Cet article tente d’expliciter pourquoi le processus de paix israélo-palestinien s’est effondré au cours du deuxième semestre 2000. L’approche méthodologique procède d’une double démarche. D’une part, classiquement, elle procède à un examen interne et externe rigoureux des sources disponibles, afin de trancher entre les différentes contradictions factuelles. D’autre part, elle dresse une typologie des principales approches interprétatives afin de refléter la dimension politique sous-jacente d’un véritable «!combat de mémoires!», tant l’historiographie de ces événements est marquée, encore plus que de coutume, du sceau des préférences politiques et personnelles. This article tries to explain why the Israeli-Palestinian peace process collapsed in the second semester of 2000. The methodological approach follows a double path. On a first level, there is a classical internal and external assessment of the available material in order to stress the main empirical contradictions. On second level, the author suggests a typology of the main approaches of interpretation in order to underline the underlying political dimension of this apparent “fight of memories”, as the historiography of those events is more than usual influenced by political and personal preferences.
En 1992, lors d'un référendum sur l'Espace économique européen, un important clivage est apparu entre Suisses romands et Suisses alémaniques. Cet article recense les interprétations données à ce clivage et propose une synthèse explicative.
Cet article critique un paradigme "identitariste" qui est souvent trop ontologique. Il y a certes parfois des contradictions entre "identité française" et intégration européenne. Mais il faut éviter de réifier cette notion d'"identité française"."
The December 2012 issue of SPSR featured a collection of short essays that explored the domestic politics of the financial crisis, the ensuing international recession and the ongoing difficulties of managing the debt problems and trade imbalances of the Eurozone. The contributors to the first installment of our debate on crisis politics engaged in historical and comparative discussions of government responses to the crisis of 2007-10 and the political repercussions of the crisis. For this, the second and final installment, we have invited prominent scholars in the field of international political economy to comment on how institutions of global governance have performed since 2007 and the long-term implications of the crisis for the prospects of international cooperation in trade, finance and investment. We have also included an essay on the domestic politics of labor market reforms in Western Europe, thematically linked to several essays in the December 2012 issue. By way of introduction, I will briefly summarize and comment on the main ideas of the four essays that follow.
Through a pooled cross-section time-series analysis of the determinants of wage inequality in sixteen OECD countries from 1973 to 1995, we explore how political-institutional variables affect the upper and lower halves of the wage distribution. Our regression results indicate that unionization, centralization of wage bargaining and public-sector employment primarily affect the distribution of wages by boosting the relative position of unskilled workers, while the egalitarian effects of Left government operate at the upper end of the wage hierarchy, holding back the wage growth of well-paid workers. Further analysis shows that the differential effects of government partisanship are contingent on wage-bargaining centralization: in decentralized bargaining systems, Left government is associated with compression of both halves of the wage distribution.
Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser's recent book, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe, exemplifies the recent incursion of economists into the domains of political science and sociology. In thinking about welfare states, economists have traditionally been interested in their effects on the distribution of income and, above all, their implications for efficiency and growth. Alesina and Glaeser instead set out to explain why the American welfare state is so small by comparison to European welfare states. This, then, is a book about American exceptionalism in the realm of social policy, but Alesina and Glaeser's discussion also addresses the general problem of accounting for cross-national variation in the public provision of social welfare. Their project is to provide an account of the exceptional nature of the American welfare state that is consistent with and sheds light on differences among other welfare states as well. This makes for an audacious book that deserves critical scrutiny.
This article examines a model of the domestic political economy of subjective employment insecurity in advanced industrial societies. Based on data on people’s attitudes toward their job as well as levels of and kinds of social protection collected in 15 OECD countries, it shows that there are distinct manifestations of job insecurity that are affected differently by distinct aspects of social protection programs. While the analysis shows that social protection measures reduce employment insecurity, it also reveals that overall levels welfare state generosity do not have any systematic effect on whether workers feel secure. The article’s findings suggest the need to decompose the different components of employ- ment insecurity as well as disaggregate national systems of social protection when examining the impact of welfare states on job insecurity.
We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine household market inequality, redistribution, and the relationship between market inequality and redistribution in affluent OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. We observe sizeable increases in market household inequality in most countries. This development appears to have been driven largely, though not exclusively, by changes in employment: in countries with better employment performance, low-earning households benefited relative to high- earning ones; in nations with poor employment performance, low-earning households fared worse. In contrast to widespread rhet- oric about the decline of the welfare state, redistribution increased in most countries during this period, as existing social-welfare programs compensated for the rise in market inequality. They did so in proportion to the degree of increase in inequality, producing a very strong positive association between changes in market inequality and changes in redistribution. We discuss the relevance of median-voter theory and power resources theory for understanding differences across countries and changes over time in the extent of compensatory redistribution.
This paper explores temporal variation in partisan effects on social spending growth in OECD countries over the period 1971–2002. We argue that partisan effects are jointly conditioned by globalization and the mobilizational capacity of organized labour. We present three main empirical findings. First, we show that partisan effects increased from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s and then dis- appeared in the 1990s. Second, we show that partisan effects rose with globaliza- tion in the 1970s and early 1980s, a period characterized by rising labour strength in many OECD countries, but this is not true for the post-1990 period, characterized by declining labour strength. Third, we show that globalization was associated with declining partisan effects in countries that experienced union decline in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was associated with rising partisan effects in countries in which unions remained strong.
