Poli630. Governance in Western Europe. Fall 2017

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1 Poli630. Governance in Western Europe. Fall 2017 Prof. Filippo Sabetti Office Leacock 518 Office Hrs: MW 10-11am ; T1-2pm & by appointment filippo.sabetti@mcgill.ca This seminar is devoted to an analysis of the domestic politics of the major West European countries Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, before and after the emerging European Union. Topics include the European miracle - what set Western European development apart from the rest of Eurasia - the widespread preference for central government activity, old and new forms of ideology, political representation and party systems, the changing meanings of citizenship, immigration and identity, and various attempts to decenter the national state. Unifying these topics is an analytical emphasis on the historical antecedents of contemporary governance, and the ways in which political scientists seek to understand continuities and discontinuities in European politics. The course helps to understand why some of the most innovative and progressive research in political science has been generated in the study of Western Europe. The course aims to provide a deeper understanding of theory and practice in comparative politics. By the end of the semester, each student will be familiar with a number of the signal works of recent and not so recent political science research in European politics, and will have tackled significant issues on his/her own. The course is organized around the critical reading of classic and more recent scholarly research. Two core questions guide the readings: the first, often posed by Elinor Ostrom, an American political scientist and Nobel Laureate, is: how can fallible individuals achieve and sustain large numbers of small, medium and large-scale self-governing entities? The second related question, often raised by Ronald H. Coase, a British-born Nobel laureate, is what is the structure of production that permits particular organizational arrangements to generate a rich mix of public and collective services? We will cover a great deal of material in a relatively short period of time. The good news is that it is an exciting set of readings that will put you at the forefront in the study of comparative politics and political economy. Please remember that the success of the seminar will depend on attendance and on each one of us contributing to the conversation. Reading efficiently maximizing the amount learned while minimizing the time spent doing it is an art and practice in this art will be shown during the semester. The following books are required and available for purchase at the McGill University Bookstore: Barber, Benjamin R If the mayors ruled the world. Yale UP. Judt, Tony Postwar. A History of Europe since Penguin. North, Douglass, John J. Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast Violence and Social Orders. Cambridge UP. Ostrom, Vincent The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration. Third ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

2 Schumacher, E. F Small is beautiful.vintage classic. Scott, Joan Wallach The Politics of the Veil. Princeton UP. Tarko, V Elinor Ostrom. An Intellectual Biography. Rowman and Littlefield. Tocqueville, Alexis de [1856]. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. New York: Anchor Books, The remaining required readings will be included in the course pack. Assignments: Each seminar participant will be expected to lead the discussion of one set of weekly readings of your choice; at the same time, everyone is expected to come to the seminar prepared to participate in the conversation. Please let me know if you have to miss more than one seminar. You will be expected to write three papers, one paper for each of the three parts of the course. Each paper, based on a weekly readings, should be about eight pages, doublespaced. The first paper is to be handed in on October 4; the second on November 7; and the last on December 12. Alternatively, you can choose to write a 25-page paper on a topic chosen from the range of topics covered in the course. I will make some suggestions about paper topics; the paper is to be handed in no later than December 11. I would like to have the opportunity to chat with you as you embark on each project. I will provide more details about these papers in our first meeting. I will also set out my expectations for your seminar presentations. Breakdown of Grade: Attendance and participation, 20% Discussion leader, 20% Three papers, (or one paper) 60%. Integrity: McGill University values academic integrity. Therefore all students must understand the meaning and consequences of cheating, plagiarism, and other academic offenses under the Code of Student Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures (see for more information). Introduction Meeting #1 course introduction and organizational meeting Part I. Development Puzzle: the European Miracle Meeting # 2 Institutional Creativity and Diversity Readings. David S. Landes Why Europe and the West? Why not China? Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 (Spring): Ralph Raico The European Miracle. Mises Institute ( 2

3 Harold Berman Mercantile Law. Urban Law Conclusions. In his Law and Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard UP, , Thomas Ertman Birth of the Leviathan. Chaps. 1 and 7, (pp. 1-34, ). Peter H.Wilson The Holy Roman Empire. A Thousand Years of European History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, pp. 1-15, 19-76, Brian Pullan The Significance of Venice. Bullettin of the John Rylands University Library (of Manchester) 56: Randolph Head Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons. Social Order and Political Language in a Swiss Mountain Canton New York: Cambridge UP, How to account for institutional creatitivity and diversity in Western Europe? Why did the Western periphery of Eurasia advance while others, the Ottoman empire, India and China, remained static? Not just by war advances were made. Why national states were before the French Revolution only one option available for political order? Meeting # 3 The French Revolution: Nationalism and National States Reading: A.de Tocqueville (1856) The Old Regime and the French Revolution. New York: Anchor Books. Read also the appendix on Languedoc, short but telling. Why the French Revolution is important historically and academically? The paradox of revolt What did the French Rev. accomplish in France and Beyond? What is the literary view of politics? Meeting # 4- The value of frameworks Reading: Douglass C.North, J.H. Wallis and Barry D.Weingast Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. New York: Cambridge UP. How do we distinguish frameworks from theories and models? Does the limited-open access framework proposed by North, Wallis and Weingast represent a new social paradigm for interpreting human development in and beyond Western Europe? Part II. Contemporary Puzzles in Governance: Once Open Access Orders are In Place, What s Next? Meeting # 5 Historical Tools: From Pre-War to Post War 3

4 Reading: Tony Judt Postwar. A history of Europe since All, but esp. chaps. 4-5, 7-8, 10-11, 14-15, 17-18, Was the fact that Western Europe became rich and political stable after WWII an accidental contingency or an outcome with deeper roots? Class politics: how was it carried out by left and center and right parties? Still important? What was the Cold War and how it came to an end? And about the culture wars? And the power of the powerless? What are the important similarities and differences that characterize the political and government structures of the main Western European countries? How many Europe were/are there? Can we speak of Europe as a way of life? Meeting #6 Research Traditions Vlad Tarko Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Chaps 1 to 5 offer multiple maps for understanding. Course pack: Lichback Mark and Alan Zuckerman Research traditions and theory in comparative politics. An introduction. Pp In Lichbach, Mark and Alan Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture and Structure. New York: Cambridge UP. Avner Greif and Joel Mokyr Cognitive rules, institutions and economic growth: Douglass North and Beyond. Journal of Institutional Economics 13: Mark Sproule-Jones (1993). A Framework for Institutional Analysis and Policy Analysis. In his Governments at Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom [1977]. Public Goods and Public Choices. The Emergence of Public Economies and Industry Structures. Pp In V. Ostrom. The Meaning of American Federalism: Constituting a Self-Governing Society. San Francisco: ICS Press. Paul Dragos Aligica and Peter Boettke (2009). Crossing the great divide: the nature of public economies. Pp In their Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development. The Bloomington School. New York: Routledge. Reflection Question: What are cognitive rules and how they differ from institutions? Can we identify hard core concepts or building blocks that can be applied to understand how people in different time and place have come to terms with collective life and goods and services? What is the nature of public economy that may apply to each and every locality? Why many life goods require some form of collective action and governmental arrangements and citizen coproduction? Why food shortages in the postwar period did not happen in Western Europe while they remained a postwar feature of much of Eastern Europe? 4

5 Meeting # 7 Representation, Ideals and Realities of Party Systems: Social Democracy, Christian Democracy, the Moving Centre, and the Populist Surge, Five Star or Not Sheri Berman The Primacy of Politics. Social Democracy and the Making of Europe s Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge UP. Julia Lynch Review of The Primacy of Politics. Comparative Political Studies 41 (2): A shortcut to Berman. Wolfram Kaiser Hegemony by Default. Christian Democracy in postwar Europe. Pp In his Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union. New York: Cambridge UP. John Bartle, Sebastian Delle Piane-Avellaneda and James Stimson The Moving Centre: Preferences for Government Activity in Britain, British Journal of Political Science 41: Cas Mudde The Populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, Reflection Questions: What are the cognitive rules that can help to make sense of Christian Democracy, Socialism and the rest? How do you account for the capacity of Christian Democracy to synthesize communitarian and conservative impulses with democratic politics and non-liberal market regulations? And the relative incapacity of Social Democracy to do the same? Class politics? What are ideals and realities in representation? Is inequality a built in feature of institutions? What accounts for cross-national variation in electoral success and parties in the postwar period? The future of British parties after Brexit? What happened to the research of internal party democracy and Roberto Michels concern about the iron law of oligarchy? Meeting # 8 Public Administration and Public Services Ernest Barker ed. Public Services in Western Europe London: Oxford UP. A classic work still worth reading. Short and to the point. Vincent Ostrom Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration esp. on Weber and democratic administration. C. Thoenig State Bureaucracies and Local Government in France. Pp In K. Hanf and F. W. Scharpf, eds., Interorganization Policy Making. Limits to Coordination and Control. Beverly Hills: Sage. Wolfgang Wirth Responding to Citizens Needs: From Bureaucratic Accountability to Individual Coproduction in the Public Sector. Pp In F.- X. Kaufmann, ed., The Public Sector. New York: de Gruyter. Francesca Forno and P.R. Graziano Sustainable community movement organizations. Journal of Consumer Culture

6 Reflection Questions: Why is the Administrative State so pervasive in Europe? Is it a chief source of inequality or equality? Does democratic administration have a future in West Europe? Can Max Weber be wrong? What kind of coproduction can exist in France, Italy, Germany and the UK? Meeting 9 From Public Health to the Welfare State Carlo Cipolla Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. A short book packed with much information and many insights. Gosta Esping-Andersen The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kees van Kersbergen Social Capitalism. A Study of Christian Democracy and the Welfare State. New York: Routledge. Chap. 8. Isabella Mares Firms and the Welfare State: When, Why and How Does Social Policy Matter to Employers. In Peter Hall and D. Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: the Institutional foundations of Comparative Advantage. New York: Oxford UP. Meeting # 10 Citizenship, Immigrants, and Identities Joan W. Scott The Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton UP. John Marino Urbs et Orbis: the Problem of Identity and Solidarity. Pp In his Becoming Neapolitan. Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP. Shamit Saggar British Citizens like any other? Ethnic Minorities and Elections in the United Kingdom. Pp In A. Bilodeau, ed., Just Ordinary Citizens? Toward a Comparative Portrait of Political Immigrant. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Christian Joppke Transformation of Immigrant Integration: Civic Integration and Antidiscrimination in the Netherlands, France and Germany. World Politics 59 (1): Reflection Questions: Are national identities deeply rooted or of recent invention? Are they fixed or malleable? What s unique about current discussion of immigrant integration in West Europe? What rules of governance apply? What is really the politics of the veil? And not just in France? Part III. Beyond State and Market: Toward a Polycentric Order? (Ostrom s question) 6

7 Meeting # 11 Complexities in Economic Systems: E. F. Schumacher Small is Beautiful. A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. London: Vintage Books. Elinor Ostrom Beyond Markets and States. Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems. American Economic Review 100 (June): Wolfgang Streeck Playing Catch Up. [review of three recent books on the German economy] London Review of Books (4 May): Charles Sabel and J. Zietlin Stories, strategies, structures: rethinking historical alternatives to mass production. Pp In their World of Possibilities. Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization. New York: Cambridge UP. Julian Oram and Deborah Doane Size Matters. The Need for Human-Scale Economic Institutions for Development. Development in Practice 15 (June): Andrew Hindmoor, Free Riding Off Capitalism. Entrepreneurship and the Mondragon Experiment. British Journal of Political Science 29 ( January); Is it useful to rethink how economic arrangements are organized and work? A suggestion: Pick one particular area of work as industry. How to account for the relative decline of unions? What is Intermediate Technology and does it matter? Can the economy work as if people really mattered? Meeting # 12 Decentering the State. Benjamin R. Barber If Mayors Ruled the World. Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. New Haven: Yale UP. Cole (2010). France: Between centralization and fragmentation. In Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe ed. by F. Hendriks, A. Lidstrom and J. Loughlin. Oxford: Oxford UP. Simona Piattoni and M. Brunazzo (2010). Italy: The Subnational Dimensions to Strengthening Democracy since the 1990s. In Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe ed. by F. Hendriks, A. Lidstrom and J. Loughlin. Oxford: Oxford UP. Can city mayors, singly and jointly, can respond to local and transnational problems more effectively than national governments? Is the city Europe s best hope for democratic citizenship in a globalizing world? 7

8 Meeting #13 the European Union: Ideals and Realities Tony Judt A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe. New York: New York UP. The Economist The Holy Roman Empire: European Disunion done right. (Dec. 22). Com/node/ /print. Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks Unravelling the Central State, but how? Types of Multilevel Governance. American Political Science Review 97: Reflection Questions: Why the appeal of the idea of Europe was especially prevalent among some (Catholic) writers and politicians? What was the driving motive behind the idea of a European unity in the 1920s? And in the 1950s? And in the 1980s? Was it always a way of limiting/controlling German ambitions and policies? Can the European Union be a new and better form of the Holy Roman Empire? Or is just an illusion perhaps, as Tony Judt suggests? Considering Houghe and Marks, what are the realistic prospects for the European Union? Conclusions. 8

Topic for Fall 2013 : The Co-evolution of States and Markets in Western Europe

Topic for Fall 2013 : The Co-evolution of States and Markets in Western Europe Fall 2013 Poli 630 & Hist.659: European Politics Prof. Filippo Sabetti Office Leacock 518 Tel. 514 398 4812 Fax. 514 398 1770 Office Hrs: M10:00-11:00am; MW 3:00-4:15pm & by appointment e-mail: filippo.sabetti@mcgill.ca