Books in the Transformations of the State series

Based on cutting-edge research, this edited volume examines how citizens and political elites perceive the legitimacy of regional integration in Europe and the Americas. It analyses public opinion and political discourse on the EU, NAFTA and MERCOSUR, arguing that legitimation patterns shape the development of regional governance.

Based on a 12-year long project, this book demonstrates the contested character of the communicative construction of Europe. It does so by combining an investigation of journalistic practices with content analysis of print media, an examination of citizens' online interactions and audience studies with European citizens.

By exploring how financial, legal and wider socio-economic systems can accelerate or decelerate the harmonization in financial markets, this book connects issues both of contemporary political science and accounting research.

Examines international cooperation in European security from a transaction cost economics perspective. This book addresses the puzzle of how to approach differing institutional preferences. It argues that the reduction and limitation of transaction costs was the primary determinant of security preferences.

What are the principal drivers of recent higher education reforms? This study investigates whether the soft governance mechanism of transnational communication has evoked cross-national policy harmonization. Results suggest that the Bologna Process has triggered substantial policy harmonization beyond general policy convergence.

In recent years lifelong learning has become one of the most prominent education policy goals. This book shows how international organizations have promoted this idea and disseminated the need for it to countries all over the world. As a consequence of their activity, lifelong learning has become a central element of modern education policy.

Focusing on the EU, this volume, with a combination of theoretical perspectives and empirical research, examines the problems multilevel governance causes for democratic legitimacy by placing it in a comparative and theoretical context, and explore how challenges faced by the EU compare with those faced by traditional federal systems worldwide.

This book takes a look at the world of accounting and examines business's relationship with the state. It compares the accounting regulations in Germany, the UK and the US to provide evidence that privatization and convergence must be used with caution, at least in the world of accounting.

This volume provides a comprehensive and up-to-date account of new arenas of education governance, examining the impact of international organizations and marketization. It explores how education policy is made at international levels, and the consequences for national policy-making.

This book takes a fresh look at a widely debated question in international relations and political communication research: How can public discourses contribute to democratic governance beyond the nation state? The book combines quantitative and qualitative analyses of media content and evaluates them from a democratic theory perspective.

In spite of the lack of plausible alternatives to liberal democracy, the age of globalization has ushered in serious challenges to the democratic legitimacy of the nation state. The contributors in this collection explore the frontiers of normative and empirical legitimacy research, drawing upon a range of key conceptual and methodological issues.

This book explores what the privatization of global rule-making means for democracy. It reconstructs three prominent rule-making processes in the field of global sustainability politics and argues that, if designed properly, private transnational rule-making can be as democratic as intergovernmental rule-making.

It is often argued that the enhanced consultation of civil society contributes to the democratization of European and global governance. This collection investigates whether this theoretical argument is supported by empirical evidence. Ten original essays analyze current patterns of civil society consultation in 32 intergovernmental organizations.

Covering the period from the 1920s, when international tax policy was solely about avoiding double taxation, to the present era of international tax competition, Rixen investigates the fate of 'the power to tax' in an era of globalization, illustrating that tax sovereignty is both shaped and constrained by an international tax regime.

This book confronts one of the most fiercely contested issues in current political debates: how is welfare state retrenchment possible in modern democracies despite the welfare state's continuing popular appeal? Starke offers an international comparative analysis of welfare state retrenchment and an in-depth examination of its radical deployments.