Coping with the Global Economic Crisis: The Regional Political Economy of Emergency Social Shock Absorbers in Italy

This article contributes to the debate on governing the global financial crisis, focusing on the regional governance of emergency social shock absorbers in Italy. The article seeks to make two related contributions. First, it argues that subnational governments have been the main drivers of change in labour market policies. Second, it shows that state–local governance elicited a path-altering system by ‘patching up’ a hybrid administrative structure and by ‘converting’ the traditional goals of social shock absorbers from income maintenance to welfare-to-work. The article provides qualitative evidence on the changing organizational bases of the labour markets of two large Italian regions: Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. Evidence suggests that administrative innovation and path dependence intertwined in the governance of the global economic crisis in Italy, mitigating the entrenched distortions of labour market policies.     

The feasibility of a desirable minimal state

Dwight Lee (1989) argues on utilitarian grounds that the minimal state of classical liberalism cannot be both desirable and feasible: if desirable, it is not attainable; if attainable, it is not desirable. Lee's article provides an intriguing new perspective on the long debate about the optimal size of government. His conclusions, however, do not hold if some of his restrictive assumptions are relaxed. In a more general model, the minimal state can be both desirable and feasible.     

New Institutionalism: Distilling some 'Hard Core' Propositions in the Works of Williamson and March and Olsen

The efflorescence of work on new institutionalism has encouraged scholars to build bridges between various schools of thought. Such cross-fertilisation enlivens the debate but runs the risk of erecting bridges on shaky foundations. My article seeks to minimise this risk by going back to basics. It narrows the field of inquiry to the economic and the sociological institutionalist tradition represented by Williamson on one side, and the collaborative work of March and Olsen on the other. It explores and assesses their contribution on three interrelated issues fundamental to any analysis of political institutions: the goals attributed to institutions, the theory of action and the commitment to methodological individualism versus methodological holism. I conclude by noting that in the transition from the old to the new institutionalism – as represented in the works of these authors – the role of power conflicts, negotiations and bargaining between individuals seems to have lost its central position.     

The Speed of Global Flows and the Pace of Democratic Politics

The claim I want to make in this article is, in short, first, that democratic theory for the most part has seriously neglected the temporal preconditions of liberal democracy and, second, that it therefore fails to adequately grasp some fundamental aspects of the crisis of democratic self-determination in the contemporary global age. In its first part, the article seeks to demonstrate that the history of modernity is an ongoing process of social acceleration and that most of the phenomena we currently grasp under the concept of “globalization” can in fact best be understood as instances or consequences of the latest wave of social acceleration. In the second and main part of this article, the consequences of this acceleratory character of modernity for the plausibility, legitimacy and possibility of political democracy are systematically explored. The main argument is that the speed-up of society at first enabled and supported democratization, but beyond a certain critical threshold, the reverse effect occurs: the speed of social change and the dynamics of socioeconomic development threaten to undermine the proper functioning of democracy. Thus, it is my claim that democracy only works properly within a certain time- or “speed-frame” of social change. From this, I conclude that what is called for in the Age of Globalization is a new critical theory of acceleration, the contours of which I briefly sketch out in the third and last part of this essay.