scholarly journals Public committees and corporatism: How does Iceland compare to Scandinavia?

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanía Óskarsdóttir

This paper compares the number of corporatist public committees, appointed by central government, in Iceland and Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden). Its main aim is to shed light on where Iceland stands compared to these countries in term of corporatist practices. Scholars view corporatist public committees as the core expression of Scandinavian corporatism and thus well suited for the measurement of corporatism. This study shows that the functional representational channel is an important feature of Icelandic democracy. In Iceland various interest groups are integrated into the democratic process of decision-making and implementation in an institutionalized and privileged manner. This is the essence of corporatism, defined as the institutionalized and privileged integration of organized interests in the preparation and/or implementation of public policies. Moreover, the results show that Iceland is today much more corporatist than the Scandinavian countries; especially, in terms of preparatory corporatism. Already in 1970, it appears that Iceland was more corporatist than Sweden in terms of the number of corporatist committees. The paper also sheds light on sectoral corporatism in Iceland.

Author(s):  
R. A. W. Rhodes

The core executive is a new concept replacing the conventional debate about the power of the prime minister and the Cabinet. It refers to all those organizations and procedures that coordinate central government policies, and act as final arbiters of conflict between different parts of the government machine. In brief, the ‘core executive’ is the heart of the machine. The chapter reviews the several approaches to studying the British executive: prime ministerial government; prime ministerial cliques; Cabinet government; ministerial government; segmented decision-making; and bureaucratic coordination. It then discusses several ways forward by developing new theory and methods. The Afterword discusses the core executive as interlocking networks, and the fluctuating patterns of executive politics.


Author(s):  
Simon Bulmer ◽  
Owen Parker ◽  
Ian Bache ◽  
Stephen George ◽  
Charlotte Burns

This chapter focuses on the so-called organized interests, whose interaction with the formal European Union (EU) institutions is a central component of the EU’s decision-making process. The term ‘interest group’ refers to a range of organizations outside of the formal institutions that seek to influence decision making. They provide a link between state actors and the rest of society, also known as ‘civil society’. The chapter first considers the general growth of interest group activity at the European level before discussing the types of group that try to influence EU policy making and the forms of representation open to interests. It then explores the strategies and tactics that interest groups use to try to influence the different institutions. Finally, it analyses the issue of regulating interest group access to the EU institutions.


Author(s):  
Ian Bache ◽  
Simon Bulmer ◽  
Stephen George ◽  
Owen Parker

This chapter focuses on the so-called organized interests, whose interaction with the formal European Union institutions is a central component of the EU’s decision-making process. The term ‘interest group’ refers to a range of organizations outside of the formal institutions that seek to influence decision making. They provide a link between state actors and the rest of society, also known as ‘civil society’. The chapter first considers the general growth of interest-group activity at the European level before discussing the types of group that try to influence EU policy making and the forms of representation open to interests. It then explores the strategies and tactics that interest groups use to try to influence the different institutions. Finally, it analyses the issue of regulating interest-group access to the EU institutions.


Author(s):  
Jack Knight ◽  
James Johnson

Pragmatism and its consequences are central issues in American politics today, yet scholars rarely examine in detail the relationship between pragmatism and politics. This book systematically explores the subject and makes a strong case for adopting a pragmatist approach to democratic politics—and for giving priority to democracy in the process of selecting and reforming political institutions. What is the primary value of democracy? When should we make decisions democratically and when should we rely on markets? And when should we accept the decisions of unelected officials, such as judges or bureaucrats? This book explores how a commitment to pragmatism should affect our answers to such important questions. It concludes that democracy is a good way of determining how these kinds of decisions should be made—even if what the democratic process determines is that not all decisions should be made democratically. So, for example, the democratically elected U.S. Congress may legitimately remove monetary policy from democratic decision-making by putting it under the control of the Federal Reserve. This book argues that pragmatism offers an original and compelling justification of democracy in terms of the unique contributions democratic institutions can make to processes of institutional choice. This focus highlights the important role that democracy plays, not in achieving consensus or commonality, but rather in addressing conflicts. Indeed, the book suggest that democratic politics is perhaps best seen less as a way of reaching consensus or agreement than as a way of structuring the terms of persistent disagreement.


Author(s):  
Robin Markwica

In coercive diplomacy, states threaten military action to persuade opponents to change their behavior. The goal is to achieve a target’s compliance without incurring the cost in blood and treasure of military intervention. Coercers typically employ this strategy toward weaker actors, but targets often refuse to submit and the parties enter into war. To explain these puzzling failures of coercive diplomacy, existing accounts generally refer to coercers’ perceived lack of resolve or targets’ social norms and identities. What these approaches either neglect or do not examine systematically is the role that emotions play in these encounters. The present book contends that target leaders’ affective experience can shape their decision-making in significant ways. Drawing on research in psychology and sociology, the study introduces an additional, emotion-based action model besides the traditional logics of consequences and appropriateness. This logic of affect, or emotional choice theory, posits that target leaders’ choice behavior is influenced by the dynamic interplay between their norms, identities, and five key emotions, namely fear, anger, hope, pride, and humiliation. The core of the action model consists of a series of propositions that specify the emotional conditions under which target leaders are likely to accept or reject a coercer’s demands. The book applies the logic of affect to Nikita Khrushchev’s decision-making during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and Saddam Hussein’s choice behavior in the Gulf conflict in 1990–91, offering a novel explanation for why coercive diplomacy succeeded in one case but not in the other.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Suhay ◽  
Bernard Grofman ◽  
Alexander H. Trechsel

Electoral persuasion rests at the center of the democratic process. Politicians, parties, interest groups, members of the media, and citizens themselves are constantly communicating with one another about electorally relevant topics. These communications will ultimately influence—although not always in predictable ways—voters’ choices and, therefore, election outcomes and the direction of government. Scholarship on this important topic has exploded in recent decades. Yet, there have been relatively few efforts to synthesize the accumulated knowledge. In this volume, we bring together accomplished scholars who study one or more aspects of electoral persuasion—who communicates with whom about democratic politics, what they communicate about and why, how and where they communicate, and with what effect. The result is a vibrant collection of US-based and international perspectives on the relevant actors, their motivations and methods of persuasion, and their varied influences on electoral choice.


Author(s):  
Mor Hodaya Or ◽  
Izhak Berkovich

Despite the popularity of distributed leadership theory, the investigation of the micro-political aspects of such models have scarcely been explored, and insights on the cultural variety of distributed practices in schools are limited. The present study aimed to explore what micro-political aspects emerge in participative decision making in collectivist and individualist cultures. To this end, a multiple case study method was adopted, focusing on four Israeli public high schools. Schools were chosen to represent an ‘extreme’ case selection rationale: two non-religious urban schools representing individualist cases, and two communal schools in religious kibbutzim representing communal schools. The analysis shed light on three micro-political points of comparison between the prototypes of participative decision making in collectivist and individualist cultures related to control, actors, and stage crafting. The findings and implications are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7746
Author(s):  
Leire Barañano ◽  
Naroa Garbisu ◽  
Itziar Alkorta ◽  
Andrés Araujo ◽  
Carlos Garbisu

The concept of bioeconomy is a topic of debate, confusion, skepticism, and criticism. Paradoxically, this is not necessarily a negative thing as it is encouraging a fruitful exchange of information, ideas, knowledge, and values, with concomitant beneficial effects on the definition and evolution of the bioeconomy paradigm. At the core of the debate, three points of view coexist: (i) those who support a broad interpretation of the term bioeconomy, through the incorporation of all economic activities based on the production and conversion of renewable biological resources (and organic wastes) into products, including agriculture, livestock, fishing, forestry and similar economic activities that have accompanied humankind for millennia; (ii) those who embrace a much narrower interpretation, reserving the use of the term bioeconomy for new, innovative, and technologically-advanced economic initiatives that result in the generation of high-added-value products and services from the conversion of biological resources; and (iii) those who stand between these two viewpoints. Here, to shed light on this debate, a contextualization of the bioeconomy concept through its links with related concepts (biotechnology, bio-based economy, circular economy, green economy, ecological economics, environmental economics, etc.) and challenges facing humanity today is presented.


Urbanisation ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 245574712110258
Author(s):  
Megan Maxwell ◽  
Milan Vaishnav

Do working women enjoy greater levels of human agency? While the theoretical foundations underlying this connection are clear, the empirical evidence is quite mixed. We leverage detailed, new data on intra-household decision-making and labour market behaviour from four north Indian urban clusters to shed light on this question. We find that women who work exercise greater say in important decisions around the home. However, this ‘work advantage’ exhibits significant heterogeneity across decision types, decision-making domains, and definitions of work.


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