The Labour Market Regimes in the Nordic Countries: A Comparative Analysis

The aim of the article is to discuss the differences between the labour market regimes in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland in a historical perspective. The foundations of the regimes were laid more than 100 years ago. Differences in labour market institutions and practices are in fact substantial, particularly as regards the role of the state in collective bargaining and conflict resolution, but also in connection with incomes policy. While the state for a long time has played a significant role in Denmark and Norway, mainly concerning conflict resolution, and in Finland since the 1960s in the form of comprehensive incomes policy agreements, a doctrine of freedom of the labour market from state intervention has dominated in Sweden. These divergences can to a great extent be explained by differences in the democratization process and the organizational structure, particularly in the trade unions, which reflect different timing and structure in the process of industrialization. 'Path dependency' has been strong in the North. The main elements of the four national labour market regimes are still there, such as trade union fragmentation and strong instruments for conflict resolution in Denmark and Norway, relatively advanced social partner responsibility for bargaining outcomes and conflict resolution in Sweden (although sometimes against the background of threats of state intervention), and almost continuous tripartite consultation in Finland as a stabilizing element in a much more turbulent political environment than in the neighbouring countries. There are no clear tendencies towards convergence between the Nordic labour market regimes.     

Arab Citizen and the Arab State: The “Arab Spring” as a Critical Juncture in Contemporary Arab Politics

The basic characteristics and historic significance of the Arab uprisings of 2010–2011 are given a multitude of interpretations, not least in light of the dramatic events that have followed. This article seeks to understand the uprisings as expressions of an unfolding crisis in the relationship between the rulers and the ruled in the region within a historic-sociological approach to citizenship as a “contractual relationship.” A brief discussion of Egyptian developments is used to illustrate the approach. The mass mobilization in the 1950s and 1960s inspired by Nasserism and the “authoritarian bargaining” introduced at the time is contrasted with the demands for a new social contract that mobilized millions during the recent uprisings. The uprisings clearly represent a critical juncture in contemporary Arab history, but their long-term impact on the direction of the future political order in the Arab region remains an open question.     

Antigovernment Networks in Civil Conflicts: How Network Structures Affect Conflictual Behavior

In this article, we combine a game‐theoretic treatment of public goods provision in networks with a statistical network analysis to show that fragmented opposition network structures lead to an increase in conflictual actions. Current literature concentrates on the dyadic relationship between the government and potential challengers. We shift the focus toward exploring how network structures affect the strategic behavior of political actors. We derive and examine testable hypotheses and use latent space analysis to infer actors’ positions vis‐à‐vis each other in the network. Network structure is examined and used to test our hypotheses with data on conflicts in Thailand from 2001 to 2010. We show the influential role of network structure in generating conflictual behavior.     

In the Spotlight: Analyzing Sequential Attention Effects in Protest Reporting

During waves of contention, international media attention can be of crucial importance for activists and protest participants. However, media attention is a scarce resource and the competition over news coverage is high. While some emphasize the agenda-setting power of news outlets and argue that receiving coverage is determined by factors outside the protest movement, others suggest a dynamic relationship between media attention and activism where social movement organizations are assumed to have some agency to make it to the news. In this article, we contribute to the latter and analyze how protest can endogenously trigger more coverage. Building on insights from communication science, we argue that widely covered protests attract media attention and temporarily lower the selection threshold for subsequent incidents. Using fine-grained data on anti-regime protest in all authoritarian countries between 2003 and 2012, we find robust empirical evidence for this hypothesis. We also show that this effect becomes weaker and eventually disappears with increasing spatial and temporal distance from a highly salient event. These findings are important for research in contentious politics, since they allow us to gauge the extent to which protest activity on the ground may under certain circumstances be overreported in the media.