Cross-border Policy Networks in the Basel Region: The Effect of National Borders and Brokerage Roles

This paper provides evidence of how national borders affect the structure of policy networks. Our analysis of the Basel cross-border metropolitan region located across Switzerland, France and Germany considers the case of public transportation in border regions. Using a social network analysis of the relationships between 44 actors, we show that national borders play a diminishing role in the formation of policy networks for both information exchange and decision making. Local actors develop different brokerage roles according to their country of origin: Swiss actors function as coordinator and representative brokers vis-à-vis actors located in France and Germany.     

Employers,the state and the politics of institutional change: Vocational education and training in Austria,Germany and Switzerland

An in‐depth comparison of Austria, Germany and Switzerland shows that the employers' constellation and the elites of the public education administration affect patterns of institutional change. If large firms are the dominant actors and collaborate with elites in the public education administration, institutional change follows a transformative pattern. If small and medium‐sized firms are in a strong position and have the power to influence public elites according to their interests, self‐preserving institutional change results. The article also shows that it is not so much trade unions as small and medium‐sized firms that act as a brake on transformative change. The article adds to the literature of institutional change by arguing that specifying and explaining patterns of institutional change requires that sufficient scope be allowed for actors' creative handling of institutions. It also suggests that in order to differentiate between self‐preserving and transformative change, one has to specify the important institutional dimensions that sustain an institution. The article combines Mill's method of agreement and difference.     

Banking, interest intermediation and political power

Abstract. This article seeks to introduce the concept of political power more explicitly into the discussion of the organizational attributes of societal interests. In pursuit of this objective, it defines a set of empirical indicators of the organisational conditions of interest intermediation systems that enhance the exercise of political power. The indicators are illustrated through a comparative study of the banking sector at the European Community level and in five countries: Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The comparison of the banking sector interest intermediation systems shows that the power of banks in Germany rests not only on their equity participation in large industrial concerns, but also on a highly developed interest intermediation system, the most integrated of the five countries. The analysis demonstrates from still another perspective the close imbrication of the state and finance in France. Finally; the article demonstrates the deep fragmentation of the US associational system, a system that has acted as a serious obstacle to banking system reform in America.     

The effects of convergence: internationalization and the changing distribution of net value added in large German firms

The paper examines whether and how the increasing internationalization of firms impacts on the operation of a co-ordinated market economy. Following the tenets of agency theory, it assumes that an emerging market for corporate control changes the monitoring mechanisms that oversee management. Since Anglo-American forms of monitoring are usually associated with a higher return for investors compared with Continental European firms, a change in the distribution of the net value added of firms is expected. Using financial data on fifty-nine large German companies, the paper shows that the emerging convergence of German corporate governance practices to Anglo-American standards has had a weak, but significant, impact on the distribution of net value added. This is in contrast to the impact of the internationalization of firms on product markets, which does not have an effect. Since the market for corporate control is, however, still underdeveloped in Germany, the main effects remain to be seen.     

External and Domestic Determinants of Education Expansion: How Germany, Japan, and Switzerland Have Varied

How do economically successful countries like Germany, Japan and Switzerland differ in their post-primary education policies? After identifying great variations in the structure and capacity of secondary and higher education sectors, explanations are sought in terms of domestic and inter-national factors. Switzerland and Japan emerge as polar cases in how political variables - such as centralism-federalism, parties and bureaucracies - affected choice of vehicles and extent of educational expansion. Party influence is most clearcut in Germany, but varies by sector. Whereas German and Japanese reform agendas changed in the aftermath of occupation experiences, Switzerland went its own way until prospects for European integration induced greater accommodation to the training and credential practices of its neighbors.     

Domestic European Union Coordination and Interest Group Mobilization in Three Member States: Looking Beyond the Formal Mechanisms

One conclusion in the literature on domestic European Union (EU) coordination is that the formal institutional properties of countries—devolved versus centralized or unitary—affect the nature of coordination practices. Basically, the view has emerged that domestic coordination is a largely bureaucratic process in which political control mechanisms remain relatively weak. Instead of only looking at public authorities and their formal networks, this article relies on a data set that allows us to analyse informal political-administrative networks and look at how societal interests mobilize and target policymakers in order to shape the position governments defend at the EU level. One of our conclusions is that despite devolution in Belgium, its intergovernmental coordination shows a considerable level of network centralization, even when compared to unitary countries such as France and the Netherlands, meaning that there are large differences between the three states with respect to the connectedness of the actors involved.     

Political economy of agricultural policy

The present paper uses a paneldata estimation technique to combine the time series for individual countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States). We postulated the response of central banks in these countries to inflation, economic growth and current account surplus given the constraints to be the same among the sample countries. Differences between central bank independence come forward in a different structural pressure to lower or raise money market rates in these countries. The empirical results in this study coincide remarkably well with the legal indices of central bank independence.     

Mixing business with politics: Does corporate social responsibility end where lobbying transparency begins?

Scholars increasingly have argued that the future effectiveness and legitimacy of firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities are dependent on more transparent forms of lobbying to ensure firms' policy positions are aligned with their CSR commitments. Very little empirical work, however, has systematically analyzed firms' lobbying disclosures or examined how these firms coordinate their lobbying and CSR activities. We address these empirical questions by analyzing the CSR reports of 150 corporations from Germany, the UK and the US over an 18-year period and by conducting interviews with the CSR managers of these firms. We find that corporations have become more transparent about their public policy advocacy over time, thus acknowledging that lobbying is a CSR issue. For most firms, however, this commitment to transparency appears to be largely ceremonial. Few firms disclose the specific policy positions they advocate or sufficiently coordinate the work of their lobbying and CSR units to foster greater alignment of these activities. These modest changes in lobbying transparency appear to be driven by legitimacy concerns and, in a few instances, by governance gaps firms perceive to be relevant to their future business interests.     

The role of venture capital firms in Silicon Valley's complex innovation network

Abstract

We still poorly understand why Silicon Valley has originated so many breakthrough innovations and large companies. The durability of Silicon Valley's innovative competence over the last seventy years also needs more explanation. The failure of several policy-makers around the world to reproduce the Silicon Valley cluster reveals the misunderstanding of the innovative dynamic in Silicon Valley. This study uses complex network theory – CNT (Barabási, Newman & Watts, 2006; Jen, 2006; Thompson, 2004a) to analyse the complex innovative capability of Silicon Valley and to understand the heterogeneity of agents and the multiplexity of ties that support creation and development of high-tech start-ups. As proposed by Barabási (2002, p. 200), we view the economy as a complex network, whose nodes are companies and whose links represent the various economic and financial ties connecting them. Innovation and entrepreneurship are understood as resulting from the interactions of numerous economic agents.

In a systemic perspective, by definition, the presence of a specific agent in a network induces specific interactions with other agents that could not take place if this agent were not there. Thus, the diversity of agents influences the dynamics of the system. The presence of venture capital (hereafter VC) firms in an innovative cluster opens potential specific interactions with other agents in the network (universities, large companies, laboratories) that determine a particular dynamic of innovation. In this perspective, what is distinctive about Silicon Valley is its complete and robust complex system of innovation supported by social networks of interdependent economic agents in which the VC firms have a specific function. Our perspective examines five different contributions of VC firms to Silicon Valley: financing, selection, collective learning, embedding and signalling. These five functions are different ways for the VC firms to interact with the other members of the complex network of innovation and to support the robustness of the system.     

The immigrant presence in collaborative structures of urban politics

Participation and representation of disadvantaged groups are important, but partly still understudied aspects of democratic politics. The present article looks at the inclusion of migrant representatives in urban governance networks making use of original survey data from 40 large cities in France and Germany. We find that about half of policy-relevant urban actors in both countries and across cities cooperate with migrant associations regularly. This indicates that urban governance networks are furthering the civic and political presence of migrants. Cooperation with migrant associations is more likely when specific representative local institutions (foreigner/integration councils) exist, and is also boosted by the overall density of governance networks in a city. Politicians and local administrators remain central actors in such networks, while social welfare organizations emerge as important interlocutors with migrant associations. The article identifies and discusses differences between the two countries.     

Globalization and the transformation of the national political space: Six European countries compared

Abstract.  This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' and 'losers' is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.     

Making electoral democracy work

This note presents a new electoral studies research program that will examine party and voter behaviour in 27 elections (national, supra-national, and sub-national) in five countries (Canada, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland) and that includes a series of experiments designed to complement the analyses of these 27 elections. The purpose is to ascertain how the rules of the game, especially the electoral system, and the competitiveness and salience of elections influence the reciprocal relationship between voters and parties.     

Regulatory Commitment to Negotiated Agreements: Evidence from the United States, Germany, The Netherlands, and France

Negotiated Agreements (NAs) are arrangements between firms and regulators in which firms voluntarily agree to reduce their pollution. This article analyzes the institutional features that facilitate or hamper the implementation of NAs. We illustrate the analysis with case studies on the implementation of NAs in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. We find that NAs are implemented when regulators are able to commit credibly to the objectives of NAs. Institutional environments marked by fragmentation of power and open access in policymaking reduce regulatory credibility and thus hamper the implementation of NAs.     

Federalism and Party Interaction in West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria

The federalism established in the constitutions of the FederalRepublic of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, in addition tothe common language of these countries, distinguishes them fromthe other West European countries, which lean toward centrallyorganized states. After examining the historical foundationand development of the federal systems in the three countries,the article analyzes the segmentation, federal-state interaction,and intraparty effects of political parties in them. While federalismis strengthened by the heterogeneity and regional solidarityof the political parties in Switzerland, federalism has becomea pure "party federalism" in the Federal Republic of Germanyand Austria.     

International Capital Mobility and Domestic Institutions:Corporate Finance and Governance in Four European Cases

This article considers the impact of international capital mobility on thecharacter of corporate finance and corporate governance in four European countries (Germany, France, Spain, and Italy). We take issue with the widespread view that the growth of international financial markets and the lifting of capital controls will in themselves produce convergence in national systems of corporate finance and governance. Although we find evidence of convergence in specific aspects of financial regulation (e.g., the abandonment of selective credit regulation and the dismantling of barriers to universal banking), these regulatory changes have not produced any clear convergence toward either the Anglo-Saxon model of corporate finance and governance predicted in much of the literature or the alternative German bank-based model. The reasons for this, we suggest, have much to do with the way in which the politics of financialreform are likely to differ from those postulated in market-driven models of regulatory change and the fact that countries are susceptible to international pressures in different ways.     

Business Routes of Influence in Brussels: Exploring the Choice of Direct Representation

This paper presents one of the first statistical analyses of the factors that determine the extent to which direct influence strategies are used by companies. New survey evidence and multivariate analysis is used to assess seven hypotheses to explain direct influence strategies. The factor of greatest significance is company size since direct influence is open only to large companies. But the extent to which direct influence is followed by large companies depends on their sector, its extent of organization, the sector's size and 'weight', and the form of the business association relevant to the sector. Direct influence is more likely where associations cover large corporate businesses (rather than owner-managers, professionals, federations or mixed associations), in sectors with a high degree of market concentration within large companies, and where their associations are relatively small. These findings are related to the logic of collective action suggesting that in sectors where there is the least chance to opt out of an association, there is a greater chance of a business also directly lobbying in order to assure itself that its interests are not being diluted and so that it can gain direct specific information or influence benefits.     

The dilemma of youth unemployment: Trade union responses in the federal republic of Germany,the UK and France

The high political salience of youth unemployent in European countries is not matched by a prompt coherent and concerted response by trade unions. In particular, measures to ease the transition from school to working life have evoked very mixed reactions. Aspects of the national trade union movements themselves are important determinants of this situation: political alignment and the legitimacy of their policy‐making role; financial, membership, and organisational resources; the structure and practice of collective bargaining, and finally, relations with other organisations representing youth. The three countries examined ‐ West Germany, Britain and France ‐ show that although the trade unions concerned are aware of the problems, they differ in their capacity to take effective action.     

Place,post-industrial change and the new left

Abstract. This article argues for the importance of place and policies addressed to it in recent post–industrial political transformations. My analysis focuses on the performance of Left parties in French and German cities with universities since the 1960s. Despite similar shifts in the occupational and sectoral bases of politics in the cities of both countries, these transformations followed divergent trajectories. In Germany decentralized policymaking, physical legacies of previous urban planning, and mobilization around land use and related issues gave rise to the most solid local strongholds of the Greens. In mid–sized and smaller cities, local constraints on growth itself resulted. In France centrally led expansion, less developed local policies and less planned urban structures contributed to emergent Socialist majorities and weaker, more contingent local Green performance. In both countries the environmental concerns and consumption interests linked to spatial amenities have given a new, altered significance to the geographic determinants of politics.     

Informelle transgouvernementale Koordinationsnetzwerke der Ministerialbürokratie der EU-Mitgliedstaaten bei einer Regierungskonferenz

We investigate the informal bilateral transgovernmental relations between equivalent ministries of EU member states during the preparation of the Intergovernmental Conference 1996. Starting point of this analysis is the hypothesis of a growing importance of transnational and transgovernmental relations as a cause and a result of European integration. Whereas these proclaimed tendencies have been extensively researched with regard to economic interdependencies and transnational relations of societal actors, networks of the administrative and bureaucratic elites have been rather neglected. Applying diverse concepts of network analysis, we identify the hitherto latent informal network structures of the governments. The overall configuration can be described as a mixture of a centre-periphery structure and cohesive blocks. The gradual center-periphery structure consists of a “triumvirate” of the powerful member states (Germany — France — Great Britain) and smaller states, and is characterized by a clear north-south dimension. The costs of informal coordination are mainly borne by the large member states as well as by “brokers” (Austria, BeNeLux, Finland, Sweden).     

Foreign corporate accountability: The contested institutionalization of mandatory due diligence in France and Germany

In the recent past, European states have adopted mandatory due diligence (MDD) laws for holding companies accountable for the environmental and human rights impacts of their supply chains. The institutionalization of the international due diligence norm into domestic legislation has, however, been highly contested. Our contribution analyzes the discursive struggles about the meaning of due diligence that have accompanied the institutionalization of MDD in Germany and France. Based on document analysis and legal analysis of laws and law proposals, we identify a state-centric, a market-based, and a polycentric-governance discourse. These discourses are based on fundamentally different understandings of how the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights should be translated into hard law. By outlining these discourses and comparing the related policy preferences, we contribute with a better understanding of different ways in which MDD is institutionalized, with important consequences for the possibilities to enhance corporate accountability in global supply chains.