Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan

Description

Does democracy control business, or does business control democracy? This study of how companies are bought and sold in four countries - France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands - explores this fundamental question. It does so by examining variation in the rules of corporate control - specifically, whether hostile takeovers are allowed. Takeovers have high political stakes: they result in corporate reorganizations, layoffs and the unraveling of compromises between workers and managers. But the public rarely pays attention to issues of corporate control. As a result, political parties and legislatures are largely absent from this domain. Instead, organized managers get to make the rules, quietly drawing on their superior lobbying capacity and the deference of legislators. These tools, not campaign donations, are the true founts of managerial political influence.

Pepper D. Culpepper is Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute. He was previously on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the author of Creating Cooperation and coeditor of Changing France and The German Skills Machine. His work has appeared in International Organization, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Revue Francaise de Science Politique, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, West European Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Public Policy, and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, among others. Culpepper was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University and received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.

'... creates an important new window on the dynamics of how organized business interests operate in practice and how they interact with government. This is a carefully-researched book of interest not only to political scientists but also scholars of corporate governance. It is also sufficiently grounded in the detail of real events to be of interest to practitioners of business. ... this is a valuable and interesting book. ... This book makes an important contribution not only to the understanding of how political processes are driven, but also to the ways that corporate interests manage their survival within and around them, through a mixture of formal and informal procedures.' Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 'Quiet Politics and Business Power is an immensely thoughtful and stimulating book that should be read by all scholars of comparative political economy, and is of particular interest to those who wish to better understand contemporary changes in corporate governance in the industrialized world.' ILR Review