The focus for students of Latin America in the past decade has been on the political forces of the left and the so-called 'pink tide' presidencies attempting to bring about social and economic change in the region. However, there has been far less attention paid to the rightwing political forces resisting such change. Such opposition is being orchestrated by political parties, business, the private media and other social and cultural institutions and is linked to the 'soft power' of US dip...

This book explores the links between European integration and globalisation, and examines the potential for social transformation in the context of the global economic crisis and the resulting EU reforms.Divided into three parts, this book offers both empirical and theoretical analyses of social integration, supranationality and global competition. Drawing on Critical Political Economy research, Neo-Gramscian, Open Marxist, Regulationist and Post-structuralist scholars subject a wi...

In How Will Capitalism End?, the acclaimed analyst of contempo�rary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is on the cusp of enormous change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of the Second World War, is unravelling. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector's excesses have collapsed, and there is no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalization of the m...

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...

This textbook provides a historical survey of economic and political development theory and practice from 1945. Against the background of changes in global politics, it explores how the project of international development has been shaped in a series of wider contexts. Divided into two historical parts: the Sovereign Order, post 1945 to the early-1980s, and the Liberal post-Cold War Era from the 1980s to the present day, it examines:the evolution of ideas of international dev...

Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics is concerned with the nature of corporate power against the backdrop of the decline of the West and the struggle by non-western states to challenge and overcome domination of the rest of the world by the West. This book argues that although the US continues to preside over a quasi-imperial system of power based on global military preponderance and financial statecraft, and remains reluctant to recognize the realities global economic converg...

Why have some countries have been more successful in welfare state reform than others? This book examines the experiences of various countries in reforming their welfare states through renegotiations between the state and peak associations of employers and employees. This corporatist concertation has been blamed for bringing about all the ills of the welfare state, but lately corporate institutions have learned from their bad performances, modified their structures and style of operation, ...

Why did the European Union experience a stark variation in the levels of conflict between the late 1970s, when budgetary disputes dominated European politics, and the 1990s, when political actors were able to settle upon budgetary agreements without major conflicts?This book responds to this key question with a two-step argument: Its first part shows that decision-making rules can be regarded as a key determinant of the level of conflict in EU budgetary politics. It details far-rea...

This book offers a significant contribution to the globalization debate, and examines the complexities surrounding modern globalization. It will be of great interest to scholars of international political economy, international relations and globalization studies.

Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Indeed, the term 'state' was rarely used. Current work, however, increasingly views the state as an agent which, although influenced by the society that surrounds it, also shapes social and political processes. The contributors to this volume, which includes some of the best recent interdisciplinary scholarship on state...

In modern society, economic growth is considered to be the primary goal pursued through policymaking. But when and how did this perception become widely adopted among social scientists, politicians and the general public? Focusing on the OECD, one of the least understood international organisations, Schmelzer offers the first transnational study to chart the history of growth discourses. He reveals how the pursuit of GDP growth emerged as a societal goal and the ways in which the methods e...

*** Winner of the Myrdal Prize for Evolutionary Political Economy ***The last few years have seen the spectacular failure of market fundamentalism in Europe and the US, with a seemingly never-ending spate of corporate scandals and financial crises. As the environmental limits and socially destructive tendencies of the current profit-driven economic model become daily more self-evident, there is a growing demand for a fairer economic alternative, as evidenced by the mounting campaig...