Product Description: The book analyses the transnational Alpine region where historical, social, and geo-economic specificities have led to a distinctive type of democracy and identity. Differentialist identities, multi-level consociational accommodation, and corporatist intermediation are typical features of this region’s «consensual politics», and the process of European integration adds further to this complexity...read more

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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Product Description: "Government and Politics in Western Europe" offers a clear and accessible, yet sophisticated, comparative introduction to the political institutions of Western Europe's four largest countries: Britain, France, Italy, and Germany. The third edition of this successful and established student textbook has been thoroughly revised to cover not only developments at national level, but also the growing integration of national politics with the politics of the European Union, including: two completely new chapters on the European Union which set the EU in the context of the national political systems studied elsewhere in the book, supplying a concise but thorough introduction to European institutions, and presenting the main theoretical perspectives on the EU; an extensive updating, covering such recent events as the Left's election victories of 1997 in Britain and France and the collapse of the Italian party system in the mid-1990s; new tables and diagrams, providing invaluable reference material for key facts and processes...read more

Product Description: European welfare states are currently under stress and the 'social contracts' that underpin them are being challenged. First, welfare spending has arguably 'grown to limits' in a number of countries while expanding everywhere in the 1990s in line with higher unemployment...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Contributors to this volume analyse the various forms of corruption in Western European countries, Russia and Japan, and assess its impact on the political and administrative system, on political parties and on standards in public life.

Product Description: "Government and Politics in Western Europe" is the first volume in the Comparative European Politics series. It offers an analysis of four major European democratic systems - those of the UK, France, Italy and West Germany - which combines theoretical approaches with empirical material...read more