Suchergebnisse

Reviews and discusses `Democracies: Forms, performance, and constitutional engineering', which appeared in vol.25 (1994), pp.1-17 of this journal. Includes a response by the original author.

Asks to what extent the dramatic differences in social policy efforts in rich and poor countries be accounted for by genuinely political explanations. Advances a hypothesis that rests upon the combination of 2 schools of thought in comparative social policy analysis: socioeconomic models which focus attention on levels of economic wealth, need and demand for social security, and models of a comparative-historiographic and political-institutionalist nature. (Abstract amended)

The distinctiveness of state intervention in West Germany resides in a combination of policies of conversative-reformist, liberal and social democratic complexion. The policy of the middle way which results, differs from the extreme poles that are marked by the model of Social-Democratic welfare capitalism and market capitalism but it also comprises elements of both types of political economies. The emergence and the maintenance of the policy of the middle way can largely be attributed to distinctive characteristics of the policy process, and of processes of learning from historical catastrophes. (Abstract amended)