new examination of oversight tools and discusses the conditions under which such tools are employed effectively.The result of a 9-year collaboration between the authors, this book draws from the findings of survey data collected by the World Bank Institute and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, analysing information from 120 par...

Covering the World Intellectual Property Organization, this volume introduces a much ignored element of the contemporary structure of global governance to scholars of international political economy.Christopher May discusses:how the World Intellectual Property Organization works, its antecedents and historythe debates about the role and justification of intellectual propertythe role of WIPO within contemporary global politicsthe...

This book presents a comparative perspective to the study of European politics, focusing on the unique and transformative effect of European Union on the politics of its member states - in effect, the Europeanization of European politics. For no other world region is there a similar intensity of Treaty and other obligations on a set of neighboring states, nor a comparable depth of of supranational governance. The concept of Europeanism as an evaluative theme is used to explore this unique,...

In 2013 almost half of Africa's top aid recipients were ruled by authoritarian regimes. While the West may claim to promote democracy and human rights, in practice major bilateral and international donors, such as USAID, DFID, the World Bank and the European Commission, have seen their aid policies become ever more entangled with the survival of their authoritarian protégés. Local citizens thus find themselves at the receiving end of a compromise between aid agencies and government elites,...

European governments have re-discovered labour migration, but are eager to be perceived as controlling unsolicited forms of migration, especially through asylum and family reunion. The emerging paradigm of managed migration combines the construction of more permissive channels for desirable and actively recruited labour migrants with ever more restrictive approaches towards asylum seekers. Non-state actors, especially employer organizations, trade unions, and humanitarian non-governmental ...

The European Union is the world's most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to supranational actors such as the European Commission. This legalistic view, Mareike Kleine contends, is misleading. More often than not, governments and bureaucrats informally dep...