From the point of view of modes of governance and constellations of interdependence, EU research policy offers ideal conditions for the flexible inclusion of non-member states: it is based on transgovernmental coordination through policy networks rather than supranational legislation, it follows scientific rather than political imperatives, and cooperation is in the interest of both the EU and of Switzerland. This article analy- ses the degree to which these factors have allowed for Switzerland’s inclusion into the regulatory and organisational aspects of EU research policy, and highlights the limits of such flexible sectoral integration.
What is the relationship between economic crises and protest behaviour? Does the experience of austerity, or economic hardship more broadly defined, create a greater potential for protest? With protest movements and events such as the Indignados and the Occupy Movement receiving a great deal of attention in the media and in the popular imaginary in recent times, this path-breaking book offers a rigorously-researched, evidence-based set of chapters on the relationship between austerity and protest. In so doing, it provides a thorough overview of different theories, mechanisms, patterns and trends which will contextualize more recent developments, and provide a pivotal point of reference on the relationship between these two variables. More specifically, this book will speak to three crucial, long-standing debates in scholarship in political sociology, social movement studies, and related fields: The effects of economic hardship on protest and social movements. The role of grievances and opportunities in social movement theory. The distinction between 'old' and 'new' movements. The chapters in this book engage with these three key debates and challenge commonly held views of political sociologists and social movement scholars on all three counts, thus allowing us to advance study in the field.
This book provides a novel approach to unemployment as a contested political field in Europe and examines the impact of welfare state regimes, conceived as political opportunity structures specific to this field, public debates and collective mobilizations in unemployment politics.
Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition is a compelling justification of a liberal,procedural conception of recognition. This conception is built upon a convincing conception of moral equality, but it does not offer a full theoretical discussion of recognition. I argue that the liberal recognition provided by Patten is too formal and narrow to address all relevant issues regarding conflicts of recognition in democratic societies. In particular, it does not consider the political and democratic preconditions that should be granted to minority groups or immigrants in order to provide them fair opportunities to effectively (and not only formally) reach equal recognition.
Citizens may respond to economic crises and to policy responses to such crises in a variety of ways. This special issue focuses on collective responses as they express themselves in the public domain, in the form of social movements or other types of interventions. The special issue originates in a large-scale comparative research project funded by the European Commission and titles “Living with Hard Times: How Citizens React to Economic Crises and Their Social and Political Consequences” (LIVEWHAT). The eight articles all use a common dataset and adopt a common method, known as political claims analysis, which has proven fruitful in previous work on social movements and contentious politics, consisting in retrieving interventions in the public domain on a given issue, or range of issues, drawing from media sources, most often newspapers. The data stem from a systematic content analysis of newspapers in each of the countries under study.
We challenge the common wisdom that the Great Recession has produced radical changes in political behavior. Accordingly, we assess the extent to which the crisis has spurred protest activities and given socioeconomic issues a higher saliency in public debates. We also assess how far the crisis has provided a more prominent place for economic and labor actors as subject actors, a more prominent place of economic and labor actors as object actors, as well as a more prominent place of economic and labor actors as addressees in claims making on the economic crisis. Our findings show that the crisis has not produced such radical changes in all these aspects, though it had some impact. At a more general level, our analysis unveils the normative underpinnings of the commonly held view that the economic crisis has fed a grievance-based conflict between capital and labor going beyond specific patterns and configurations in each country.
The aim or this paper is to present a practical manual prepared for the World Health Organization (WHO) on how to identify, collect, estimate and compare costs of the available technical options to provide access to safe drinking water in low-income communities.
