The Politics of Representation in the Global Age: Identification, Mobilization, and Adjudication

Description

How has the process of political representation changed in the era of globalization? The representation of interests is at the heart of democracy, but how is it that some interests secure a strong voice, while others do not? While each person has multiple interests linked to different dimensions of his or her identity, much of the existing academic literature assumes that interests are given prior to politics by a person's socioeconomic, institutional, or cultural situation. This book mounts a radical challenge to this view, arguing that interests are actively forged through processes of politics. The book develops an analytic framework for understanding how representation takes place - based on processes of identification, mobilization, and adjudication - and explores how these processes have evolved over time. Through a wide variety of case studies, the chapters explore how actors identify their interests, mobilize them into action, and resolve conflicts among them.

Peter A. Hall is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies and a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Successful Societies Program for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His publications include Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era (edited with Michele Lamont, Cambridge University Press, 2013), Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health (edited with Michele Lamont, Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make (edited with Pepper D. Culpepper and Bruno Palier, 2007). He is the author of more than eighty articles on European politics, public policy making, and comparative political economy. Wade Jacoby is Mary Lou Fulton Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, where he also directs the Center for the Study of Europe. His publications include The Enlargement of the EU and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Imitation and Politics: Redesigning Modern Germany (2001), and Europe and the Management of Globalization (edited with Sophie Meunier, 2010). He is the author of more than thirty articles on European politics, the European Union, US-European relations, and globalization. Jonah Levy is Associate Professor, Vice Chair, and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at Berkeley. His publications include Developments in French Politics 3 and Developments in French Politics 4 (with Alistair Cole and Patrick Le Gales, 2005 and 2008); The State after Statism: New State Activities in the Age of Liberalization (2006); and Tocqueville's Revenge: State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France (1999). He has written numerous articles on comparative politics, political economy, and social policy. Sophie Meunier is Research Scholar in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her publications include Europe and the Management of Globalization (edited with Wade Jacoby, 2010), Making History: European Integration and Institutional Change at Fifty (edited with Kathleen McNamara, 2007), and Trading Voices: The European Union in International Commercial Negotiations (2005). Her work has been published in numerous journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative European Politics, Comparative Political Studies, European Political Science, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, French Politics, Culture and Society, International Affairs, International Organization, the Journal of Common Market Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, Perspectives on Politics, Political Science Quarterly, and the Review of International Political Economy. She was made Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques by the French government in 2011.

'This is an excellent, coherent collection of essays unified around the theme of interest representation, in particular the ways in which globalization has transformed domestic reformulation of interests. Beginning with an outstanding introduction by the editors, the volume continues with contributors speaking effectively to the core themes, and to one another. The identification, mobilization, and adjudication processes that the authors describe provide, both analytically and heuristically, an effective framework for the book. I envision this book being required reading on graduate comparative political economy syllabi.' Rawi Abdelal, Harvard Business School 'This volume seeks to offer an alternative way of understanding the construction of political interests, one that differs from the mechanistic conceptions that dominate socioeconomic, institutional, and cultural approaches. It does so by considering how processes of globalization have reshaped interest representation. This work has the potential to influence a wide range of scholars. It showcases the value of problematizing interest representation in the global age, and every single chapter makes an empirical or theoretical contribution to a body of literature.' David Art, Tufts University