Most people believe that large corporations wield enormous political power when they lobby for policies as a cohesive bloc. With this controversial book, Mark A. Smith sets conventional wisdom on its head. In a systematic analysis of postwar lawmaking, Smith reveals that business loses in legislative battles unless it has public backing. This surprising conclusion holds because the types of issues that lead businesses to band together—such as tax rates, air pollution, and product liability—also receive the most media attention. The ensuing debates give citizens the information they need to hold their representatives accountable and make elections a choice between contrasting policy programs.
Rather than succumbing to corporate America, Smith argues, representatives paradoxically become more responsive to their constituents when facing a united corporate front. Corporations gain the most influence over legislation when they work with organizations such as think tanks to shape Americans' beliefs about what government should and should not do.

The birthplace of the nation-state and modern nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was supposed to be their graveyard at the end of the twentieth. Yet, far from moving beyond the nation-state, fin-de-siecle Europe has been moving back to the nation-state, most spectacularly with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia into a score of nationally defined successor states. This massive reorganisation of political space along national lines has engendered distinctive, dynamically interlocking, and in some cases explosive forms of nationalism. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and the 'new institutionalist' sociology, and comparing contemporary nationalisms with those of interwar Europe, Rogers Brubaker provides a theoretically sophisticated and historically rich account of one of the most important problems facing the 'New Europe'.

Many societies use labor market coordination to maximize economic growth and equality, yet employers' willing cooperation with government and labor is something of a mystery. The Political Construction of Business Interests recounts employers' struggles to define their collective social identities at turning points in capitalist development. Employers are most likely to support social investments in countries with strong peak business associations, that help members form collective preferences and realize policy goals in labor market negotiations. Politicians, with incentives shaped by governmental structures, took the initiative in association-building and those that created the strongest associations were motivated to evade labor radicalism and to preempt parliamentary democratization. Sweeping in its historical and cross-national reach, the book builds on original archival data, interviews and cross-national quantitative analyses. The research has important implications for the construction of business as a social class and powerful ramifications for equality, welfare state restructuring and social solidarity.

This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.

Review
In this new work, the authors make another major contribution to the field of comparative political economy by examining in a thorough manner the various factors that influence the different trajectories of social policy (primarily the development and reform of welfare policies) in middle-income countries of Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. . . . This will be an important and widely cited work in the field.
(Choice )
The in-depth comparative investigation into the welfare states in developing and former-communist countries provided in Development, Democracy, and Welfare States is unprecedented. This book will likely be the point of departure for most future work on welfare states in any of these regions. . . . The conclusion of the book, in addition to presenting the significant findings of this initial investigation, could be read as a research agenda for students of welfare-state (re)formation in Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe.
(Kristin Nickel Makszin Czech Sociological Review )
Review
While many authors cannot see beyond the borders of their own country, Haggard and Kaufman masterfully compare Latin America, East Asia, and East Europe from a global perspective. These two great scholars analyze urgent contemporary problems, the status and future fate of the welfare state, and the relationship of changes with the creation and development of democracy with remarkable expertise, precision, and human empathy.
(Janos Kornai, professor emeritus, Harvard University and Collegium Budapest )

The Divided Welfare State is the first comprehensive political analysis of America's system of public and private social benefits. Everyone knows that the American welfare state is less expensive and extensive, later to develop and slower to grow, than comparable programs abroad. American social spending is as high as spending in many European nations. What is distinctive is that so many social welfare duties are handled by the private sector with government support. With historical reach and statistical and cross-national evidence, The Divided Welfare State demonstrates that private social benefits have not been shaped by public policy, but have deeply influenced the politics of public social programs - to produce a social policy framework whose political and social effects are strikingly different than often assumed. At a time of fierce new debates about social policy, this book is essential to understanding the roots of America's distinctive model and its future possibilities.

Originally published in 1971, this social science classic outlines the social functions of welfare programs.
"Uncompromising and provocative....By mixing history, political interpretation and sociological analysis, Piven and Cloward provide the best explanation to date of our present situation...no future discussion of welfare can afford to ignore them."

This 2002 study examines the process by which the seemingly impossible in 1987 - the disintegration of the Soviet state - became the seemingly inevitable by 1991, providing an original interpretation not only of 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 data and case studies from across the USSR during its final years to elicit the shifting relationship between pre-existing structural conditions, institutional constraints, and event-generated influences in the nationalist explosions that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Beissinger demonstrates, the 'tidal' context of nationalism - i.e., the transnational influence of one nationalism upon another - is critical to an explanation of the success and failure of particular nationalisms, why some nationalisms turn violent, and how a crescendo of events can overwhelm states, periodically evoking large-scale structural change in the character of the state system.

The question of whether democratization is an elite-led process from above or a popular triumph from below continues to be an area of contention among political scientists. Examining the experiences of countries which have provided the main empirical base for recent theorizing, namely, Western Europe and South America in the 19th and early 20th centuries and again in the 1970s and 1980s, this book delineates a more complex and varied set of patterns. The volume explores the politics of democratization through a comparative analysis that examines the role of labor in relation to elite strategies in both contemporary and historical perspectives. In her detailed analysis, Professor Collier also describes multiple patterns within each historical period, challenges conventional understandings of these events, and recaptures a role for unions and labor-based parties in contemporary processes of democratization.

Caring for Our Own inverts an enduring question of social welfare politics. Rather than ask why the American state hasn't responded to unmet social welfare needs by expanding social entitlements, this book asks: Why don't American families view unmet social welfare needs as the basis for demands for new state entitlements? The answer, Sandra Levitsky argues, lies in a better understanding of how individuals imagine solutions to the social welfare problems they confront and what prevents new understandings of social welfare provision from developing into political demand for alternative social arrangements. Caring for Our Own considers the powerful ways in which existing social policies shape the political imagination, reinforcing longstanding values about family responsibility, subverting grievances grounded in notions of social responsibility, and in some rare cases, constructing new models of social provision that transcend existing ideological divisions in American social politics.

Despite a quarter-century of constructivist theorizing in the social sciences and humanities, ethnic groups continue to be conceived as entities and cast as actors. Journalists, policymakers, and researchers routinely frame accounts of ethnic, racial, and national conflict as the struggles of internally homogeneous, externally bounded ethnic groups, races, and nations. In doing so, they unwittingly adopt the language of participants in such struggles, and contribute to the reification of ethnic groups. In this timely and provocative volume, Rogers Brubaker--well known for his work on immigration, citizenship, and nationalism--challenges this pervasive and commonsense "groupism." But he does not simply revert to standard constructivist tropes about the fluidity and multiplicity of identity. Once a bracing challenge to conventional wisdom, constructivism has grown complacent, even cliched. That ethnicity is constructed is commonplace; this volume provides new insights into how it is constructed. By shifting the analytical focus from identity to identifications, from groups as entities to group-making projects, from shared culture to categorization, from substance to process, Brubaker shows that ethnicity, race, and nation are not things in the world but perspectives on the world: ways of seeing, interpreting, and representing the social world.

This book contains essays on the foundations and limits of the state, derived from papers presented at a conference held in May 1983 at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center.

The social sciences have long been based upon contrasts drawn between the 'militaristic' societies of the past, and the 'capitalist' or 'industrial' societies of the present. But how valid are such contrasts, given that the current era is one stamped by the impact of war and by the intensive development of sophisticated weaponry?
In setting out to address this and similar questions, this book investigates issues that have been substantially neglected by those working in sociology and social theory. Anthony Giddens offers a sociological analysis of the nature of the modern nation-state and its association with the means of waging war. His analysis is connected in a detailed way to problems that have traditionally preoccupied sociologists - the impact of capitalism and industrialism upon social development in the modern period. The result is a theory both of the institutional parameters of modernity and of the nature of international relations.
The book is a sequel to the author's much discussed Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. The framework of social theory outlined in that work is here elucidated in a systematic and thorough-going fashion. The novel and provocative ideas which the author develops will interest those working in a wide variety of disciplines: sociology, politics, geography and international affairs.

《社会冲突的结构性来源》作者以变迁社会中的经验现象为据，围绕历史以及转型中基层社会的制度、行为和观念变迁等主题，精选文章。各论题聚焦于社会冲突的结构性来源和秩序转化、公共组织角色变化的政治后果、秩序稳定的社会结构基础、中国社会利益组织化的特点、阶级组织化不活跃的原因，以及社会建设可借鉴的历史经验。

本书为国际知名社会学家的代表作，也是政治社会学领域的经典之作。作者在系统介绍了政治社会学的几位奠基人物——马克思、韦伯、杜尔克姆、托克维尔等——的理论体系的基础上，从各派观点着手理清政治社会学的分析，并对现代大都市的权力与政治、政党和政治党派意识、公民政治参与、现代世界的民族国家建设等问题作了清晰的阐述。本书适合作为政治学系、社会学系的教材。