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...

The age of party democracy has passed, argues Peter Mair in Ruling the Void. The major parties have become so disconnected from society that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.First published in 2013, Ruling the Void presciently observed that the widening gap between citizens and their political leaders posed a crisis of legitimacy for the governing class, and was fuelling populist mobilizations against it. Europe's political e...

Coming out of the 2000 Canadian federal election, the dominance of the Liberal Party seemed assured. By 2011 the situation had completely reversed: the Liberals suffered a crushing defeat, failing even to become the official opposition and recording their lowest ever share of the vote. Dominance and Decline provides a comprehensive, comparative account of Canadian election outcomes from 2000 through to 2008. The book explores the meaning of those outcomes within the context of the...

International Relations and International Law have developed in parallel but distinctly throughout the 20th Century. However in recent years there has been recognition that their shared concerns in areas as diverse as the environment, transnational crime and terrorism, human rights and conflict resolution outweigh their disciplinary and methodological divergences.This concise and accessible volume focuses on collaborative work within the disciplines of international law and interna...

Welfare state reform occurs in all advanced capitalist democracies, but it does not occur in identical ways, to the same degree or with similar consequences. In Comparative Welfare State Politics, Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis explain the political opportunities and constraints of welfare state reform by asking 'big' questions. Why did we need a welfare state in the first place? How did we get it? Why did we get different worlds of welfare and do we still have them? What does the wel...

The importance of polling public opinion is widely recognized today. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that in mass societies, polls have also become an important medium for communicating ideas and beliefs, especially since many people have become less involved in community organizations and interest groups that formerly connected them to events and issues. Polling and Public Opinion examines the impact that polls have on the thoughts and behaviour of the public.Peter M. Butl...

Social science research has frequently found conflict between Latinos and African Americans in urban politics and governance, as well as in the groups' attitudes toward one another. Rodney E. Hero and Robert R. Preuhs analyze whether conflict between these two groups is also found in national politics. Based on extensive evidence on the activities of minority advocacy groups in national politics and the behavior of minority members of Congress, the authors find the relationship between the...

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...

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. The European Union's market integration project has dramatically altered economic activity around Europe. This book presents extensive evidence on how trade has increased, jobs have been created, and European business has been reorganized. However, changes in the economy have been acco...

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 ...

Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politicisation in a comparative perspective over more than forty years. Focusing on six European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerl...

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...