Bargaining When the Future of an Industry Is at Stake: Lessons from UAW–Ford Collective Bargaining Negotiations

The 2007 American automobile industry labor negotiations involved fundamental challenges for labor and management, including a historic shift of responsibility in the management of retiree health care, a need for new approaches to core employment security issues, identification of ways to create new unionized jobs in the industry, and a joint commitment to the competitive viability of U.S. operations. Less visible, but no less important in the United Auto Workers–Ford case, has been unprecedented levels of information sharing and unique innovations in the bargaining process designed to enable problem solving even when tough issues were on the table. More than 300 people were directly involved in the negotiations, serving at the main table and on twenty‐four subcommittees. This case study covers the context for the negotiations, key events leading up to the bargaining, a unique process of “bargaining over how to bargain,” the actual negotiation process, and the results achieved. Implications are generalizable to the broader concept of pattern bargaining and many other types of negotiations when transformation is on the table.     

Conflict-Management in Russia's Federal Institutions

A political scientist examines factors leading to instability in the Russian legislative and executive branches. The article focuses on the design of Russia's “unlinked dual-channel” institutions-particularly, partisan factions and legislative committees in the Duma, and the presidential administration and government apparatus in the executive branch. Media sources and the author's personal interviews with Duma, Kremlin, and ministry officials are analyzed.     

Escaping the joint‐decision trap: Repetition and Sectoral politics in the European union

Decision making in the European Union has been argued to present a ‘joint‐decision trap’, in which the ability of national actors to block decisions unilaterally produces decision making by the lowest common denominator. While this outcome is apparent in some decision situations it is far from a general outcome. The division of decisions into functional specialities and the continuing nature of the policy debates limits the capacity of ‘high politics’ to hinder decision making. Further, there are ways in which a policy entrepreneur can structure decisions to eliminate this sub‐optimal outcome.     

The Criminal Justice Approach: Case Examples

The article presents a special form of a European comparative synopsis. For this case examples have been chosen ranging from administrative or minor (criminal) offences to increasingly serious offences and offenders. In this way it can be comparatively demonstrated how the criminal justice systems studied handle specific cases and whether they do so in a similar or different way.