AbstractAfter the dramatic disruptions of Trump years, American political development might do well to consider whether American exceptionalism still holds or has changed, and that would require scholars to be more attentive to cross-national comparisons and perhaps also to change the countries with which the United States is compared.
With the odd exception (Wallace, 2000), the term 'Europeanisation' has come to be used in reference to the impact of the European Union (EU) across member states (Bulmer and Burch, 1998). Assessing the nature of this impact is, however, extremely problematic. The EU does not present a single over-arching 'European principle of organization' that we might examine for evidence of its influence. Analysis of change within European states also runs into the problem of separating out 'Europeanisation' from other equally plausible variables. Finally, assuming that these difficulties can be overcome, there remains the methodological problem of how to compare the impact of the EU and/or Europeanisation in quite differently constituted national state forms. The point of this article is to try to elucidate a framework that avoids these problems. Taking the focus of analysis to the meso level, the policy networks approach is utilised to provide comparative characterizations of cross-national policy-making processes, supported by a theory of political integration to explain variation and change in alternative national policies arising as a consequence of Europeanisation. The article concludes by deploying a number of propositions from neofunctionalism in order to provide precise expectations about the effects of political integration on the institutional and political organisation of member states.
"The association of exclusionist and nationalist relations, termed ethnocentrism, has been previously explored within single-country contexts. Studies have shown that dispositional factors, such as social identity and personality traits, affect ethnocentric reactions and that attitudes differ between social categories. However, broader national and international explanations have been neglected in the literature. This book fills this major gap by providing a unique account of the relationship between nationalist attitudes and the exclusion of migrants across a range of European countries, the US, Canada and Australia. Drawing on a variety of comparative surveys, the authors assess whether ethnic exclusionist reactions and nationalist attitudes are indeed systematically related across countries, and whether variations in such attitudes reflect country-level as well as individual-level differences. The authors consider the multidimensionality of the concepts of nationalism and exclusionism as well as the empirical associations, and analyze the attitudes of both majority and minority groups within the countries studied."--Provided by publisher.
Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of temporal autonomy: the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using surveys from five countries (the United States, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden) that represent the principal types of welfare and gender regimes, we propose ways of operationalizing the time that is strictly necessary for people to spend in paid labor, unpaid household labor, and personal care. The time people have at their disposal after taking into account what is strictly necessary in these three arenas - which we call discretionary time - represents people's temporal autonomy. We measure the impact on this of government taxes, transfers, and childcare subsidies in these five countries. In so doing, we calibrate the contributions of the different welfare and gender regimes that exist in these countries, in ways that correspond to the lived reality of people's daily lives.
