This edited collection explores how party politics impacts the implementation of gender quotas in political representation across Europe. Contributors identify actors, institutions, and cultural legacies shape how quotas are put into practice. The volume’s subtitle, Resisting Institutions, points to the myriad ways in which parties and other institutions in Europe over time have resisted the inclusion of women into politics. As voluntary party quotas and legislative quotas gained ...

This book provides a timely and unique contribution to current debates on how effectively voluntary party quotas address the persistent underrepresentation of women in legislatures. Using a most similar case design and a mixed-methods approach, the authors draw attention to the ways in which electoral systems and party regulations interface with voluntary party quotas in Germany and Austria. All quota parties in these countries support the goal of equal participation of women and men in el...

The Web plays an increasingly important role in the communication strategies of political parties and movements, which increasingly utilize it for promoting ideas and ideologies as well as mobilization and campaigning strategies.This book explores the role of the Web for right-wing populist political parties and movements across Europe. Analyzing these groups’ discourses and practices of online communication, it shows how social media is used to spread ideas and mobilize supporters...

Unaccompanied minor migrants are underage migrants, who for various reasons leave their country and are separated from their parents or legal/customary guardians. Some of them live entirely by themselves, while others join their relatives or other adults in a foreign country. The concept of the best interests of a child is widely applied in international, national legal documents and several guidelines and often pertains to unaccompanied minor migrants given that they are separated from pa...

Gendering the State is a ground-breaking collection of studies that examines the efforts of women in countries all over the world to frame public policy debates on nationally critical issues in gendered terms. This is the latest volume in the Research Network on Gender and the State (RNGS) collaborative studies. Using the RNGS model of women's movement and women's policy actor strategies to influence public policy debates and state response, the book looks at data gathered from ten Europea...

Governing Affects explores the neoliberal transformation of state governance in Europe towards affective forms of dominance exercised by customer-oriented neo-bureaucracies and public service providers.By investigating the rise of affective labour in contemporary European service societies and the conversion of state administrations into business-like public services, the authors trace the transformative power of neoliberal political thought as it is put into practice. The...

Heated debates about Muslim women's veiling practices have regularly attracted the attention of European policymakers over the last decade. The headscarf has been both vehemently contested by national and/or regional governments, political parties and public intellectuals and passionately defended by veil wearing women and their supporters. Systematically applying a comparative perspective, this book addresses the question of why the headscarf tantalises and causes such controversy over is...

There is an institutionalized dilemma in Europe that counteracts social cohesion and stability. It is a result of the collision and incompatibility between declarations of universal values (such as human rights and democracy) and institutionalized actions which exclude and discriminate against Europeans of immigrant background and against ethnic minorities.This book analyzes the institutional patterns and politics of ‘racial’ discrimination in modern-day Europe. Based on a research...

By focusing on the wider process of negotiations, this novel volume presents the first systematic analysis of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The authors include outstanding scholars and relevant practitioners from across disciplines and various academic institutions around Europe and North America, but also from outside of the transatlantic basin. While presenting a thorough examination of the process of TTIP negotiations, the volume is divided into four parts w...

We are living through a period of dramatic political change – Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of extreme right movements in Europe and elsewhere, the resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia and a concerted assault on the liberal values and ideals associated with cosmopolitanism and globalization. Suddenly we find ourselves in a world that few would have imagined possible just a few years ago, a world that seems to many to be a move backwards. How can we make sense of these dramati...

Multiculturalism appears to be in terminal crisis. It has been blamed for undermining national identity, diluting social cohesion, creating ethnic ghettos and cultural fragmentation, providing fertile ground for Islamic radicalism, encouraging perverse 'political correctness', and restricting liberal freedoms of expression, amongst other things. The public debate over multiculturalism has polarised opinion amongst the general public, policy makers, and politicians. But how much real eviden...

The past, present, and possible future of the agency designed to act as "the world's environmental conscience."The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) was founded in 1972 as a nimble, fast, and flexible entity at the core of the UN system--a subsidiary body rather than a specialized agency. It was intended to be the world's environmental conscience, an anchor institution that established norms and researched policy, leaving it to other organizations to ca...