Focusing on the intersection of politics and law in six western European countries and in two supra-national bodies, the contributors here aim to debunk the myth that judges are merely "la bouche de la loi" and analyze similiarities in policy-making of the judiciaries from one nation to the next.

This book examines why Western European states have recently introduced citizenship tests, integration courses, contracts, and oath ceremonies. These requirements are perceived as instruments of civic integration, to enable immigrants to be better participants in society and the labor market. However, are all states introducing these requirements for the same reason?

Social pacts – policy agreements between governments, labor unions and sometimes employer organizations – began to emerge in many countries in the 1980s. The most common explanations for social pacts tend to focus on economic factors, influenced by industrial relations institutions such as highly coordinated collective bargaining. This book presents, and tests, an alternative and complementary explanation highlighting the electoral calculations made by political parties in choosing pacts. Using a dataset covering 16 European countries for the years 1980-2006, as well as eight in-depth country case studies, the authors argue that governments’ choice of social pacts or legislation is less influenced by economic problems, but is strongly influenced by electoral competition. Social pacts will be attractive when party leaders perceive them to be helpful in reducing the potential electoral costs of economic adjustment and wage restraint policies. Alternatively, parties may forgo negotiations with social partners and seek to impose such policies unilaterally if they believe that approach will yield electoral gain or minimize electoral costs. By combining the separate literatures on political economy and party politics, the book sheds new light on the dynamics of social pacts in Western Europe. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, economics, political economy, European Studies and comparative politics.

Examining such issues as the welfare state, the politics of unemployment and government-industry relations, this work looks at the developments in western European politics up to and during the 1980s.

Governance and Environment in Western Europe: Politics, Policy and Administration, provides an up-to-date overview of developments in this area focusing on a selection of ten countries in Western Europe and the European Union. The countries examined are: Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The range of countries covered - representing as they do different stages of development in environmental policy, different state and institutional traditions - provides an interesting comparative analysis of how different countries confronting similar problems of environmental management have responded politically and (re)organised their administrative systems for implementing these policies.

The Handbook of West European Pension Politics provides scholars, policy-makers and students with a complete overview of the political and policy issues involved in pension policy, and well as case studies of contemporary pension politics (1980 to present) in 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The book is suitable as a text for courses in comparative politics, European Studies, social policy, comparative public policy and public administration. Each chapter is written by an expert on pension politics and is presented in a standardized format with standardized tables and figures that describe: political institutions; government coalitions, parliamentary and electoral majorities; the party system; the pension system; proposed and enacted pension reforms.

Sebastian Hartmann aims at answering the question whether socioeconomic policies implemented by governments are generally rather similar or whether their content actually varies with the ideological background of governments. In addition, he wants to find out whether government characteristics such as coalition or minority situations impact the degree of partisan policy-making. The author employs a new dataset of social and economic policies collected for several Western European countries. By conducting a wide range of empirical analyses and by using an innovative approach for analysing the policy output, he shows that ideology indeed matters. However, the degree of its influence is contingent upon structural characteristics of governments.

First published in 1982, Policy Styles in Western Europe considers the growth of the modern state in the 1980s and examines the implications of this for the making and implementation of public policy decisions. It argues that the business of government was simply easier in the 1970s and that the growth of the modern state has meant an expansion of public policies, with the state widening in areas of societal activity. This book looks at the similarities and differences that exist among the countries of Western Europe. Whilst it is increasingly clear that most policy problems arise from areas of concern common to all Western democracies, for example, unemployment, inflation and crime, this book focuses on whether or not individual countries exhibit characteristic policy styles in response to them. In this volume, the country-studies consider the main characteristics of the individual policy processes in relation to a simple typology of political styles. Each author considers a series of central questions: the relationship between the government and other actors in the policy process; the degree to which policy-making has become sectorised and segmented; and the broad approach to problem solving in terms of anticipatory or reactive styles.

Long gone are the times when class-based political parties with extensive membership dominated politics. Instead, party politics has become issue-based. Surprisingly few studies have focused on how the issue content of West European party politics has developed over the past decades. Empirically, Reshaping of West European Party Politics studies party politics in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK from 1980 and onwards. This book highlights the more complex party system agenda with the decline, but not disappearance, of macroeconomic issues as well as the rise in 'new politics' issues together with education and health care. Moreover, various 'new politics' issues such as immigration, the environment, and European integration have seen very different trajectories. To explain the development of the individual issues, this volume develops a new theoretical model labelled the 'issue incentive model' of party system attention. The aim of the model is to explain how much attention issues get throughout the party system, which is labelled 'the party system agenda'. To explain the development of the party system agenda, one needs to focus on the incentives that individual policy issues offer to large, mainstream parties, i.e. the typical Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, or Conservative/Liberal parties that have dominated West European governments for decades. The core idea of the model is that the incentives that individual policy issues offer to these vote and office-seeking parties depend on three factors, namely issue characteristics, issue ownership, and coalition considerations. The issue incentive model builds on and develops a top-down perspective on which the issue content of party politics is determined by the strategic considerations of political parties and their competition with each other. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Université libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Political Science, University of Houston.